Margaret Fuhrer:
Hi dance friends, and welcome to The Dance Edit Podcast. I’m Margaret Fuhrer.

Courtney Escoyne:
I’m Courtney Escoyne.

Lydia Murray:
I’m Lydia Murray.

Amy Brandt:
And I’m Amy Brandt.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Welcome, listeners, to our second ever mailbag episode—second in what is going to be an ongoing series.

So, what is a mailbag episode? Well, over the past few weeks, you all have been sending in your suggestions for discussion topics—just dance-world ideas and issues you’d like us to get into. Today we will be pulling two of those topics from our digital grab bag for discussion.

This episode’s winners are, first, the upsides and downsides of Zoom dance class, which it looks like is here to stay; second, a look at why the adult recreational dance world should not be dismissed and why it matters, which it does. If your topic didn’t make it this episode, don’t worry. Because, as I mentioned, we will definitely be doing more mailbag grounds in the not-so-distant future, so please keep the ideas coming.

The easiest way to share those ideas is on social media. So make sure you’re following The Dance Edit @the.dance.edit on Instagram and @dance_edit on Twitter, and then go ahead and leave us a comment or slide on into our DMs.

All right. So let’s get right into our first topic: Zoom dance class, which was actually suggested by friend of the pod Gavin Larsen. Hi, Gavin!

This is a fascinating one, because I think in the earlier days of the pandemic, so many dancers were just so fed up with taking class over Zoom that a lot of us assumed Zoom classes would be like a COVID blip on the radar—as soon as we were actually back in the studio in person, they would just disappear. That has not proved to be the case. And I think the four of us on this podcast, right now, have experienced Zoom class from a few different perspectives, as teachers, students, journalistic observers. So I’m curious to hear everyone’s thoughts on both the positives and the negatives of Zoom class.

Lydia Murray:
Personally, one thing I’ve liked about Zoom classes is just that they make it easier for me to focus on myself. I feel like if there’s ever any temptation to rely on the mirror, that is almost non-existent in a Zoom class for me, since I don’t have a mirror that’s big enough for that. I also don’t worry as much about how I fit into the rest of the class. In person, if I take an open class, I’m more concerned about things like the level, which class will be challenging enough without being so difficult that I get in someone’s way, or things like teacher accommodation or if one of my old injuries flares up, will I be able to modify the combination without disrupting anyone around me and those kinds of things.

But more broadly, I think one of the positives is accessibility. Not everyone can take class in-person, whether due to disability or financial concerns or geographical constraints. That reminds me of that Dance Magazine story from last year in September, by Jakki Kalogridis, that focused on those issues.

Margaret Fuhrer:
We’ll link to that in the show notes. That was a great piece.

Amy Brandt:
There’s also that great ability to connect with people who are far away, or perhaps in a location that is different from yours where you would otherwise not be able to take class with them or connect with them, or just share that experience. I know with Turnout with Tiler, and all of those things that were happening—I mean that wasn’t on Zoom, that was on Instagram. But World Ballet Class, things like that, it was a fun opportunity to learn from dance stars and other coaches and teachers who otherwise you wouldn’t have access to.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Access in a different sense of the word. Yeah.

Courtney Escoyne:
Yeah. Well, I know I definitely growing up in south Louisiana, if I had been told, Hey, you can literally from your computer take class from these New York City Ballet principals and all these other people, I would’ve lost my mind a little bit.

But also conversely, I know something I experienced early on as a practitioner and am still experiencing is, yes, I do, surprisingly, in my Brooklyn apartment, have room to take class if I want to. But I still haven’t quite been able to bring myself to. And I was having trouble articulating why to myself. I was talking to some friends who are not dancer people at all, but some of them stream on Twitch and they do YouTube stuff and different sector of the online universe. We were talking about, the thing about Zoom fatigue is you’re in this group and you’re engaging with people and you’re talking with people, or in this case, dancing with other people, even if they’re separate from you. Then there’s the moment of when you log off, all of a sudden you’re just by yourself in your house. None of those people you just had that connection with are there. I had a realization of, the thing that I personally felt like I would be missing in a Zoom class, a lot of it had to do with not having that communal ritualistic experience of coming together and taking class and feeling the people in the room with me. Even though Zoom dance classes absolutely have done an incredible job of filling that gap, I know personally—I don’t know if emotionally I can handle what I feel like is going to be the stepping away from it that happens in that instant.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Well, this is why Zoom classes are never replacing in-person dance, in-person energetic exchange. You’re not going to find a substitute for that on a screen. You’re just not.

Amy Brandt:
I was just talking to a friend about this last night. She was saying how her choices at this studio that she sometimes attends to take open class, her choice is to pay a lot less and take class at home, or to have in-person class in a mask. Both of those options aren’t really great, because she really hates dancing in a mask, but I would do that in a heartbeat compared to trying to do class in my living room. So I think it’s always kind of preferred to do it in person.

