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36. Where are the Women? Addressing the Leadership Gap in Ballet with Anna Morgan
116 Plays1 month ago
Anna Morgan is a teacher, creative, adjudicator and researcher. She directs her own teacher training program, Anna Morgan Dance, and has taught for institutions such as the Royal Ballet School, Performers College, and Bird College. She is currently studying for her Masters at Rambert School, with gender equity in Ballet as her research specialism.
In this conversation, we dive into Anna's groundbreaking research on gender inequity in ballet leadership, highlighting systemic issues that hinder women and non-binary individuals from rising to leadership roles despite ballet being a female-dominated industry. We discuss how long-standing traditions and societal biases have shaped these imbalances, often starting with how dancers are trained.
Anna also highlights the historical and cultural shifts that have influenced ballet’s gender dynamics and challenges the assumption that tradition should limit progress. While honoring ballet’s rich history, she makes a compelling case for rethinking certain practices to create a more inclusive and equitable future for dancers and leaders alike.
This episode really got me thinking - I am confident you’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of the barriers to leadership in ballet and a thought-provoking perspective on what the future of the art form could look like.
Key Moments:
- Anna’s early dance training [1:32]
- How Anna crafted a portfolio career and her advice for dancers who want to follow a less traditional path [2:12]
- The statistics on gender inequity in the ballet industry [4:11]
- What is causing the gender inequity in ballet leadership [6:07]
- Anna’s solution to addressing gender inequity by adjusting the way we educate ballet dancers from a young age [12:44]
- The reactions Anna has received from her research [20:04]
- The glass ceiling/escalator theory and how they come into play in the ballet industry [35:57]
- The history of gender in ballet [40:33]
- Her biggest piece of advice for dancers pursuing a career [43:39]
Connect with Anna:
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/annamorgandance
WEBSITE: www.annamorgandance.com
Links and Resources:
Set up ticketing for your next event with DRT (Make sure to mention that The Brainy Ballerina sent you!)
Get your copy of The Intentional Career Handbook
1-1 Career Mentoring: book your complimentary career call
Let’s connect!
My WEBSITE: thebrainyballerina.com
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thebrainyballerina
Questions/comments? Email me at caitlin@thebrainyballerina.com
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Transcript
Gender norms in ballet: Why are roles gendered?
00:00:00
Speaker
Why are we saying that the feminine way of doing things has to be gentle and sensitive? And why are we saying that the masculine side has to be bold and strong and proud? Can women not be bold and strong and proud? Can men not be more sensitive? You know, societally, we're trying to encourage that so much more that there's not just this one way of being a man or one way of being a woman.
Introduction of host and podcast purpose
00:00:23
Speaker
We're all multifaceted.
00:00:26
Speaker
I'm Caitlin, a former professional ballerina turned dance educator and career mentor. And this is the brand new ballerina podcast. I am here for the aspiring professional ballerina who wants to learn what it really takes to build a smart and sustainable career in the dance industry. I'm peeling back the curtain of professional dance world with open and honest conversations about the realities of becoming a professional dancer. Come along to gain the knowledge and inspiration you need to succeed in a dance career on your terms.
Meet Anna Morgan: Focus on gender equity in ballet
00:01:01
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Brady Valorina podcast. I'm your host, Caitlin Sloan, and I am joined today by Anna Morgan. Anna is a teacher, creative, adjudicator, and researcher.
00:01:12
Speaker
She directs her own teacher training program, Anna Morgan Dance, and has taught for institutions such as the Royal Valley School for Forest College and Ford College. She is currently studying for her master's at Rambert School with Gender Equity and Valet as her research specialism, which is what we'll really be diving into today. And I am so excited to get into that. But first, Anna, before we really get into that topic. I would love to hear from you. Why did you take your very first dance class? Oh, my goodness. I say thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here. My very first dance class, I think I was too. So I don't really remember i think my mum just had other friends that children were in dance. And so off I went and the rest is history. I suppose. What was your training like growing up?
00:01:57
Speaker
I took it pretty seriously from a fairly young age and liked to do all different styles. I mainly focused on ballet, but I did also train in jazz and tap and contemporary. and I'd say by the time I was sort of teenage. I was taking it pretty seriously and training every day of the week. Yeah, I loved it. I couldn't get enough. I loved it. Didn't like school so much but loved us. What was your path once you
The gender leadership gap in ballet: Why do men lead?
