CBA aims to open the world of the university and the world of ballet to each other. The idea is simple: they both have much to learn. The university “gets” the deep physical and artistic knowledge of ballet and a new field of study that is naturally interdisciplinary. Ballet “gets” new (and old, but forgotten) ideas and new collaborators.
While ballet remains at the core of our mission, CBA’s inherently multidisciplinary nature has led us to grow up around and beyond it: we have become an international research institute for the performing arts organized around dance. This organic evolution brings ballet and its related arts into an ever wider cultural community within the life of the University. Since our founding, we have become a forum for open discussion and debate about dance and the arts, with an ever-growing place in the cultural life of NYU, New York City, and beyond.
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Artists
CBA brings to the art of ballet and its related arts new ideas and the full resources of a major research university.
CBA is the first institute of its kind in a major research university. It exists to address the dual needs of innovation in both the study and practice of ballet, by uniting the two to further the advancement of both.
Scholars
CBA brings ballet into the university as a serious subject of study and research – to define it as a field in the history of culture.
Ballet
Ballet means simply ‘to dance.’ It is a form of poetic gesture.
Physically, ballet is a system of training based on a linear and geometrically proportioned organization of the human body. Ballet is intellectually expansive; it has profound connections to philosophy and mathematics, to manners and religion, to painting and fashion, and to the practices of war and the ambitions of sport. At its origins, ballet was a western art form with roots in the Renaissance. Throughout its history, it articulated a vision of society and civic culture, which was at first courtly and aristocratic and in the 20th century became public and democratic.
Today, ballet is practiced world-wide and has incorporated and influenced a wide range of dance traditions and styles. Like classical training in theater or music, ballet is a skill and a gateway: a necessary grounding for the most radical directions in art. What kinds of dances artists make with it is an open and unrestricted question.