Articles from February 2022

“Watch your thumbs,” the ballet teacher said, and I looked toward my left thumb, held in second position. After a few seconds I realized what she actually meant was to tuck my thumb into my palm. I tend to take things literally.

I was diagnosed with autism a few months ago, at age 25, but I’ve been autistic my whole life. In many ways ballet class has been a safe place for me, even before I knew why I craved routine, envi­ronments with explicit rules, and social situations that don’t necessitate talking.

Ballet class’ standardized structure offered me stability as I learned the art form, starting at age 12. Autistic brains don’t automatically filter out unimportant information, rendering routine critical. Parts of my day need to be familiar if I’m taking in every sound outside my window, every leaf on the sidewalk, the way my curls feel different on my head each morning. Because the order of ballet class is consistent, I’m better able to process new information, including combinations and corrections.

Parts of class even helped my social development. Most social settings come with a high number of implied rules that can feel elusive and ever-changing to autistic people. During adolescence, I’d intuit that I’d broken a social rule but be unsure of what my mistake was. In ballet, the rules were stated directly. Once, some girls were standing in front of my teacher while she taught a combination, and she told them, “The student stands behind the teacher when they’re teaching.” Her specificity was clarifying. These explicit ballet-etiquette lessons set me up for greater success in the studio.

Because class resembles parallel play—a stage of social development when children prefer to play independently beside each other rather than interactively—it also provided me with fulfillment that I struggled to find in unstructured environments, like hanging out with friends. Autistic people can find parallel play rewarding into adulthood, unlike many of their allistic (non-autistic) peers. During the pandemic, my roommate took virtual ballet classes and, with little else to do, I started taking them beside her. I realized­ ballet is a way to feel close without language—to feel part of a community without having to navigate complex social interactions.

Along with the ways ballet has enriched my life, however, there are plenty of elements of studio culture that alienate autistic dancers. Before my diagnosis, I internalized shame about how my brain and body work, because many assumptions made during ballet class didn’t apply to me—that people swing their arms in opposition to their legs while walking, for example, which I don’t. Growing up, one of my studios banned skirts because students would fidget with them. Autistic people (and other groups, like people with ADHD) need to “stim” to regulate themselves physically and emotionally. “Stim” is short for “self-stimulatory behavior” and can include things like rocking, hand flapping and other repetitive motions. While correcting extraneous movement during dancing is justifiable, criticizing a student for fiddling with their skirt while waiting to go across the floor is unnecessary. When I let myself stim during ballet class, I learn combinations more quickly and can better regulate my emotions. While some teachers may argue this doesn’t prepare dancers for the professional world, I believe that the professional world should make reasonable changes to become more inclusive.

Ballet also comes with a host of sensory stimuli—unique fabrics, hairspray-filled dressing rooms, loud music—that can be a nightmare for autistic dancers. Sensory issues, which are unique to each individual’s nervous system, can register as physical pain and aren’t merely dislike. For example, my childhood studio’s dress code required a specific make of leotard, and the sensation of the sleeves on my skin sometimes triggered sensory overload. When a dancer complains about uniforms, costumes or music, I encourage teachers to investigate the reason. Whether it is a sensory issue, a body-image issue or something else, a nonjudgmental and open conversation will get closer to the heart of the problem.

Unaddressed sensory processing difficulties can even have dangerous effects in the long term. For most of my life, I’ve had hip discomfort while dancing that I thought was just related to muscle engagement. However, I recently learned the sensation is a chronic injury. Autistic people struggle with interoception: the perception of sensations inside one’s body. It’s hard for me to differentiate between soreness, pain and engagement. I’ve started seeing a physical therapist who helps me identify the differences, but talking about pain identification is a conversation teachers should have with all of their students.

Changes like these will include not only dancers who have requested accommodations but also those who may not know their disabilities or have the language to ask for what they need. Autistic women and people of color are much less likely to be formally diagnosed with autism as children, or ever, because of gender and racial disparities in research and bias in the diagnostic process. Each individual’s needs are unique, and there will never be a one-size-fits-all accommodation. But the first step to making sure everybody feels safe and included in a classroom is to value dancers’ autonomy. Allow input from students when solving problems; ask before touching a student and respect their answer; when a dancer expresses a need, consider creative solutions to meet it.

It would have helped me to have conversations about why certain rules existed. Discussing the reasoning for uniforms might have given me permission to approach a teacher and explain why it was difficult for me to wear the class leotard. But in my experience, the only talk of uniforms was dancers being reprimanded for not wearing them, which made me afraid to ever mention my discomfort. As Keith Lee, director of diversity and inclusion at Charlottesville Ballet, put it in a conversation with me: “Don’t discourage the artist. Take notice and act on their discovery. Their honesty, approach and involvement is their contribution to the art.”

After seriously considering a career in dance as a senior in high school, I decided not to pursue one because of the parts of dance institutions that ostracized me. I feel unwelcome in the art form when I see companies and studios perform for autistic audiences while failing to accommodate autistic dancers in their classrooms. Still, I continue to love ballet, and I regularly take classes from teachers who are patient, respectful of my needs and nonjudgmental of my differences. I hope that all autistic dancers can find teachers who celebrate them and that, as time goes on, more of us find safe and welcoming places in the field.

The post Ballet Could Be a Home for Autistic Dancers Like Me appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As a Black girl from the inner city of Baltimore, I hadn’t known anything about the codified world of dance growing up. Ballet was something I had only seen on TV—and who I saw in it never looked like me. I never thought that would be my future.