00:02:22
Speaker
graduated? Did you go straight into being a dance educator or how did that work for you? Bits and bobs really. So my kind of professional career was riddled with injury and I had loads of surgery on my right ankle and
00:02:35
Speaker
That kind of created a bit of a stop start momentum as I went into the profession, but it also kind of led me into this, what I now know to be called a portfolio career, but I didn't have a name then, ah where I was doing all sorts of things. So I'd be performing in between when I could, between surgeries and things like that. But I was also starting to teach and I was producing and I was choreographing and building businesses. And so I kind of have always done a little bit of everything.
00:03:03
Speaker
What advice do you have for dancers who feel like that might be a path for them who want to try a bunch of different things? Lean into it because I think we're learning more and more that actually individualize career paths, even training paths are possible. And for some people, they, they suit a lot better. And I think that I've always thought that these things happen by accident, but now as I'm older and I understand my brain a lot more, I look back and think, Oh, that was no accident. It would have ended up that way. You know, I thought it was always because I was injured, this happened, but actually I probably would have created that kind of life and career for myself anyway and I think in the past maybe that's been and frowned upon a bit like you know you need to pick what you want to do and go with it whereas I've almost had ballet is what I love but then I've done a million things within that and I love it and I've made a career out of it and I'm happy so I would say I feel that kind of person that
00:03:58
Speaker
Actually, it's multi-skilled. You've got an area of interest, but lots of different places that your skills lie. Lean into it. Why not? Let's talk about your research in gender andequity and equity and ballet leadership. What we see is that ballet is a female-dominated industry when you're looking at a company structure especially.
00:04:18
Speaker
And yet we're not seeing that reflected in the leadership. So can you share some of the statistics on this that you found about just the numbers and the inequity? Yeah, absolutely. So as you've quite rightly said, ballet is a female dominated activity at all levels. Right from the beginning, you know, if you go to any ballet class in the world, the average is something like 20 to one in terms of female to male dancers.
00:04:44
Speaker
We then see that reflected in vocational schools, particularly in the number of people who audition, even if they even out the amount of who they take, and then into companies as well. But then it's also reflected in dance teachers, vast majority of whom, especially at grassroots level, are women.
00:05:00
Speaker
Audiences, because 70% of audiences for ballet are women, most of the donors are women, so most of the interest in ballet comes from girls and women, and yet most of the artistic leadership roles particularly are taken by men, so globally somewhere around three quarters of the artistic directors of ballet companies.
00:05:22
Speaker
are men, so this this trend is completely reversed. For the average person, if they've ever been to a ballet, it's extremely likely that anything they've ever seen has been choreographed by a man. You'd probably have to have sought out that you wanted to go and see something created by a woman, or now there's you know a lot more coming. But for most people, if they think of a ballet, it would be a man that has created it. So I'm particularly looking at those two areas, the artistic direction,
00:05:52
Speaker
and the choreography and which are both heavily dominated by men in the leadership positions. Can you talk about why this is happening starting from dancers training at this young age all the way up to professional companies?
Ballet's gender expectations and their impact on opportunities
00:06:06
Speaker
Absolutely. So my research has taken me in so many different directions. And what's so interesting is that ballet is almost like this little microcosm for the world and the kind of Western society and the systemic gender inequity that we see generally, it's like put a microscope over it and you've you've got ballet. And in a way, it's exaggerated in ballet. So I think that it all starts from what I've discovered right at the beginning, which is society's preconceptions of what different gender roles should be and homophobia, essentially. So most boys who want to go into ballet
00:06:44
Speaker
will be bullied for it at some point, will get stick from it from their friends at school, will maybe try and hide it, will maybe have cis he men in their life who make fun of them or are ashamed and and don't give them that same, you you know, they wouldn't be turning up and cheering them on at their dance competition like they would be.
00:07:04
Speaker
doing football or rugby or you know those kind of traditionally masculine sports. So I think it starts there that there aren't many boys that go into it in the first place as I say 20 girls to one boy. So you've got this boy maybe in the class who's quite isolated and the likely female teacher really tries to help him you know we want these boys in our class we want to even it out So they may start actually treating that boy to be really special, maybe. Regardless of talent, he's likely in the school show going to be centre front, partnering two girls next to him. It's just what we've always done. and Even if there's a class of 20 and talent wise, maybe he's number 18 out of 20, but he's likely to be there on account of being a boy. As that moves into sort of more pre-professional training, the boys of course
00:07:54
Speaker
have more scholarships given to them because these schools is not the schools fault but they need to even out for how ballet is at the moment they need to even out because we need to have equal male to female dances so you know you might be getting 100 girls per place and only 10 boys per place auditioning, for example. And so, of course, those scholarships will be more easily given out to the boys. They're also sometimes given more autonomy and been encouraged to take more risks and be more creative. One of the studies I looked at is at one point one of the major ballet schools here in the UK. Their website was looked at as part of this study.
