Love, sacrifice, and rebirth: exploring the embodied narratives of retired women ballet dancers using life history interviews and body mapping

Adopting a narrative constructionist lens, we conducted life history interviews and arts-based body mapping sessions with five retired women ballet dancers to examine how they storied their embodied experiences, both verbally and artistically. We constructed two narrative themes using narrative thematic and holistic-form structural analyses. (Embodied) Devotion: Love and Sacrifice explores the tensions between participants’ love for the artistry of ballet and the (physical) sacrifices they endured for success in dance, drawing on the performance and forward momentum narrative types. Illustrating these contradictions, on their body maps, participants included ballet-related symbols such as the colour pink and the bun hairstyle, but redrew their body outlines to be thinner and indicated areas of pain in red. Rising from the Ashes: Transformation and Contribution explored how participants drew on the quest meta-narrative, and the discovery and relational narrative types, to construct stories of personal growth and pedagogical reframing following ballet retirement. In conjunction with the symbols in the first theme, such stories were shown on the body maps through the symbolism of a tree and being traced in poses that ‘reach’ for the audience. These findings illustrate the role of cultural sport, body, and femininity narratives valorising performance, thinness, and discipline in shaping storytelling that rationalises and/or resists traditional ballet ideals. Methodologically, this research elucidates the body’s affordance as a medium for storytelling, foregrounding its capacity to articulate affective and shifting embodied experiences alongside verbal storytelling.