Janet Panetta and a continuing pedagogical practice

The teaching approach I work with comes from Janet Panetta (1948–2023), a Brooklyn-born dancer and pedagogue who spent over fifty years developing an alternative way of transmitting classical ballet.

Panetta trained in the Cecchetti method under Margaret Craske at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School in New York City and was a ballerina with American Ballet Theatre, then chose an independent path that led her to work between Europe and New York City, across ballet, modern, postmodern and contemporary dance enclaves where she offered ballet technique as a continuity with movement forms as diverse as the somatic work of Alexander Technique and the rhythmic pathways of Axis Syllabus.

Her strategy was to instruct ballet form from the inside out.

According to my own interpretation, Panetta's central insight was a paradox: she often affirmed dancers' work, saying something like "You are already doing this." In this way, she affirmed the person doing ballet, their personhood could then relate to ballet regardless of their rank in experience or talent. Closer to the person, I experienced and witnessed how this intimate approach emancipated dancers intellectually. Over thirteen years, I saw participants in her classes transform, from feeling they would never be good enough to exhibiting the type of familiarity and soft confidence many classical dancers struggle to achieve. For her, dancers were inherently capable of ballet regardless of how much range they had in the arches of their feet. In this approach, the whole body becomes an asset to create with and care for.

Rather than correcting students toward an external image-ideal owned and withheld by the teacher, she located knowledge already present in the body and made it visible for others to perceive. This was not a reform of ballet, but a sharing of ballet language and knowledge of technique in a different way. At its core, the pedagogy is classical ballet, albeit with emphasis on the dancer's natural lift, momentum, and precise awareness of their axis in relation to the floor, which the repertoire of the Cecchetti technique emphasizes well.

Ten years as a teaching assistant and mentee.

I learned to teach from Panetta’s mentorship in the last ten years of her life, when she was highly active as a teacher with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels and ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival. I demonstrated her class material for other students to observe, substituted her classes when she traveled and engaged with her in dialogues about her philosophy of deconstruction.

For her, teaching students was a movement from general to specific in anatomical terms that required the courage to be unsure and circle back. In one of our conversations, she told me,

"You can't skip A and get to C. You have to go A… B… C…, that's how we are specific. Right? So, I think that's very important and the more you know about your body like that the more you can imagine what can be done."

Since her death in 2023, I have felt her immense absence as an insightful conversation partner whose expertise on technique and experimental performance and pedagogy motivates ongoing research, and willingness to stay curious about how ballet relates to other dance forms and the people and communities who carry them. Since 2024, I have initiated dialogues with students who studied with Janet during her long career to further my understanding of what it feels like to work with this approach to ballet. My PhD research documents this work on pedagogical lineage and the ethics of ballet transmission and embodied aesthetic.

Anecdotes have brought me to think about Janet's practice with technique as grounded in creative acts of translation of original texts. Ballet teachers have an opportunity to not reproduce a fixed style as technical know-how, but to approach teaching as a situation where witnessing the dancer concerns reading the language of each body, what it already speaks, and finding where classical ballet might live within that language. As a pedagogical approach, it requires a level of patience, spontaneity, and curiosity and the willingness to not-know in advance what ballet can bring to each dancer. When I carry an old repertoire like Cecchetti forward, for example, I get to witness dancers use these forms, let them go, and bring them in again. That middle part is as valuable to the process as the formal itself. Each time they let go, they strengthen their knowledge of musical and formal structures in relation to active movement research and everyday life. Students also practice not lionizing ballet, which I think is healthy for contemporary dance and resisting racist, colonial, anti-feminist and classist structures that pervade our contemporary lives.

Janet attended to each body as a somatic system, diagnosing capacity rather than correcting error. This highly analytical practice is contemporary. It requires a quality of living attentiveness akin to witnessing performance. It cannot be written into a syllabus cleanly because attention slips, leaks, is pulled and fades as quickly. As it burns embodied memories into the body, technique is a slow process. There is simply too much contingency at play to determine in advance everything this way of working with dancers alongside a canonical form like ballet brings.

What Janet left behind were not notes or systems and certifications, but people who became experts in their own will to learn—an expansive creative community was formed in the process, a community motivated by inclusion and possibility for change. Dancers around the world carry this unique pedagogy in their bodies and continue transmitting it today.

I am one of those people.