00:08:35
Speaker
and the girls in the website were all you know lined up in bra bar at the bar, absolutely uniform. And the boys on the same website, it was an image of them playing in the woods. So it's almost like this kind of message that if you're a girl, you come, you conform, there's a hundred girls waiting for your place.
00:08:53
Speaker
out the door so you better get in that line and you better make sure that you're exactly like everyone else. But the boys you know you can explore your agency and you can have fun and you can make friends and it's also about that for you. So I think that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that whilst these boys are likely being badly treated outside of ballet for their participation within ballet we haven't noticed that we're actually treating them as really special. And then from there it goes into the professional companies because again there's more demand for men because there's so many women that want the places. The women have to conform, that's their number one skill, you know, let's get in the quarter ballet.
00:09:36
Speaker
can't get up the ranks unless we've succeeded in the quarter ballet and the whole idea of the court is conformity. Look the same as everybody else and the men maybe don't have that pressure quite as much and then there's also been these leadership funnels where you know it's a bit of a boys club. So and so has been director and then they handpicked the next director and it maybe hasn't gone to a more democratic kind of recruitment process. There's all of those systemic things and then there is this idea of the binary nature of ballet in itself that the women are often stylistically and in our behaviour expected as I say to conform but also to be demure and to be sensitive and to be quiet and small and shrink and we must be thin and all of these things
00:10:25
Speaker
and the men can maybe assert their agency and personality and dominance a little more. So if all we've been trained in all our life is conformity and just not being too much for anybody, then it's much more difficult for women to create and develop these leadership qualities that might make them feel empowered to run a company.
Towards inclusive training: Skills over gender roles
00:10:45
Speaker
Obviously there's so many more aspects of it, but that gives ah a taste of a few of the things at play. Yeah. And one thing I saw you talking about in your research was the fact that a lot of times boys will start ballet later. And so they're coming into it at a different place in their life or maybe they do.
00:11:04
Speaker
cultivate that agency a little bit more. Can you talk about that discrepancy? Yeah. So it also goes into then how we actually teach ballet because traditionally ballet has been taught in this like rote learning fashion. This is what it is. This is what you must do. I will tell you, I will show you and now you recreate it.
00:11:22
Speaker
Whereas as modern day educators, of course, we're trying to be much more kind of learner centered in our approach and making sure that we are guiding and facilitating rather than just standing at the front and telling. But for most of us, the way that we were trained was the former, you know, just being told how to do it. and So that's where the entry age becomes relevant because Most little girls start ballet when they're three or four or two, like I did. And it's quite a normal thing in Western society that you send your little girls to ballet. So a lot of the girls, that is one of their kind of standard activities that parents send them to do.
00:12:01
Speaker
likely if boys are going to participate it usually is later sometimes into the teens and so in that time let's say that a girl starts at age three and a boy starts at age 13 that girl's had 10 years more of that very strict stringent dictatorial you must do this you must stand there you must not speak kind of training. And by the time the boy enters when he's 13, he might have a little bit more about him, he might have negotiated some, and you know, different issues in his school life, or he might know a little bit more about who he is. And he's missed out that kind of chunk of training. So I think that's relevant as well. here So one solution that I've seen you talk about for this issue is
00:12:43
Speaker
a more genderless approach to teaching ballet. Can you talk about what that would actually look like? And then what are the advantages of this method? I kind of wasn't expecting to go in this direction. But as I was really looking at all of the different components that build up this picture,
00:12:59
Speaker
where cis men are generally in leadership and everybody else isn't because it's worth noting as well that I'm not just looking at cis women, it's also going to be looking at trans people, non-binary people and generally underrepresented gender groups. So I've sort of accidentally got into this idea of well actually how can we talk about this in leadership roles if we don't look at the pedagogy if we don't look at how we actually train dancers in the first place and is it still serving people to separate boys all do this and girls all do this a because where does someone go if they don't fit into that binary and you know i'm hearing more and more from people who are transitioning for example and
00:13:43
Speaker
they can't fit in either either category and so ballet is just not for them is how they feel. So firstly it doesn't cater to that group that feels that they're not part of either the male or female binary or that they're not part of the one that they were assigned to at birth. So for them but also when I've been doing surveys a lot of for example the cis women that I've interviewed and surveyed feel like they're limited because they actually can do some of these steps. You've seen all these amazing women on Instagram that can double tour and double assembly and do all these amazing steps and we're not even being trained in them and sometimes then we become teachers and we can't even train those steps because we didn't really do them ourselves. So there's a lot of different components at play
00:14:28
Speaker
the crux of it is that what are we looking at as being masculine and being feminine? Why, who decided that you know doing a third arabesque is more feminine than doing a first or a second? We probably all call it different things but the matter is like who made it sound that that bit's feminine and that bit's masculine? Who made that happen? It's all constructed like gender is more generally and so Why are we saying that the feminine way of doing things has to be gentle and sensitive? And why are we saying that the masculine side has to be bold and strong and proud? Can women not be bold and strong and proud? Can men not be more sensitive? You know, societally, we're trying to encourage that so much more that there's not just this one way of being
00:15:13
Speaker
a man or one way of being a woman. We're all multifaceted. So my approach that I'm proposing, it sounds radical to some people, but it's actually just what we're doing already, but categorised slightly differently. So I propose that everybody learns ballet to start off with. A plie is a plie.