My first introduction to dance was at my audition for the Baltimore School for the Arts, and from there a love bloomed. It didn’t happen on the first day; it grew gradually, up until that one class where I was finally able to successfully execute a combination that we had been working on for a month—something that, at first, I didn’t fully believe I could accomplish. The recognition came from my teacher, but the real reward was for myself. That confidence brought about a self-awakening. Dance made me believe that I could achieve anything.

Fast-forward a year, and I met someone who turned what I thought about the world of dance upside down: Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell. At that time, she was a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. After seeing her, I made a mental checklist: Black girl from Baltimore. Check. Performing in front of thousands of people around the world. Check. Getting paid to dance. Check. People accepting and being inspired by her artistry. Check. There were no more excuses for me to not take this dance thing seriously.

Once I made up my mind that it was possible to have a professional relationship with dance, my life changed. Dance taught me so much: Respect for my body, commitment, freedom of self, a strong work ethic, self-reflection. It taught me to love myself not “flaws and all,” but completely and uniquely for who I am. There is only one me, my story is different, and in this world I can be rewarded for it. I am a beautiful, Black girl from Baltimore and also a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Representation matters.

The post Ailey’s Jacqueline Green on Representation in Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The pandemic has contributed to many shifts in the dance world, as the community has outspokenly criticized longstanding practices and cultural norms. However, no one has called into question the structure (or, rather, the lack thereof) of the job market. As a now-retired ballet dancer of nearly a decade and a PhD student in economics at Harvard, I know that incorporating basic lessons from economics could change the game for both dancers and directors.

The ballet job market is what an economist would refer to as a “matching market”—you cannot simply choose where to go, but you must also be chosen. What makes the ballet market peculiar is that, unlike most professional athletic markets, directors have vastly different preferences for dancers and they mostly do not (and cannot) compete for hires with salaries. Rather, dancers are first and foremost committed to finding their best artistic fits and are often willing to work for less than their worth.

This phenomenon would not be quite as problematic if dancers and directors were nonetheless matched efficiently. Unfortunately, there are two major failures that plague the current system.

First, although many, but not all, major ballet companies in the U.S. operate under the dancers’ union AGMA, there is virtually no regulation in terms of hiring. Deadlines to hold auditions, renew or cancel contracts are company-specific and are not standardized industry-wide. This is problematic because when streams of dancers are released into the audition market at different times, both companies and dancers can end up with undesirable results.

Here’s an example: A dancer knows she will be let go early in the season and begins a job search right away. Other companies, ones that hold auditions later or whose dancers have several months to return their contracts, do not know how many places they will have available and so they tell her they might—or might not—make her an offer down the road. She may then feel pressured to accept an offer that expires in a matter of weeks from another, less preferred company.

Still, she’s better off than the dancer who’s let go after auditions have already passed. I’ve also known directors to rescind verbal offers to dancers very late in the season, instigating a chain reaction that not only leaves the dancer worse off, but also the other companies that would’ve preferred to hire her but were unable to do so.

This coordination failure is made worse by the fact that many dancers wishing to leave their current jobs typically do not announce their departures until they’ve secured other positions—and for good reason. But directors at saturated companies cannot make additional offers until they know who is definitively leaving. This is what I refer to as “holdup.” There are many favorable “trades” available across companies, but either someone has to first give up their job without a guarantee of another, or a director needs to seek out additional funds in order to start the trading process.

This is where market design comes in. This field, which seeks to find economic engineering solutions to practical problems, has studied similar failures in markets like the medical residency matching program, public school choice and vaccine allocation.

One of the central tenets of good market design is creating market “thickness,” or bringing together as many people as possible at once so the best outcomes can be achieved. By centralizing industry-wide contract renewal dates and audition time-frames, not only would companies avoid coordination failures, but this would also eliminate the unnecessary anxiety that dancers face by not knowing when they might receive an offer and when they should accept one.

This practice has become commonplace in other highly competitive settings in the U.S., such as legal clerkships and PhD programs, which do not require students to accept any offers before a standardized date. It is also the reason why most markets that bring together various traders, including the New York Stock Exchange, open and close at the same time each day.

In other settings, centralized clearinghouses have been enormously effective in eliminating similar market failures. Specifically, what I have in mind is a variant that I’ve designed of the well-known top trading cycles algorithm. It would work something like this: After all company departures have been announced and auditions held, dancers and directors would simply submit their preferences to a centralized algorithm that would quickly determine final assignments based on those preferences. While this may sound radical, variants of top trading cycles have been used in school assignment settings and most notably in the kidney exchange system in the U.S., an innovation for which economist Alvin Roth was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012.

The assignments resulting from this process are guaranteed to be efficient. The process also encourages all dancers to submit their preferences over companies truthfully, eliminating another major element of anxiety. By streamlining hiring in this way, both parties get their best shots at their most preferred counterparts, while trades across companies at capacity can happen swiftly and without the need for additional expense.

Of course, centralized clearinghouses are most effective when the majority of the market agrees to partake in them. While leaders may fear that this would require them to relinquish some control, they would only make offers to the dancers who they would under the best possible scenario, and the gains they would achieve by thickening and coordinating the market would far outweigh any perceived losses.

As new leaders begin to take the reins at companies around the globe, time will tell whether they will be brave enough to challenge the status quo and reshape the marketplace in a way that truly works for both dancers and directors.

The post The Ballet Job Market Needs a Market (Re)Design appeared first on Dance Magazine.