The challenges of inclusion

A few weeks ago, with concert season upon us, we started a little series about the added complexity that putting a show on stage brings to the subject of INCLUSION. At that stage, the team had already been in planning and pre-production stages for a couple months, and all of these are topics that we need to discuss and issues to address, before the students even sign up to participate. 

This fortnight, we unpack a very specific issue that quickly turns into a much bigger problem:

Ballet tights and shoes

If you think of ballet tights, it's very likely that the image that pops into your head is some form of light pink or salmon colour. It's just the ballet attire and that's the way it's been since forever. No questions asked.

To fully understand the extent of this issue, we need the historic background for context:

In the world of ballet technique, the goal is to achieve the most aesthetically pleasing shapes (within the language of this dance style) with elongated lines and a sense of effortlessness. There is a huge fixation in "the proper alignment and placement of the body" and ballet students will spend many hours in the years that they practice it sculpting and polishing the smallest details of their positioning and movement.

This requirement of ballet shaped what the class attire and stage costumes would look like and how they would evolve. Enter the tights and the shoes.

The initial (and traditional) intention was for the shoes and tights to match in colour in order to visually support that technique aspiring for an elongated extension of the legs. All good up to here. But the reason they are pink/salmon was to match the dancers skin colour. This of course, further established ballet as an elitist art form (don't forget it originated in the courts of European royalty) only accessible to white people.

When the colour of tights and shoes creates a disconnect

Misty Copeland performing in pink tights.

When we place these thoughts and ideas about 200-300 years ago, they feel easier to digest. But when we think that it was only in 2015 that the American Ballet Theatre, one of the three leading companies in the world, promoted the first ever African American woman to be principal ballerina, things really get into perspective. We are talking about Misty Copeland, a now 41 year old woman who started ballet as a young girl wearing pink tights. And still to this day, Copeland has spent more years in pink tights than in the one that match her skin tone. How were pink tights helping Misty with her ballet lines? Yes, the shoes were matching the tights, but her whole lower body was in disconnection with the rest of herself, externally and internally.

It is only in the past couple of years that the tights and shoes colour has been questioned and, in part, it has been thanks to Misty's activism once she earned her position as Principal Dancer at ABT. She is just one ballerina out of the many darker-skinned ballerinas impacted throughout history, but she has the platform and the voice to bring this issue to the mainstream and has chosen to use it.

Back to us

As a dance school that wants to make an effort to make dance as inclusive as possible, we have been having conversations about the topic for about two years now, always finding a huge road block when realising the market was not caught up and we simply couldn't stock tights in different tones to offer our students the option. THEY DID NOT EXIST in major worldwide retailers' catalogues. They were basically a very rare and limited thing to find, therefore a bit of a luxury item for recreational students.

This is a change that will take time and will develop slowly, but it is exciting to see that this year the market has reached a point that allow us to offer alternatives to our students that don't mean an extra cost.

Starting small

However, just like any structural changes in the world, any dismantling of a system, will take extra work and extra effort at the beginning, but we believe it's an effort worth making for a better, more inclusive future in the world of dance in general. We are back to basics: a small change in everyday life can (and will) have a huge positive impact in the future of many people.

It won't all get done overnight and it will require a decent amount of communication and education, but that's how it is with all things worth doing, isn't it? We remain a small business and understand that we can't change the world alone, but we can change our world and are very excited to start this new era with our community.