Welcoming Everyone to Our Work

Watching Alice Sheppard‘s DESCENT a few months ago, I put on the multitrack audio descriptions. On top of the music, I heard close-up sounds of the dancers moving onstage, plus a spoken description that was so nuanced it bordered on poetry. I’d seen the work in person before, but this experience hit me in an […]

Dance Schools Are Updating Their Dress Codes to Become More Inclusive

Catalyzed by the national reckoning on racial injustice last summer, much of the dance world began to ponder some tough questions, one being: “Who does traditional dancewear leave out?” Brands heard the growing calls for a greater range of options and have begun producing and promoting new lines of flesh-tone shoes and tights. Meanwhile, dance […]

Beyond Pink Satin: Dancewear Companies Reckon with Implicit Bias

Implicit bias and racial stereotyping are rampant in the dance world . That’s a fact dancers of color have always known. But the anti-racism protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd—protests whose effects have reverberated through a myriad of industries—are bringing new attention to the problem. Though dance has been heavily influenced by Black […]

Op-Ed: Where is Your Outrage? Where is Your Support?

For the last five years the dance world, and specifically the ballet world, has been enrolled in the mission to understand and implement diversity, equity and inclusion into the field at all levels. A great deal of funding has been allocated towards efforts of education and training, consultants have been hired, conferences and seminars attended. […]

Our Wish List for the Next Decade of Dance

There are lots of gift guides floating around the internet this time of year. But the end of the decade has us thinking about more than presents. As much as the dance world has evolved over the past 10 years, there’s still a lot of work to do. So we started pondering: If we could […]