00:15:33
Speaker
the way we externally rotate at the hip happens regardless. And that is determined by you and your bone structure and the way that your body is made up, not whether you're male or female. So everyone learns the basic foundations. And then after that, we start trying some of the different specialisms, but that everyone gets a small go at everything. So if it's safe and appropriate, everyone would try point work or at least point prep.
00:16:00
Speaker
Everyone might try partnering on both sides, so we are the supporter and the supported dancer. I'm not talking about overhead lifts necessarily, which obviously the different limitations of each dancer would need to be taken into consideration. But learning to bear weight for somebody else and learning to assist a pirouette, they're all skills that, you know, everyone can do. Big turns, big jumps, all of those things. We all try all of those. And then we develop, ideally with mentors who can help us seek specialisms and say, right, I am going down this kind of track where I will be the supported and lifted dancer. I will be looking at point work. I will... <unk>da da
00:16:38
Speaker
So it's actually the same system as we currently do. It's just that it's not automatically assigned that men do this and women do this. You might then find that, for example, a dancer who decides to identify as non-binary wants to transition from what they'd always previously done would have been the male track because they were assigned male at birth. But now they actually think of the point work and the lifted of the pas de deux as being what suits them, someone like Ashton Edwards, and they're able to pursue that because the training mechanism allows it during training. Because quite often with trans people in particular, you know, that transition is such an an enormous moment and process in their life. It's rarely going to happen at an age young enough to then train through that
00:17:29
Speaker
trajectory so if we have a more open system then it caters to everyone and equally you know if you've got a cis man but he's only five foot six but he's amazing.
00:17:41
Speaker
He would previously have been discarded, but now under this system, he might be able to focus on turns and jumps as his specialism. And then when that piece is being cast, we know that that's the kind of dancer that we want for that piece. And maybe he doesn't do all of the lift work or, you know, so it just opens it up a lot more, I think. When it comes to dance ticketing solutions, I have tried them all. And honestly, none can hold a candle to DRT, the premier online ticketing provider for dance studios.
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Feedback on genderless training: Is it the future?
00:18:54
Speaker
It makes so much sense when you're describing it. It feels like, yeah, why haven't we always been doing it this way? And even the concept of the court of ballet being more of a female role where the men have to do a group section and they struggle to dance together because they haven't been trained in that mechanism whereas females were like so used to doing that.
00:19:15
Speaker
and We can pretty quickly dance together, but men are so used to typically being, like you said earlier, the soloist, the principal, of all the one who's dancing with the two girls or whatever they're doing, they haven't learned to dance in a course. So it's another skill that they need to learn too. And I love this idea that you can learn every single skill and then you get to a certain point where you, in your career,
00:19:42
Speaker
decide what you want to specialize in and where maybe your passions lie, maybe your strengths lie, where you want to take that road. I think it makes so much sense. How has the feedback been from other teachers in the industry when you've shared this?
