<
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/britain-ballet-diversity/>
"It was a pointed comment about her Afro-braided hair that spurred Ruth Essel
to carve out what she calls a safe space for Black dancers.
The founder of Pointe Black Ballet School in London said when she was a child,
teachers and assistants all but punished her for not fitting the traditional
ballerina mould, as if she was using her race as some kind of rebellion.
“I’ll never forget my first time about to dance on a West End stage,” said
Essel, describing when, aged 10, she started a final rehearsal at a theatre
proudly wearing the braided bun her single mother had spent her last 100 pounds
on.
Her pride turned to shame when her teacher pointed at her in the lineup of an
almost all-white group of dancers, saying, “You’re going to take all of those
zigzaggedy things out of your hair because it looks a mess.”
That was just one of several instances when Essel was made to feel that being
different was “like a defiant choice by me,” she said. “These are all things
that happened before I was 16 years old, and I didn’t know any better.”
Those challenges inspired Essel, a deputy programme manager at a unit of the
Royal College of Psychiatrists, to establish Pointe Black in 2020 at the age of
26.
“I wanted there to be a Black environment. I wanted there to be people who
looked like me. I wanted there to be a teacher that looked like me,” she said.
It was empowering, she recalled, to finally wear black tights and shoes, rather
than the traditional pink for ballerinas, “because it was closer to my
colour.”"
Via
What Could Go Right? October 5, 2023:
https://theprogressnetwork.org/natural-disaster-deaths-declining/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
