Ballet is not Dance.
And the BFA is not BS.
When I’m not going to class at IU, I’m working here. I have a part-time assistantship position as an undergraduate advisor. In that role, I see lots of student records, and I end up asking lots of questions about how the curriculum is organized.
Recently, I was reviewing the records for a student who was majoring in dance. I noted that this student’s program was in the College of Arts and Sciences. But IU also has a similar-sounding ballet major, something I fleetingly explored in a previous post.
I’d like to explore that a little less fleetingly now.
Ballet
The Ballet BS degree is strikingly direct in its requirements. The core of the program is three courses taken every fall and spring semester with a fourth taken in half the semesters.
Ballet Majors: Yes, that’s just the name of the class. This is the “ballet practice” element, focused on mastering the skills to be a dancer. It meets five days per week for a total of eight hours per week.
Ballet Ensemble: This is where performance rehearsal takes place, focusing on specific upcoming shows. This class also meets every day for a total of fifteen hours per week.
Conditioning the Ballet Body: This is required for six semesters. It’s about learning exercises for dancers and it occurs immediately before the “Ballet Majors” class, serving effectively as an extension of it. It meets twice per week for just 30 minutes.
Ballet Pedagogy/Choreography Workshop: Both classes must be taken twice, so four of eight semesters will feature one of them. They focus on ballet instruction and meet for about an hour per week.
Depending on whether you’re taking a #4 class, these courses alone will compose 9 to 11 credits. Students need to take an average of 15 credits per semester to graduate in 8 semesters. This means that Ballet majors will have about two thirds of their credit requirement met just by doing these courses over and over throughout their enrollment.
The only other specified courses they have to take are contemporary dance, ballet history, anatomy, nutrition, and at least four credits of piano.
The remainder of their credits are the General Education courses (a wide range of options, required for all IU students) and 24 credits from any theater, music, or public health courses the student chooses.
Setting aside general education, the ballet major requires its students to complete 116 credits for graduation. Remember: IU only requires 120 credits to confer a degree. Factoring in some general education, the single major program can easily compose an entire degree.
Dance
If you are in the Dance BFA degree program, you have a core program that looks similar on the surface. But its time obligations are smaller, giving students more options.
Dance Practice: This is what it sounds like. Students in the major take it for eight semesters. It’s four days per week for a total of six hours.
Dance Workshop/ Dance Theater: Just like for the ballet students, these courses are rehearsals for specific productions. These courses take up seven semesters and meet twice a week for four hours total. In the eighth semester, dance majors have a “capstone” project instead of the workshop.
Dance Theory/Dance Making courses: This category has a sequence of eight courses with different titles, each taken over the course of eight semesters. Broadly, they cover teaching, choreography, and improvisation in dance. They meet twice per week for less than an hour.
Supporting Techniques electives: Essentially this category requires students to take seven courses on different styles of dance. This is where students can make more choices on their “focus area” for the kind of dance they care most about.
Depending on whether you take a #4 class, this means dance majors take 6-9 credits in dance per semester. The credit total is a little lower than ballet students, but the biggest difference is the time commitment. Dance majors simply have less of their time dictated to them by the program than ballet students do. This conforms to my stereotypes about ballet education.
Beyond this, dance majors simply need to take four courses on “foundations of dance,” a category that gives them several options for fulfilling requirements, and one course on professional practice. Dance majors also need to complete the College of Arts and Sciences general education requirements, which are somewhat heavier than the Gen Ed requirements for ballet students.
Aside from general education, the dance major requires 84 credits. Compare that with the 116 for the ballet major.
This is BS(OF)
Despite the similar names of these programs, they have very little overlap. Ballet students may take a few theater courses to fill out their degree requirements. Dance students can take a single “ballet for non-majors” course in the music school, but they are otherwise divorced from the ballet world.
Ballet students have a stricter set of requirements, both in terms of their credits and their time commitments. This is likely why, of the 70 ballet majors at IU, 50 of them actually do the Ballet BSOF degree program, not the BS which I profiled above. The differences are kind of funny if you look closely. The BSOF removes the 18 ancillary public health, theater, or music credits. It also relabels the “Ballet Majors” class as being 5 credits instead of 6. It’s the same class with the same students, but lowering the credits gives them space to add alternate coursework.
The effect is that students can now reallocate 27 credits toward an “outside field.” This is more than a minor but less than a second major. And it’s all done without requiring any more coursework than the regular BS degree.
Of course, some students will just take extra credits and do summer courses to stack a second major on top of the Ballet BS. But the “outside field” track appears to be the most common solution to maximizing perceptions of breadth for ballet graduates.
What’s the move?
For dance majors, the response is similar. There are also about 70 dance majors at IU, and about 50 of them double major in another field. Since they have about forty credits available after completing their major, this makes sense to me.
Every student in these programs knows that dance is not the safest career trajectory, so you can see a focus on diversifying their CV, even as they pursue these time consuming performance programs. While dance majors have more flexibility in terms of picking an unofficial “focus area” for their practice, both programs have high demands and plenty of uniformity in how students spend their time.
The extent to which the core programs are at least structurally similar for both groups surprised me. Somehow I expected the dance students to be more fundamentally different, considering their formal isolation in separate schools.
One other difference that I don’t know much about is the difference in juried assessment. While both programs require students to audition for the major, the ballet program has three subsequent juried examinations as well. This fits with the theme of the programs being similar in core structure with ballet having a higher threshold for control of its students’ time and expectations.
As I spend more time thinking about curriculum, I’d like to reflect on this kind of stuff more. How much are these programs the products of the preparatory programs that get students here? Would dance students resent the level of control ballet students get because of a cultural difference in their background? How much is the dance program a product of its home in the College of Arts and Sciences? Do students in these programs see one another as being engaged in similar projects or is it much more different an experience than it appears from the outside?
Lots more to learn. Thanks for following along while I try to make sense of some areas that are unfamiliar to me.
-Matt
My oldest applied to IU's ballet program. It is supercompetitive and I think it only has a 2-3% acceptance rate. She was accepted as a general IU student but not as a ballet major. It would interesting to have her read this and respond to your questions.