Still in Practice

Ballet is built through repetition. A movement is demonstrated, attempted, corrected and repeated — over months and years. Much of this knowledge cannot simply be written down. It is accumulated in the body and passed from one body to another, through observation, imitation, touch, correction and discipline.

At seventy-six, Phing is approaching retirement after decades of teaching ballet. She continues to work with students in Regensburg, carrying a method of training shaped over many years. In the classroom, that tradition meets younger bodies and changing ideas about discipline, authority, physical contact and education.

The transmission is not seamless. There are moments of concentration and recognition, but also repetition, fatigue, resistance and mismatch. As Phing tries to pass on what she has practised for decades, the classroom begins to feel like a place where something is being preserved while something else may already be slipping away.

Still in Practice follows this uncertain passage. What does it take to pursue an art that depends on years of physical repetition and accumulated bodily knowledge? What happens to such knowledge when the person carrying it stops teaching? Will Phing’s way of teaching be inherited, adapted or abandoned? And as art education changes, will the practices that formed one generation still have a place in the next?