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DIVERSITY AND DANCING

Bringing dancers together

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AUDITION-PROOFTop tips on how to ace audition season by knowing exactly what the judges want to see.

NOT JUST CLASSHow you can take more advantage of your teacher’s knowledge.

DANCING

Dance, by its nature, should be diverse. There is no ‘cor-rect’ way to dance, anything

goes. Styles are as variable as genres of music. There is Ballet, Hip-hop, Tap, Jazz, Crumping, Salsa, Waltz, Voguing, Foxtrot, Disco, Contem-porary, Bachata, Lyrical… the list goes on. Everyone has a story about feeling outside the norm. But dance suffers from the stereotype that dancers must be white, middle-class females with little variation from that. With the rise of urban styles like hip-hop and break-dancing, the colour of dance may have slightly diversified, but beyond that, almost nothing has changed.

There is a huge body-image stig-ma attached to dance. If you are not exactly the ‘correct’ shape or colour then you are written off. This is par-ticularly true of the ‘classical’ styles: Ballet, Tap, and Jazz. Katie Daniel, President of Napier Dance 2018/19, feels “there is often a perception

of what a dancer should look like, and to an extent that is true. Long legs look so much nicer in a grand battement or leap; even if someone with shorter limbs extends further, we just don’t have that same line.”

As an inherently visual art form, the pressure to look a certain way is huge. Victoria Gray, a tap teach-er, describes her experiences: “As someone who is overweight, and therefore does not fit the stereotype of a ‘good dancer,’ it can be difficult to get your foot through the door and to be taken seriously.” If the community doesn’t remain open to diverse talent, it will lose passionate and gifted individuals, creating a community devoid of its innately infinite variety.

However, there have been radical movements in this regard. Misty Copeland’s meteoric rise to ABT’s first African-American principal dancer is a huge development in diversity in the ballet world, which

traditionally is the worst dance style for body and racial diversity. Copeland discovered ballet at the age of 13 and never looked back, performing professionally within the year. She has opened many doors for black dancers globally. But this needs to continue, and be-come the norm, not the exception.

What dance actually is can be all too easily forgotten in the aims for the highest extension, or the most interesting trick. Bruno Marques, the President of Napier Dance 2017/18, understands dance as “creating connections with different people solely through movement and music, allowing for true and meaningful experiences.”

Grace Balfour-Harle examines how diversity in dance affects dancers today

Choreographers are becoming more innovative, with same-sex pas des deux in classical ballet, and Justin Peck (New York City Ballet) recently cast a female in a originally male role. However, if a dancer differs physically from the rest of the corps, they are conspic-uous, focusing the audience’s at-tention onto the anomaly, instead of seeing the group as a whole.

Chase Johnsey has become the first male ballerina to dance in the

corps in modern ballet history, performing as part of the ensem-ble in the English National Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty. Mr. Johnsey, who identifies as gender fluid but uses male pronouns, is an award-win-ning ballet dancer who performed with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, an all male troupe from New York. This small accept-ance of gender fluidity in ballet will hopefully encourage other companies to do the same.

Ballet takes steps toward gender fluidity

Image: Fearing Diversity by Johnny Silvercloud

“Everyone, whether they are a dancer or not, should feel free to express themselves in any way they wish. It is imperative that they are accepted and supported by everyone when doing so; no-one should be made to feel differ-ent or unaccepted.”

Turnout | July 2018 | 3

NDIVERSITY

Aisha McKay, dancer

GBH