Our Dancing Daughters
By A. V. COTON
THE business • of training for ballet involves a certain mystique. But there are also cruelly hard facts which determine h o w many girls can step on even the lowest rung of the ballet ladder. Attendances at schools all over the country where the Royal Academy of Dancing syllabus is taught, and at other kinds of school able to train profes- sional dancers, indicate that today about 45,000 children• between seven and seventeen years old do regular ballet training. Dozens drop out every term. Teachers or parents may see that the child is only doing some useful exercises. The child herself can easily lose interest. But hundreds struggle on. From once-weekly lessons at eight or nine, they graduate to several half-days a week by the age of fourteen. Even for the one in a thousand with real talent, what chances of profes- sional activity are there? Not many. In ballet companies, revues, musicals and cabaret there are altogether fewer than a thousand full-time jobs, with—at most—another 300 in seasonal work covering part of the year.
The 'Saturday morning class' is a moderate expense for any family's daughter (half a crown's worth of healthy exercises). But after a few years the ambitious or promising child is taking lessons four or five times weekly, often on half-days surrendered by the local education authority. A few schools (too few, and mostly in the London area) provide a general education plus ballet training. The fees vary between £45 and £75 a term. Board, special clothing and shoes are extra.
Few normal recreations are permitted—no bicycling, no tennis, no running about. Only swimming is approved of. At the age when little girls should be daydreaming into femininity, the serious ballet student is worrying about her diet, her weight and especially her muscles. If she takes the career-publicity seriously she will try to study piano and music theory. She will insist on being taken to art galleries to look at pictures and sculpture. Parents have to be very devoted, unusually starry-eyed, or extremely happy in their bank balances to cope with the special routine imposed on the whole household by a dancing daughter of twelve.
At sixteen she will have learned a lot of tech- nique and will have danced in one or two school shows. She may then win one of the few scholar- ships to the important ballet schools in London. Even then there is no certainty of a place in a company. In her late teens she can still be dis- carded if she is not considered to be of the standard momentarily favoured by a capricious director. She may go ahead backed only by her teacher's and her own faith. She may plan to break in by way of pantomime or revue. But most of these channels open in London. A helpful starting push is needed from another dancer, a ballet director or an unusually clever agent.
At twenty she may be earning £500 a year in a full-time job. But she will have a one-year con- tract which doesn't have to be renewed—even in the best companies. This, after a training from the age of ten'has cost about £750—apart, naturally, from food, shelter and clothing. More often she is a freelance working in cabaret, on tour in revue or musical, doing odd spots in TV or films, with a fair chance of being out of work six months in the year. If she dances all the fifty-two weeks, Equity will see that she gets a minimum of £9 weekly. These heights are attained after a training of not less than six, and usually ten, years. And yet the dancer with sound technique and tough physique reinforces these attributes with a nun-like sense of dedication, a supernormal amount of courage and self-discipline.
Inside a ballet company luck will count for more than skill. She will be competing against 'from a dozen to twenty other dancers equally well equipped. Her luck might be to have a trick of style (all good dancers have clearly individual personal styles) which appeals to a choreographer looking for something new. Among an average crop she may have that extra dynamism, that sheer muscular staying power, that streak of ruthlessness, which wins a director's interest and leads to her gradual advancement. The real ballerinas have each gone through such a training as this. But they have also all shown early on a driving compulsion towards dancing, an eager appetite for ceaseless work, and a comparative ease in mastering the technique. For them the mystique was non-existent. They knew, they felt in their bones, that they had to dance or die.
The mystique always seems to disguise the facts. All the little girls in dance schools between Aber- deen and Penzance are metamorphoses of Anna Pavlova. She was the ultimate in ballerinas, an ambassadress-at-large for the sacred cause. Through her legend thousands have been guided towards the notion that they, too, could transmute themselves into fairies, snowflakes, or humming- birds. She personally never hid the fact that it meant hard work. Nor did the teachers who finally sprang up to cope with the rush of pupils. But the war-time boom in ballet, the post-war easy- money period when lots of films-about-ballet got made, helped to swell the mystique. The idea grew : 'You can be another Markova—Fonteyn-- Shearer. Look at their pictures in all the maga- zines. See how they go dancing all over the world. Think of the money, the mink, the glamour. . .
