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How does legendary status evolve in the world of ballet? Are the most brilliant dance figures simply bound to be recognized by the public and discerning critics alike? Or does historical importance depend on specific strategies? Or on the serendipity of circumstance? Joan Acocella notes that genius owes much to “ego strength” as well as luck (2007, xii). Perhaps the element of fame is always interlocked with market forces, even in the dance world, where artists are affected by what is written about them, whether it appears in influential places, and how much can be gained by selling an image. But how does history arrive at the consideration of a dance legend's substance and contributions? Being respected in the long run might inevitably depend on a combination of circumstances, including whether the popular imagination or the attention of academics can be captured. In the case of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, a legend has grown around a particular set of glorifying associations. My question here is whether or not these associations, while celebrating Pavlova as a dance “star,” have also limited consideration of her as a significant figure in dance history. Often categorized as “old-fashioned” and “conservative,” Pavlova was in fact an innovator, I suggest, in terms of the way she combined ballet and dance influences from around the world, as well as her role in revivals of neglected dance forms, and, lastly, in her rhetorical framing of ballet as a serious endeavor and an empowering pursuit for women.

The image and interpretation of the ballerina has shifted over time since she first took her place in the pantheon of romantic female performers in the early nineteenth century. For many, she is still romanticized, respected, and revered; in other circles, she has become suspect as a creature who may be obsessed, exploited, and retrogressive in light of the egalitarian strides women have made or are still trying to make. The female ballet dancer's basic contradiction—her ethereal exterior and her iron-willed interior—has not been sufficiently accounted for in either scheme, nor has it been woven into the kind of complex, contextualized analysis that includes practitioners who embody the form, audience members of various kinds, and the multiple, shifting locales and attitudes that surround them. As an elite art form, ballet has until recently relied on the more univocal discourse of bouquets and brickbats from critics and other specialists. In 1993, when dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull called for a consideration of ballet's relationship of dance to life in ways that other cultural forms are investigated, few took up the call.

This text concentrates on the enactment of exhibitions, particularly, within the films of Batman, Dressed to Kill and 9 1 /2 Weeks. While central to the discourse of visual art, exhibitions must in fact be performed. An aesthetic experience, then, can be considered not only in terms of a static visual relationship between beholder and art, but also in its proprioceptive aspect of moving through space. The project of analysing museum enactment poses obvious challenges short of actually stalking people. So I have turned to examining the action of museum scenes from popular films. What I found was that the coding of the postural and kinaesthetic engagement of gallery visitors provides a rich source for mining some of the ways that aesthetic experience is stereotyped. Beholders shift their weight between feet, step back to get a different view, cup their chins with their hands, or walk through gallery spaces with the kind of indrawn awareness characterizing heightened visual engagement. But beyond these representations, I have discovered that films portray the gallery space as contexts for affective choreographies which exaggerate, or even exceed, aesthetic conventions altogether.The disciplinary aspects of museum enactment have been explored by several authors in recent museum criticism. Carol Duncan (1995), for example, has argued that museums are performed as civilizing rituals which constitute an art public, while Tony Bennett (1995) has elucidated, in the wake of Foucault, how the disciplinary architectures of museums operate on the minds of spectators as they view an exhibition and on their bodies as they themselves are viewed. We now know that aesthetic experience is administrated and contained through the behavioural protocols of the gallery space: speaking in hushed tones, not touching works of art, refraining from running. We are guided to contemplative conduct by the presence of museum personnel: museum guards who police apprehension, volunteer guides who exemplify 'the ideal viewer' , and from time to time curators who, heir to the class of connoisseurs, perform savoir faire through their physical manner and style. Yet, despite the efforts of museums to contain their public's aesthetic experience, individuals activate the museal according to their own tactical pleasures and purposes. What I want to argue here is that museums pose the

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