00:19:58
Speaker
mixed but often very positive. The main reaction if it hasn't been just completely with me has been just like genuine questions on how it would work which I'm always completely open to because I think when you first hear it you do think oh my gosh well how would that work and actually like you've just described it's actually quite simple because it's not dissimilar to what we already do. I'm just suggesting that we already make categories we just don't need the categories to be exactly the same but the training path can be very similar and we use it in other professions because you know that's what we do in medicine. Everybody learns general medicine and then if you want to specialise or you stay as a generalist and you know we can use that similar system. I'm yet to have somebody who opposes it that has been able to give a really
00:20:48
Speaker
clear reason why. I have had plenty of people oppose it but when we've got into the arguments of ah for and against I feel that actually there isn't a clear reason why they want to keep it as it is other than it's what we know and we don't like to change things because you know as you said it almost is like oh I can't believe we haven't done this before. It opens up so many different opportunities as well in terms of kind of diversity of bodies and things like that because again if we only have very very slim slight women and very muscular tall men and that's the only combination we can have particularly we know for women that is a massive component of disordered eating because naturally
00:21:33
Speaker
there's only going to be a certain amount of those women that naturally sit with that body type. And so they're making that happen. And we know that we can't expect to perform at a high level when we're under-fueled. And then you know you mentioned as well about the corps de ballet and this idea that we're missing out on the skills that haven't been assigned to our our gender expression. So the corps de ballet, you know when we think corps de ballet, we think Swan Lake. But actually in 2025,
00:22:00
Speaker
it's also crystal pipe you know it's also thinking how crystal pipe manages a formation of dancers where everyone has to be uniform whilst also still being completely unique that's the skill now just as important as being absolutely lined up in B plus ready for the next moment for the call so it's also looking at where things are moving and how we fill those gaps because like you say the men might have that gap where they haven't been trained in that ensemble work and similarly you know one of the participants I and interviewed who we call Ella that's her pseudonym and that I use and she's a trans woman and she went through ballet school and professional top professional company
00:22:45
Speaker
as a male dancer and then transitioned in her late 20s. And she said she found it fascinating because when they're doing more modern work like Hillian and things like that, the girls didn't know how to support weight and they're trying to lift and they're trying to do all of these things and they haven't been given those skills. So one of the main arguments, um just to go back to your original question, how have people taken this? One of the main arguments is it's not relevant to the industry. The industry is still Romeo and Juliet, so that's what we've got to do. And having spoken to so many people and looking at where ballet is going in terms of modern choreographers for ballet, I'm thinking, actually, the current system does not cater to the industry that we're coming into, where I think individuality will be so much more celebrated than it previously has been. The more directors I talk to and leaders in the industry, too, I am hearing that they're saying
00:23:39
Speaker
We want dancers who have confidence, who have a voice, who are able to think for themselves. I was shocked at how much improvisation I was asked to do in my professional career because I was not trained in that skill at all. And that's so much critical thinking, being able to make choices, being able to think on your feet. I was so used to being told what to do that I felt very paralyzed in those moments. We trained dancers this way and then we asked them to change all of that as soon as they become professionals. And it's like,
00:24:08
Speaker
Well, what if we just train them differently so that they are prepared for this moment? Exactly. I couldn't, you know, that's so perfectly put that we're expecting this, you know, you must be quiet and conform the whole way through school. And then right now you're in a company, right? What do you think? And then we all go, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't think I just, I just do. Um, I do what I'm told. That's my job. And, uh, I went to a really interesting conference here in London.
00:24:33
Speaker
with some company leaders and they were saying you know it's not just a ah bonus now it's it's an expectation that dancers would come in the room and be able to contribute ideas choreographically and in terms of direction of the piece and they're not just passive vessels to put choreography onto anymore so I think these are essential skills that companies expect, to the point where one of these artistic directors said he struggles to hire graduates because they're not being trained to do what he needs. So he needs to leave them in the world for four or five years first and let them work out for themselves. And then he'll take them because they've got the skills then that he needs. And I just thought, like you said, well why don't we just train that in them? Yeah.
00:25:18
Speaker
I think you touched on this quite a bit, but I want to make sure I have all the information or anyone listening has all the information if they're listening and they're thinking, wow, this is a really cool idea and I would like to pursue an approach like this in my school. what Can you share with us your specific recommendations for like best practices in terms of how to run a ballet program with gender non-specific training? If you were running a you know a local dance school,
00:25:46
Speaker
All the time these children are below teenage years, I don't think they particularly need to think about gender as such, it can all just be trained as ballet technique. Now this isn't to erase gender, so I'm not saying that if you have a piece and there is a prince in it that you can't cast a prince in that piece um and that that couldn't be a cisgender boy, that's fine. It's just that it's not going to be automatically that he will be that part. Maybe the you know that part could actually be a girl or it could be you know a non-binary child or whatever ah so that you're actually
00:26:27
Speaker
being a little bit more open with that but generally I would look at very general training where everybody learns fundamental technique that that technique is adapted for their body not on account of all the boys do this all the girls do this and that they're all accessing lots of different characterisation styles and lots of different qualities and dynamics rather than certain ones for their gender and then I think if you were in more of a kind of full-time training context then I think the same can be done in the fundamental years and then lots of trying of these specialisms with mentorship so that you sit down with this dancer maybe when they're in their mid-teens and really talk to them about
00:27:12
Speaker
career trajectories and and hopefully we'll have more representation and you could say, you know, I see you in a career doing something like this dancer. And this is now the timetable that we would put together for you that will allow that. And I know people when they hear me say that will be like, oh my gosh, well, you know, it's already, we've got so many challenges and limitations with budgets. But essentially we are already doing that because we already separate. We're just maybe separating in a different way so that they're not all categorized in the same way that we currently are. You know, as a teacher, you think in your mind, well, my female students have to learn.