Margaret Fuhrer:
I’ve heard some people express concerns—I think Theresa Ruth Howard expressed concerns along these lines, that what we’re going to end up with as studios reopen fully is a tiered system, where it’ll cost more to take class in person, and if you can’t afford that or if you can’t afford to travel to where the in-person classes are happening, you’ll be online in some capacity, and you will get a reduced experience. Are we going to create two tiers of dance students in a way that’s potentially harmful to a lot of students? That’s something to think about.

Courtney Escoyne:
And it’s also worth noting that even though these online class are increasing accessibility in some senses, not everyone has the privacy or space in their homes to be able to do this.

Amy Brandt:
Right.

Lydia Murray:
Or the equipment.

Courtney Escoyne:
Yeah. And there’s a number of dancers who were able to, through personal connections or whatever, leverage having essentially a studio space, which is incredible that they were able to do that. But I do question, is this only further widening that gap in terms of who can, in a number of senses, afford to train and dance?

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. One thing that I hope we’ve learned when we had to take class on Zoom that we can then carry back into the in-person environment is, I think it pushed teachers to find better language to explain corrections, when they couldn’t rely on the body to demonstrate or like physically move a student’s body into the correct position. Finding words that explain what you want activates a different kind of learning that begins internally, instead of being focused entirely on the external. I think that connects to what you were saying too, Lydia, about like, you can’t rely on the mirror—it’s a different type of learning a different processing that’s happening. I hope we can bring that back into the studio.

Amy Brandt:
I think it’s helpful for the student too, to not rely on the teacher taking the time to show the combination and demonstrate everything that there’s the language of dance that you need to be familiar with too. I remember taking class with Larry Long, who was this great teacher in Chicago, and he had mobility issues. So he never demonstrated anything. You would finish the combination, he would verbally tell you the combination, go! And you had to know vocabulary and put it together in your brain. It did force you to pay close attention in a way that when there’s that little break to demonstrate and to watch you kind of can tune out a little bit.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Oh, I had a teacher like that growing up. A tiny old Russian man who had come in with his cane, sit in a chair in the front of the room and kind of mutter the conversation, like you had to physically come closer to make sure you were hearing what he was saying. But man, did it help us learn? Yeah. All the terminology—we were sharp.

Amy Brandt:
I feel like for me personally, Zoom class is sort of best as a special occasion type of thing rather than a consistent method or, consistent medium—a master class, something to do in a case of emergency or whatever. But as far as like consistently training on Zoom, I don’t know if that’s really ideal.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. It all comes back to, it’s not going to replace in-person classes, but it’s also not going anywhere. So yeah. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how the dance world’s use of it evolves over time and how it affects training in a bigger picture sense over time.

Lydia Murray:
Yeah. I could see it being a great supplement to in person training, but yes, definitely agree that it has its limitations and probably can’t really replace an on the ground class.

Amy Brandt:
Yeah.

Margaret Fuhrer:
All right. So next up out of the mail bag is the importance of the adult recreational dance world, which is a suggestion from listener Rachel Toburen. And thank you, Rachel, because yes, adult rec dancers are just written off by studios and teachers in the wider dance world all the time for a variety of reasons, but they make up a not-insignificant portion of the dance student population. They should be taken seriously, and their experiences in their contributions matter. Amy, I know you said in our prerecording correspondence we were doing that Pointe readers in particular are very passionate about this topic.

Amy Brandt:
They are, actually. We cross-posted an article from Dance Magazine by Lindsay Martell, “Why Adult Ballet Students Should Be Taken Seriously.” It got so much engagement on our social media and it really opened our eyes. In the past, I’ve also heard from people asking us to create more content geared towards that community. When we were a print publication, we were very much geared towards a younger dancer, a pre-professional student, someone in the early years of their professional life. There wasn’t really space for that. But now that we’re completely digital, we’ve broadened our coverage. We are starting to look into publishing more stories from that world. They do really well. We’ve done a few on summer programs for adult students. We did one recently on how to return to the studio after a year of Zoom class on an adult body, not a…

Margaret Fuhrer:
A fundamentally different proposition.

Amy Brandt:
…professional, or—yeah! Yeah. And we have another story in the works about starting pointe as an adult and how that’s different and how your needs are a little bit different than when you’re 12. When you think about it, this is the ballet audience, too—these are the people who are buying the tickets, who have really invested in dance as an art form. I think it’s important to make sure that they are informed and that they feel part of the dance community.

Courtney Escoyne:
Growing up in my early training, when I was I don’t know, middle school, early high school, there was some, there was an adult class at my studio, but one of the guys in it, his name was John, he was in his early sixties, had never danced before in his life was an engineer. He decided he wanted to start taking ballet. He was one of the most delightful presences to have in the studio because he was there just because he was really interested in it and really loved it. And he knew that he had different physical limitations. I think having that perspective in the studio alongside a bunch of us who wanted to be professionals and were so ahhhh about it, and just having this person who was also dedicated to doing the work, but also Hey, you can chill out a little bit. Your life is going to be really long—having that perspective alongside was so valuable just for me as a perfectionist, obsessive kid.

