Ballet and British Soft Power in Cold War Turkey

Today, Britain is considered one of the world’s “soft power superpowers,” a position that is a product of the country’s sustained cultural influence. While historians of Britain and the world often turn their attention to economic, political, and social relations across domestic and imperial spaces, this paper locates the history of British power in the arts, as well as audiences they attracted around the world. In particular, it presents dance - and especially classical ballet - as a vital channel of British influence during the twentieth century. Moreover, it argues that accounting for dance allows historians to achieve a richer understanding of soft power’s mechanisms, qualities, and convoluted effects.

The paper delves into British artists’ engagement with the Turkish State Ballet as an illustrative case study. From 1947 through the 1960s, the British Council (the state’s main organ for cultural diplomacy) sent a stream of ballet directors, teachers, choreographers, and dancers to Turkey to establish a “national” school and company there. These artists (many of them women) arrived at the invitation of Turkish officials, who had their own motivations for establishing a national ballet in partnership with the British. Yet this artistic and political project would play an important role in cultivating a mythic cultural image of Britain abroad: one that promised to withstand its weakening international position as the Cold War persisted and the British Empire dissolved.