00:27:48
Speaker
Be strong in point work, they have to be able to do all these things. My male students have to be strong partners, X, Y, and Z, because in our heads, we're thinking of the traditional career path that we went down, that we were presented with. The idea of talking to your students and saying, what do you envision yourself doing? Because maybe you're training them for a career path that they don't actually even want to have.
00:28:14
Speaker
Exactly. And you know, and that is a difficult process. It's difficult for us as, you know, if we we were the mentors, it's difficult because we're talking about options that were not available, that didn't exist for us. But I think that's where we've really got to open our minds and get out of that. Well, we weren't allowed to do that. So you won't be able to do it and be like, wow, this is amazing. The world's moved on. You can do things that we couldn't even dream of doing.
00:28:38
Speaker
and really guide them and really have knowledge ourselves in case studies of different dancers and different ballets and different companies so that we could open their minds because equally a 15 year old might not know what route they want to go down and that's where you might be able to guide and say go and check this person out online and see what you think about them and inspire them to think, okay, yeah, I want to follow this particular trajectory. But the other thing with it is that if they get it wrong, you know, they go down a path that actually turns out to not be, they can move across because they've had all of it at some point, whereas no one can cross at the moment because we're all very separate. and I love how all of this has come back to training and starting at the beginning.
00:29:23
Speaker
because ultimately the goal is to find more gender equity in leadership. So what is your theory on how changing the way training works will in turn affect how many female leaders we see in the future. It does come down to being more equitable in the way we train dancers. We've made the boys feel very special for a long time. It's not about not making them feel special. It's making sure that everybody else is also treated as special, even if, objectively, yes, there are 100 other girls that might want to take their place.
00:29:56
Speaker
They're still valuable in that place that they're in at the moment. When we shift our thought process to that, it will ripple on to leadership roles because at the moment there are initiatives, particularly in choreography.
00:30:13
Speaker
to uplift particularly women choreographers and that's great but if we always are going from the top and picking out then there's that risk of it being performative or not really underpinning it with the work that would allow that female creative to really feel confident in what she's doing so my research really focuses on this bit. So then hopefully we can do together. So this bit being the educational strand. So yeah, I'm hoping that once we start putting all of this together and build awareness really in each other, but in our own biases, because, you know, I'm studying this, I'm invested in it every day. And I still notice little changes that I do when I'm teaching. Before Christmas, I had some
00:30:58
Speaker
only female identifying class full of female identifying students and then after Christmas they streamed groups and then they put in so I had 50-50 male and female identified students and I really reflected on the fact that the vibe was so different when the male students were in there and that I was enabling that it was basically more fun it was a little bit more boisterous you know a bit more kind of chatty and all these things where it had been quite quiet before and I really had to think like Was that just the way that the female students wanted to work? Or have I enabled that the boys are basically allowed to have fun and have a voice in their class and I wanted the girls to be quiet? So I'm checking all of that stuff all the time of those little biases and thinking, OK, can the girls have a little bit more fun in their class? Can they have a bit more of a voice? So a lot of it is just is awareness, I think, of what our words as educators and our actions and our approach can do
00:31:55
Speaker
subconsciously to the young people in front of us.
Setting personal values for a successful dance career
00:32:00
Speaker
There is so much dancers need to learn as they pursue a professional dance career. It can be completely overwhelming. Where do you even start? With your intention. To me, this is the first step in defining success on your terms.
00:32:16
Speaker
Once you have an intention for your career based on your core values, you can begin to hone in on a strategy to make your goals a reality. But without it, you will always feel out of alignment, out of control, and ultimately unfulfilled in your career. So how do you figure out what success means to you? With the Brainy Ballerina Intentional Career Handbook. This is not just your ordinary book. The Intentional Career Handbook walks you through it everything you need to think about as you embark on your dance career.
00:32:45
Speaker
With over 50 guided question prompts, you will dive deep into determining what really matters to you in a dance career based on your individual core values. By the end of this handbook, you will not only be crystal clear on your goals, but in the mindset you need to make it happen. Tap the link in the show notes to download your copy today and start pursuing your dance career with intention.
00:33:09
Speaker
You've created a career for yourself where you are a choreographer, a leader, doing all these things that we've talked about that traditionally a lot of males in the industry are doing. What do you think led you to this? I know we talked briefly in the beginning about having a more multifaceted career, but how do you think you got the skills that you needed to get to this part of your career? um One thing is I am just a very kind of determined like if I've got a goal inside, like I will do everything I can to make it happen. But honestly, I think it's because I've gone around the side on a lot of, a lot of it with my career, because I don't think I've always gone up the traditional pathways. I have been in those very sort of traditional systems and spaces.
