![]() ![]() “To see it in black and white, and to speak to your partner, it opens up that whole trust,” she said. For Kingsley-Garner, having recently returned from maternity leave, her back stood out. The dancers each had a piece of paper with a person drawn on it, and were asked to use the drawing to mark the areas of their bodies that felt vulnerable, and then communicate what they were to colleagues. Kingsley-Garner said a simple exercise helped her. On their first day with Scottish Ballet, in February, the intimacy directors encouraged the dancers to practice setting boundaries and to check for consent. ![]() But dancers are increasingly eager to shake things up: After the intimacy sessions, Hampson said, the change was “instant.” “I still don’t feel like the industry has accepted responsibility for the holistic challenge that it’s produced,” he said. There are glimpses of change, said Christopher Hampson, the director of Scottish Ballet, but the road is long. Ballet’s #MeToo moment, around 2018, brought some of them to the fore, and they are hardly confined to the past. (One of the biggest ballet stars of recent times, the French dancer Sylvie Guillem, was nicknamed Mademoiselle Non for daring to express disagreement with her directors.)īallet abounds with what dancers often euphemistically refer to as “the horror stories” - tales of boundaries being crossed or ignored altogether. Members of ballet ensembles have little agency over what they perform and an ability to silently adapt to any situation is prized. ![]() That is especially true in ballet, where training starts at a young age and many companies maintain a strict hierarchy. Yet because touch is a requirement of the job, dancers have historically been discouraged from speaking up when they feel uncomfortable. Dancers are also much more accustomed than other performers to close contact some frequently performed ballet lifts, for instance, require men to hold their partners high up the thighs, or even by the crotch. In those fields, intimacy directors choreograph sexually charged scenes by setting the performers’ moves in advance, but for existing dance works, the choreography mostly can’t be altered, which limits their potential input. Intimacy work for screen and theater doesn’t entirely translate to dance. “Ballets like this tap into physicality and traumas, so the training is a great, solid layer to build on,” Kingsley-Garner said. They encouraged Kingsley-Garner to take control through conversations with partners and a slow buildup to the more uncomfortable parts of the choreography. For this new, shortened production of “Mayerling,” renamed “The Scandal at Mayerling,” which has its premiere on April 13, Scottish Ballet brought in two intimacy directors, Ruth Cooper-Brown and Rachel Bown-Williams, for companywide workshops as well as private discussions with dancers. Unlike previous generations of dancers, she had a place to voice her concerns: intimacy coaching sessions. “I didn’t feel like I was ready for the extreme positions just yet.” “I felt that anxiety of being touched again,” she said. Just five weeks before that rehearsal, Kingsley-Garner, a principal dancer with Scottish Ballet, was still apprehensive about tackling the role - her first since having a baby last summer. As she was grabbed, thrown and lifted, Kingsley-Garner’s back, visible through a cutout in her leotard, grew increasingly red from the rough - sometimes audibly so - skin-to-skin contact. On a recent afternoon in the Glasgow studios of Scottish Ballet, she was running through an upsetting scene in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1978 ballet “Mayerling.” Her character, Stephanie, is violently assaulted on her wedding night by her husband, Crown Prince Rudolf. GLASGOW - The intensity of the choreography left visible marks on Bethany Kingsley-Garner’s body. ![]()
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