Why Every Ballet Company Needs an Emotional Counselor
I spent the better part of my academic career studying a dance style that shaped me as a student and professional; an artist and performer. After countless conversations with other dancers, and with myself, it’s become clear to me how the beautiful ballet-world I love needs to change now.
Ballet taught me strength, showed me the breadth of humanity’s beauty, and made me a masochist. My privilege as a male in the artform shielded me from the stressors that may have otherwise bore an eating disorder, but it didn’t shield me from constantly criticizing my body. Or questioning my self-worth in school and company cultures that never gave me the full story. For all the genuine good that dance offers to both audiences and performers, ballet has a huge problem with communication, a lack of which is costing dancers their physical and mental health.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the racial discrimination and sexual harassment.
As more and more people open up about ballet’s social issues, it’s becoming clear to me that what ballet needs is an intervention that not only combats the fallout victims suffer after harassment, discrimination, or emotional invalidation. It needs an intervention that facilitates every dancer’s broader psychological development in ways that revolutionize our understanding of ballet’s workplace culture — and like most contributions to American ballet, this idea starts in New York City.
In 1989, five researchers led by Dr. Linda Hamilton worked to assemble a psychological profile of professional ballet dancers. They sent out a first-of-its-kind questionnaire to American Ballet Theatre and New York City ballet soloists and principals. Analyses revealed those dancers scored consistently high — upwards of the sixtieth percentile — for three sources of occupational stress. The first was extreme physical conditions. The second was ambiguous criteria for professional evaluation. The third was conflicting supervisory demands and loyalties. Though some of you may roll your eyes at “extreme physical conditions” (yes, welcome to pointe), the latter two items are interesting, each specifically connected to authority and communication. Furthermore, Hamilton concluded that those stressors combined put dancers at severe risk of developing problematic coping behaviors, like anorexia and alcoholism.
Every piece of research in dance literature released thereafter built in some way off Hamilton’s study. Dancers’ relationship with mirrors. Dancers’ relationship to perfectionism. Dancers’ relationship to their culture and career. They all come to similar conclusions. Dancers are prone to hyper-critical evaluations of self, denigrated senses of self-worth, and an over-reliance on external validation — a byproduct of the beauty expectations we must meet in order to be viewed as physically valuable. Worse, those expectations set the standard for which ballet dancers strive to achieve and also maintain by any means necessary. So, despite the body’s natural aging processes, the natural limitation of one’s biological capabilities, or maybe even the emotional/physical abuse ever-present in an archaic social hierarchy, dancers dance on despite the occupational costs.
Unfortunately, a system that relies solely on those suffering to ask for help is perpetuating — sometimes by accident, other times not — a system already stigmatizing social-emotional conversations.
I’ll be the first to tell you that no single panacea can spread across the culture of a centuries-old art form and chiropract-it into place. It will take a conscious effort on our part to de-stigmatize this culture’s tendency to deprioritize our emotional health. Removing this stigma, I believe, begins by advocating for dance-oriented group counseling.
No, I’m not kidding.
If the only thing that comes to mind when I say “counseling” is your aunt, sprawled on a beige couch with a bearded gentleman peering over his notebook in a cushioned chair beside her (his corn-cob pipe an optional addition), you aren’t alone. To your aunt, bless her soul, that form of counsel may actually yield tremendous cognitive aid. For dancers, however, whose work life is quite socialized, an intervention that can catalyze a community’s rather than just an individual’s propensity for social and emotional wellness seems necessary.
Group counseling in a company setting could instill hope in dancers of their capability for self-empowerment, all by facilitating meaningful communication alongside a trusted mentor (the counseling professional), as well as empathizing colleagues (other dancers). Each party exists as a network of support, encouraging dancers’ betterment from a place of reassurance. Through such thorough social engagement, artists can develop new, progressive attitudes and behaviors, the likes of which may even override the problematic ones developed before.
“But hey, isn’t all this what Human Resources and Employee Assistance Programs are for?”
To those who don’t know, Human Resources (HR) refers to an organizational department responsible for managing all matters related to employees. Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) refer to work-based interventions designed to assist employees in resolving personal problems that may be adversely affecting their performance. Now, It’s true that administration departments in several dance companies have some sort of wellness referral system. You can even get external psychological healthcare if the company’s insurance can pay for it. Unfortunately, a system that relies solely on those suffering to ask for help is perpetuating — sometimes by accident, other times not — a system already stigmatizing social-emotional conversations.
In short, I’m not just asking us to create a short-list of dance counselors that companies can point us to when we’re feeling blue. I’m asking, in the same way kids have counselors in their schools, for dance companies to have therapeutic counselors in the workplace.
We, dancers, are not working in conditions with problems that only affect us as individuals, especially those of us in smaller, more intimate companies or at the lowest level of our professional career in bigger companies. Behavior in the ballet-world is impacted by a community that subtly stresses external validations of self-worth in conscious and unconscious ways. This stress is worth discussing alongside other dancers and artistic authorities, some of whom may be unknowingly perpetuating ballet’s more negative social dynamics. In fact, group counseling sessions are one of the few interventions that can jumpstart a necessary dialogue about workplace health. It allows us the opportunity to talk to one another about the personal impact invalidation, discrimination, or harassment in the ballet-world has had on our growth. It gives us space to realize that we are not the only ones who feel this way, and we become empowered by a counselor’s direction as well as the group journey itself.
So, while dancers express through movement and voice their desire for empowerment, those in power must recognize the benefits of prioritizing our social-emotional health and asking tough questions about the neglectful underbelly of ballet’s social foundation. Then, once these vocal seeds of developmental wellbeing are planted, the company culture in which they reside will shift in perpetuity. This is the way our change will blossom.
If you’d like to hear more about mental health (and race) in the ballet world, tune into my episode on dance;better, a podcast for lovers of mental health and ballet, hosted by the super Sarah Schiewer and fabulous Courtney Ulrich. You can also find them on Instagram @dancebetterpodcast and me @jxjirar.