00:33:53
Speaker
But when I haven't liked something, I've just looped it and done it for myself. So if I think the pathway is not there for me, I've kind of created it myself. Oh, I really want to choreograph this kind of work at that kind of theatre, and but I can't see a path for me to go up the normal route. So I'll go around the side and create something for myself. so I think that's maybe been my approach and I would just like to see that in the future there are pathways that are a little bit clearer and easier because that's another thing that a lot of the evidence shows is that even if you have a male and a female doing the same job title, choreographer let's say, the
00:34:33
Speaker
wider picture of his role might actually be a lot more conducive to success. For example, maybe he's a resident choreographer, they're more likely to be male, and therefore he has a salary which allows him to create with more time, more space, more freedom, whereas women often do what i've just described where there wasn't a pathway so they've funded their projects or they've gone around the side and they've maybe tried to seek investment or crowdfunding or whatever it happens to be they're more likely to do that which in itself
00:35:08
Speaker
creates so much more stress and load on them because this person's got an admin team doing lots of their things. This person's got to hire the theatre, hire the dancers, pay the dancers, to you know, everything. And so we also have to look at that. It's not just, oh, look, 50-50 now, men and women. It's like, but what's the role? Is it paid as much? Is there more to that role? Is there more load? We have to look at the kind of nuances of things as well, I think.
00:35:32
Speaker
Can you talk about the glass ceiling concept?
Gender biases in ballet: Who benefits?
00:35:35
Speaker
We talk about in general, you know, general life outside of ballet, this idea of the glass ceiling of there being kind of a cap of to where women or other underrepresented groups in leadership can kind of get themselves to. And I've also talked about this glass escalator theory, which really applies in ballet, as well as that one, which is where so when women enter male dominated industries, they are generally very badly treated. There's often sexual harassment, abuse, assault involved and this is through a wide spectrum of industries, not just your brain might go to kind of construction work um as a male-dominated industry but it goes right up to medicine. There's been a big report here recently in the UK about how such a huge proportion of female surgeons have been sexually assaulted
00:36:24
Speaker
including in surgery, like during surgery sometimes. It's wild, honestly. So this is not kind of a, oh, this is a low paid job. issue, this is the whole scope. If women enter a male-dominated field, they tend to have a really tough time. The opposite is true the other way around, so when men enter a female-dominated field, and there's one study that I looked at that was like teaching, nursing, librarianship, things that are traditionally female roles,
00:36:55
Speaker
they are disproportionately promoted and well treated and the theory there is that a they're they're special like in ballet because there's less of them and b again because of that societal kind of homophobia we are inherently uncomfortable with having men do feminine roles so for example say he's a nurse We don't really like that because that's a caregiving role and that's for women. So what we'll do is we'll promote him so he's in charge of all the women and then we all feel a lot better about it. And same with, you know, looking after young children, that's really a women's role. So let's make sure he's the nursery manager rather than just working with the two year olds.
00:37:37
Speaker
They actually have a route that's much clearer and easier for them. It's often not noticed. I never noticed any of this because everyone I came across in ballet generally in my education was a woman, pretty much. I never noticed, I just assumed it was female dominated and it wasn't until The thing that kind of piqued my whole mind on this was when I went to the theatre, I think it was 2016, an English national ballet, who at the time Tamara Rojo was the ah artistic director of, and she was still dancing as principal dancer as well, so she's right at the end of her career at this point.
00:38:16
Speaker
And she'd got a triple bill of three female choreographers that she'd commissioned. And she said the reason that she did it was because in her entire career, she'd never danced anything by a woman. And this was, you know, like world leading principal ballerinas. She danced every role ever. And she's right at the end of a 20 something year career.
00:38:37
Speaker
And she'd never danced something by a woman until she commissioned it for herself. So I was like, what? how How? And then started to look into all of this and thought, oh my gosh, not only is this happening, but it's almost like none of us are even aware of it. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to do is is just make people realize that this is happening for one. And it's so funny because when I was reading all the research that you put out and thinking about this topic, I realized that I've professionally I've danced in two ballet companies and I had a female director both times. I didn't realize how rare that was. Yeah, and I think a lot of people are in that same situation where it just hasn't necessarily really occurred to them because regardless of their gender, they've probably been mostly accustomed to having women involved in their training to a certain point, certainly. And, you know, there's a lot of examples of where
00:39:31
Speaker
These companies were often founded by women, in especially you know here in the UK, and how this happens inside and out of ballet, women sometimes found companies, and just at the point where they start becoming culturally or financially important, it gets taken over by a man, and then that's where it goes, almost like, oh, right, okay, this ballet company is a real thing, right, let's get the men in to kind of lead it where it needs to go. And actually, you know, the women started it in the first place.