It chimed with another newly-fledged idea: to the subject of the Welfare State no career is impos- sible.
Half the teachers, able as technical instructors, have little or no stage experience. At sixteen, the child may command a brilliant technique but have no stage-appeal whatever. Good dancing is an expression of the whole personality. The would-be ballerina has to have that passion to project her- self on to a congregation of strangers. For the ambitious male the odds are a shade better. There are fewer jobs but the standards are lower. In proportion to the number of entrants, more boys than girls get into the business. But most parents think twice before allowing their boys into an occupation which, despite all the whitewashing that goes on, is known to be overloaded with men of epicene tastes.
P.pr both boy and girl the work is strenuously healthy. The comradeship is also part of the reward. Dancers stick together and help each other more than actors do. They. must, for at forty the physical brilliance has fizzled out in both male and female dancers. Work as teacher or coach isn't easy to get. Many turn to jobs as actors or in stage management and production.
Most important of all is the question of psycho- logical adjustment to the life. Almost everywhere, except perhaps in Russia and Denmark, the ballet school atmosphere is unhealthy for teenagers. Boys are few and the girls of fifteen and sixteen tend to hero-worship them. Through the constant physical closeness of the work in classroom, the boys tend to know too much too intimately about the girls. A high degree of precociousness in both sexes inevitably conflicts with the 'respectability' of the home background. As in too many other residential schools, little explicit sexual instruc- tion is given. At far too early an age both sexes are highly developed physically while still mentally immature and emotionally unstable. (A few years ago—and conditions of training have not changed since--an unofficial committee of inquiry composed of a cross-section of dancers. teachers, doctors, critics, psychiatrists investi- gated the problems of the ballet teenager. It turned out that about half the girls were emotionally starved, the others oversexed. Of male dancers in one company, three-fifths were simultaneously undergoing psychiatric treatment.) The young dancer will never succeed unless she comes to the notice of someone important in one of the few ballet companies we have. For various historical reasons, ballet companies in the West, and especially in this country, are often under the command of a woman. Sometimes she exercises autocratic powers, sometimes she is hedged in, by a body of useful advisers which may include a few detached and objective males. Again, for historical reasons, teaching tends to be done by women. This female ascendency tends to work for the advancement and artistic nourishing of would-be ballerinas. It works less well for the small number of men involved in the business.
The actual business of ballet is highly competi- tive and is usually possible only under State subsidy. Hence the fierce struggle between com- panies for engagements, between dancers for roles, between teachers for recognition of their pupils. Within only thirty years the system has developed so that in each ballet-creating organisation great powers rest in the hands of one individual. Too often the same person is the artistic director making policy, a choreographer making ballets, the supervisor of a dance school making dancers, and the final arbiter on what physical and psychological type will be allowed to become a professional dancer.
In Russia and Denmark—possibly also in the few European centres where the old system still functions—the ballet school and the ballet com- pany are controlled by a committee. Only a care- fully weighed majority decision accepts, or rejects, a possibly good candidate. In these countries the system not only teaches dancing but also educates the pupils in the widest sense towards their responsibilities both as citizens and as dancers.
Nothing will stop your daughter starting to dance. If she has that 'something' she will get as far as an audition with the highest powers in the ballet world. But absolutely nothing will guarantee that she will become a ballerina. That depends on unchangeable temperament, on excellent train- ing, on a balanced and sympathetic education, on good contacts, on the ceaseless moral and practi- cal support of parents, teachers and friends. And on luck. This combination can apply today to very few of our dancing daughters in Great Britain.
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