Margaret Fuhrer:
We did an interview a little while back with Richard Riaz Yoder, who’s a brilliant tap dancer, Broadway dancer. He said that when he started training, the class that his mom found for him was a class that was mostly older women. That was the environment that he was in for the first several years of his training. He said it was just the best way to enter dance. Because you’re just around all these people who are completely at home in their own bodies, know exactly what their limitations are, are there because they love it. And that’s it, there is no other end goal. It’s just, I want to be in this classroom right now. Imagine if more kids started out that way! And not that the benefit of adult recreational dancers is only to the children who see them, but it is nice to have that kind of role model in the classroom.

Lydia Murray:
Yeah, I think for a lot of teachers that all-consuming dedication and that ability to embody the traditional aesthetic ideals of ballet is seen as essential to studying ballet, when really it’s about so much more than that. I think that it’s, like you’re saying, it’s great to be able to have those people with different goals and different perspectives. And not just creatively, but also just to meet people who do a lot of different things outside the dance world. And on an interpersonal level, it’s really good to have that experience when you’re a pre-professional or growing up.

Amy Brandt:
I remember when I was dancing with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, we were at the Kennedy Center, and we used to give master classes there when we were in season. I was tasked with teaching an adult master class for the company. I was kind of nervous, because I wasn’t sure what they would be able to do and I didn’t want to hurt them and all of that. But they were so much fun. I was giving them a stretch and I said, “Let me know if this hurts you,” and they were all into it. And grand allegro, you name it. They were so pumped. It was one of the best teaching experiences I’ve had. It was so much fun.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah.That’s the thing is that I think teachers, maybe sometimes aren’t as excited about teaching adult students because they have no professional prospects. What that actually means is that the class isn’t a means to an end, it’s the whole point. They’re super excited to be in that classroom. And that’s exactly what you want of your students. You want them to be fully invested and present there.

Amy Brandt:
And they’re coming with an adult mentality. There’s things that they just immediately understand, even if they physically don’t have the coordination or the ability, they intellectually understand what you’re talking about. That’s really fun and refreshing. It’s a different kind of student that you work with, you know?

Courtney Escoyne:
And, I think there’s also something to be said about coming into a dance practice as an adult when you know who you are and you know what your value is outside of this thing that you are working towards. I think that’s something that we’ve discussed a lot being something that to be looked out for in pre-professional dancers, because you’re basically pursuing an impossible ideal while your sense of who you even are and your sense of self worth is like forming. I think we can all speak to and acknowledge the ways that sometimes that isn’t handled great. Sometimes that creates lasting impacts on a person’s personality. I think there’s something really kind of special and incredible about coming at it and you know who you are already. You’re doing this to do it.

Lydia Murray:
And it’s also great to have—from the perspective of someone taking adult classes, it’s really great when you have classmates who also have backgrounds in pre-professional ballet training or whatever who maybe did have those struggles when they were younger and now they have worked through that. It’s just really great to see, I guess? That it’s also just good to be in the company, I guess, of someone with that experience because it’s somehow, I don’t know, healing to you too.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Shared past trauma.

Lydia Murray:
Yeah I was trying to say it in a more positive way because this is sounding really negative, but yeah. [laughter]

Margaret Fuhrer:
But yeah, the sense of okay, that pressure has been removed, now you can just focus on the joy of it. I feel like the term “recreational” in dance generally has gotten a bad rap. Even when you talk about younger students who are recreational dancers—oh, well they’re not serious enough or talented enough to be pre-professional. Why is there a stigma associated with this word? What if kids who just want to dance who have no professional aspirations? So what! That’s great. Come on in, welcome.

Amy Brandt:
There’s so much more that dance can teach you besides, a career. Dance can give you so much.

Courtney Escoyne:
The vast majority of dance students aren’t going to go professional. There are so many more dance students who don’t—who do it for like a year or two or several years or until they graduate high school, whatever the case may be. And treating them as less than in any way in a lot of ways is like setting them up to not care about dance when they are adults with disposable income and are the people that you want to have butts in seats when it comes to selling tickets to shows hello. Hello? Hello. We’re not just cultivating pre-professional dancers, we’re cultivating audiences.

Lydia Murray:
Exactly. Yeah. From a business perspective, it makes so much sense to engage that segment of the dance community. Like Amy was saying earlier, they bring so much enthusiasm to the art form, and they’re willing to support art form, and that’s important.

Margaret Fuhrer:
I think we could all keep talking about this for another three hours.

Lydia Murray:
Probably. [laughter]

Margaret Fuhrer:
So much! There’s so much to unpack here. Thank you again to Rachel for submitting that question—clearly we have lots to say about it.

All right, that concludes this special mailbag episode. Thanks everyone for joining us. We will be back soon with more discussion of the news that’s moving the dance world. Keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing.

Courtney Escoyne:
Mind how you go, friends.

Lydia Murray:
Bye everyone.

Amy Brandt:
See you later, everybody.