Balancing tradition with change in ballet
00:39:59
Speaker
So there's lots of amazing women in the history of ballet, but at some point it kind of has got taken over by men. There's always a lot of talk about tradition in ballet. We're worried about making sure we don't break tradition. But the fact is that ballet has not always been a female-dominated industry, correct?
00:40:18
Speaker
Correct. So as an activity, it's been completely cyclical. When ballet first started, you know, it was in the kind of Italian and then the French courts, and it was only done by men. And if there were women in the plot, they were danced on travesty, which is basically in drag by men. And it continued that way for a long time. and It wasn't until ballet moved out of the courts and into the theatres that then women got involved. And then that's gone up and down depending, you know, where in the world has been kind of the peak of ballet at that time so yeah I another argument I commonly get is just you know you're you're messing with tradition just leave things how they are.
00:40:58
Speaker
and I'm like what bit because actually it's not been one way. It's continued to change based on the world around us at that time and it just shows you that it's constructed because the way that it started it was the most masculine thing you could do to dance a ballet. It was the most regal thing you could do and fast forward until the last sort of 50 years and it's become very look down upon as a feminine thing. If you're a man doing it, then, you know, there must be something feminine about you um as if that's a bad thing as well. And it's like, well, no, because again, there's not just one way to be masculine or feminine. But yeah, I think the concept of tradition, I get it. And I think there's nothing wrong with preserving some traditions. And I think that when we're protecting history of our particular art form like ballet,
00:41:50
Speaker
It's really worth looking at the traditions which still stand and which still serve us, but I think that people generally probably need to be a little bit more bold and open to the idea that some traditions just don't serve us anymore in the world that we now live in and the way that we should treat each other and the way that ballet should be opened up to make sure that it is for everybody and not just for a small group
Achieving gender equity in ballet: How to start?
00:42:15
Speaker
of people. I'm quite open to the idea of, you know, keep what works and move forwards to so what could be better.
00:42:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I love this because not only are you bringing attention to the issue, but you have a really wonderful solution that I hope that we start to see adopted across Valley schools. And it seems so obvious when you say it, but obviously it took hours and hours of research to come to this conclusion.
00:42:43
Speaker
and to realize the solution starts from the beginning. So I'm very grateful for you and all of your work that you've done on this. Thank you. Yeah, it's been it's been amazing to do this work, so fascinating and I
Exploring multifaceted careers in dance
00:42:55
Speaker
can't wait to do more. I would love to hear any updates coming up as you continue to do the work. Before we wrap up, my last question for you that I ask all of my guests is what advice would you give to aspiring dancers who are pursuing a professional career?
00:43:10
Speaker
I would say at the same time be absolutely determined that you want to push yourself towards success but that that success could look different for every person and that part of that success is also about being a multifaceted human because if all you have is the blinker of being this one thing, maybe it's dancing a ballet company, if that doesn't happen it's very difficult to then feel fulfilled Whereas if you buff the thing a little more and you also build a life and friendships and other hobbies and interests outside and you become this generally like richer more nuanced person rather than kind of just a bunhead that I think we were kind of encouraged to be in our time.
00:43:58
Speaker
that that's only going to be better. And it's more what ballet company directors want now because they want fully rounded human beings. So be authentic to you, have a goal and be driven towards it, but also explore who you are as a person and how those two things can fit together authentically. I love it.
00:44:19
Speaker
If anybody listening wants to learn more about you or your work or your research, can you tell us where to find out more? I'm most active on Instagram, which is at Anna Morgan Dance. Same handle on TikTok and my TikTok is new. So it's all very small at the minute, but I only post about this subject, sort of the gender in ballet subject on there. So that's where I put all of that and Instagram's about.
00:44:42
Speaker
that and other things going on for me in my life and career. But in my Instagram bio it links to my research site and all of my work so they can find that there too. Thank you so much Ina for those conversations. Thank you for having me.
00:44:59
Speaker
Thank you for tuning into the Brainy Ballerina podcast. If you found this episode insightful, entertaining, or maybe a bit of both, I would so appreciate you taking a moment to leave a rating and hit subscribe. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode. And you'll join our community of dancers passionate about building a smart and sustainable career in the dance industry. Plus, your ratings help others discover the show too.
00:45:25
Speaker
I'll be back with a new episode next week. In the meantime, be sure to follow along on Instagram at The Brainy Valorina for your daily dose of dance career guidance.