Let’s Talk About… Eating.

Dance has, for many years, had strong associations with eating disorders. It’s something everyone seemed to know about and no-one was able to talk about. These dancers didn’t need help, they were doing what was required to succeed in a highly difficult, aesthetic based industry.

I applaud Royal Ballet’s artistic director Monica Mason for highlighting “What we are looking for is a healthy, talented, gifted individual” commenting that in and ideal world, dancers would be able to recognise eating problems themselves and be less secretive and ashamed about it.

Still, I don’t know whether this problem is as open-aired as what we currently believe. I believe the problem is exacerbated in early learning, propagating at smaller dance schools before the dancer can even reach a professional sector. By the time this awareness surfaces, it is often too late. It’s true that many tertiary institutions now harbor many programs that recognise and treat students who struggle with this issue, but I think the message needs to be stronger to resonate further down the learning line, re-establishing what dancers can do to get the body they desire without taking extreme measures.

Even now, around my peers, there are offhanded comments about body image, weight and “preparing for performance”. The implications are still on starvation and managing a “diet” rather than looking at overall lifestyle choices that can contribute to long term gain. I’m not exempt from this thinking myself. It’s the only short term solution I have that seems go get results quickly, albeit in an unhealthy manner. My knowledge, and my belief in building a long term, healthy lifestyle is the only thing that rally’s against these thoughts.

I’m heartened to seem many shapes and sizes turn up to auditions, but still, frustratingly, it’s a single type of body that seems to succeed, and it has everything to do with genetics.

Part of the problem may be in the wording. In everything we read, a lifestyle for longevity is promoted has the tagline “healthy”. Yes, a perfectly good word, but perhaps what they don’t realise is that in the dance world, “healthy” is synonymous with “fat”. This is an awful, incorrect association, but to drive dancers to look after themselves, we need to consider new buzz words and a new way to consider this information.

If things are truly changing, we need to not just identify the problem, we need to implement positive ideologies much earlier and promote what it is dancers can do to attain the body they truly desire without the psychological damage or confusion. We’ve come a long way from Balanchine grooming his principal dancers by giving them an apple for dinner, but we’ve still romanticised this idea of starvation as key.

Those who attended the Dance UK conference was applauding the inclusion of the topic of eating disorders, seeing the wave of positive change to talk about the issue. I hope this continues. I hope what they propose is true and this is something we can talk about – and not just as professionals. I hope this enters the early dance education world, so our young dancers can grow up to be healthy and happy – knowing that a dancer’s body is a finely tuned instrument that takes rigorous training, but they don’t need to live on air to achieve it.