Ethical considerations

Ethical considerations Some ethical considerations as they emerge for my research proposal for: An exploration of whether a deeper awareness of and connection to the natural environment impacts the mental health and artistic development of ballet dancers 

 Mental health is an area I will be exploring in my inquiry. I will not discuss this in the interviews with the dancers I plan to carry out in case it is triggering for them. But will send them a short questionnaire following the interview which they can fill in if they wish and send back to me which will address areas relating to mental health and connection to nature.

 I will be addressing mental health with the counsellor who I intend to interview who specialises in dancers. This participant was also a professional dancer so I will ask them questions regarding their relationship to nature throughout his career as well as see if any strategies they now use with clients are nature based. Because I know this participant, I will need to retain objectivity and a certain degree of formality when talking to the individual to ensure we stay on track of the topic.

 I will be interviewing one retired ballet dancer who is now a teacher and character dancer who I know has had a strong connection to nature. Because I know this participant I must be careful to ensure I work in a way that keeps the interview fairly formal I must be mindful that they may share more personal information than what they intend to because they know me. So I will use a semi structured approach and must be very objective in how I interpret the data. 

 I intend to do a call out for 2 Ballet dancers trained in the UK at vocational ballet schools and currently dancing professionally either freelance or in a company. These participants must have performed at least once in both an outdoor and indoor context. I intend to do this across social media groups and perhaps by emailing individuals who can then forward on the information to others. 

 I will be using my own journals and experience as a professional ballet dancer throughout this study. I need to be mindful that revisiting journals does not bring back past trauma and I need to consider how discussing trauma within the study may be triggering for others reading it. 

 If I am asking participants questions related to their training and careers I will retain anonymity of all institutions and companies and any names they may refer to. I will omit any information which makes them identifiable. Apart from the counsellor who in principle has said they are happy for their name to be used.

 I am concerned to ensure I reach a culturally diverse participant base although this is difficult when I am only using a few participants. So not sure whether focusing on UK participants for this research is better in that it is more specific? Or shall I just open up the inquiry and see who comes forward? 

I want to ensure I am being inclusive in this research and considering disabled dancers as well, even though they do not form a large part of the current intake in vocational ballet schools. I come from a place of hoping that this will in the future be the case, therefore I am hoping to consider these dancers throughout the research.

 Also would it be useful to ask if we can disclose ethnicities within the research? Is it right to do this? I am so drawn as to whether or not to ask the other 2 dancers as participants or to do a random call out. There are 2 individuals who I think would be excellent for it, to tackle the area from a number of angles, but I am unsure if this is already twisting the inquiry to how I want it to unfold. 

What are your thoughts? 

 Would really appreciate your thoughts on this MAPP team. 

Thank you💚

Watching Lea’s piece: Starving Dingoes

 As I watched Lea’s piece Starving Dingoes I felt as though I was transported to the early days of human existence. 

Here were the thoughts and ponderings which emerged from witnessing this fascinating piece at the Place on Saturday night. 

 Who are we beneath the façade we have created as societies? 

 What are our primitive desires and feelings? How does disease manifest and can we truly fight it of with the healthy cells in our bodies? 

The feeling of fighting a disease was strong throughout.

The way in which this theme was explored was so powerful and the ways the dancers committed to the emotions at each stage of the piece struck me deeply. 

 I was particularly interested in how a certain crawling movement was adapted in a way that made the beautiful disabled dancer the more powerful force to be able to execute that movement. 

 I felt at times uncomfortable as though lost in a repetitive cycle and this reminded me of the discomfort from OCD. 

It felt like connecting to the deepest parts of self which we do not want to confront

 The sand seemed so integral and I found my eyes drawn to the patterns of the sand and how the dancers were creating them through their movements.

 The choice of score was equally interesting and I wonder Lea if I could ask what was the inspiration for using the La Traviata pieces? 

 A most impactful piece which leaves a lasting memory within me. 

Discussions and special Interest Groups

 Last week I had a fascinating discussion with Dieter around the area of trauma. It was great to hear Dieter's knowledge from a somatic point of view concerning Long Covid in particular. We discussed how the body can tell you through physical symptoms that something in your life needs to change. How so often illness manifests from the disconnection between mind and body - when we stop listening. We spoke of the challenges that the national health services have with so little time allocated to each patient and how they can rarely get the root of a problem and must instead prescribe medication which is not always the right treatment and in most cases does not fully address the underlying issue. This discussion further prompted my my exploration into considering what really helped me to reach the point of recovery I am in when many people with Long Covid are still struggling. I remembered nature and how much I missed in isolation and then how I would go each day and sit by the tree in the park and gradually increase my walking in nature which eventually led to running.

I wonder how much of Long Covid is related to the fact that at a time when the body was struggling to adapt to an unknown virus, I was stuck in a room lacking oxygen, away from people and disconnected from nature. This can't have helped me to recover from a disease which affected my respiratory system so badly as well as every other system in my body.

Dieter pointed out the connections between nature and somatic practice and I hope this week to be able to attend his somatic class as I seek to develop a deeper awareness of this connection.

Evolving ideas of an inquiry and finalising my research question

 In the last few weeks my ideas for what I will focus on for my inquiry have evolved in ways I never anticipated. First of all I began feeling that I would be focusing on the effects of trauma on ballet dancers. But the more I researched, the more I wanted to focus in on a particular type of trauma, as it is such a vast area and did not feel I would be able to do it justice. This led me to revisit the trauma of Long Covid which I have experienced and I explored the possibility of looking into the impact of Long Covid on ballet dancers. I revisited diaries and memories from my experience and this led me to remember a moment of enlightenment which occurred when I was very unwell. 

I remember noticing that I did not miss doing ballet class which I had previously been somewhat addicted to. After 14 days in isolation entirely alone in my flat trying to look after myself when I was struggling to walk around even, and then the months and months that followed of being unable to do basic things let alone a ballet class, showed me what I missed most. I missed being able to walk down the street into the park and connect with the beauty of nature. I missed feeling the breeze on my face, seeing the colours of the flowers, touching the trees. I realised just how much of my life I had spent disconnected from the beauty of life itself.  

This memory has returned at a timely moment in my life where I was starting to ask why? Why am I dancing to begin with and this led me to revisit a favourite children's book of mine which I asked my dad to read to me over and over again! Bravo Tanya, A book which tells the story of a young girl who loves to dance but when she is in the ballet studio and the teacher is shouting counts she cannot seem to connect to the dancer within her. Down by the brook she dances to the music of nature which only she and her ballerina bear toy can hear. One day the pianist is walking by and stops to watch Tanya dancing. Afterwards she applauds her and tells her what a beautiful ballerina she is and that she too likes the music she can hear there in nature. This surprises Tanya and the next time she goes to class she ignores the shouting and counts of the teacher and instead focuses on the music of the piano instead in which she hears 'waves, a storm and branches in the wind'.(Gauch,1992, np)  Later, the teacher who had previously told Tanya's mother that Tanya was a lovely child, but that not every child was meant to be a dancer declared ''My goodness...what a little ballerina you are''. (Gauch,1992, np) This book spoke to me most deeply and has never stopped leaving an impact on me. I now use it with my own students because the message is so clear. When we connect to the world around us only then can we truly dance. This is of huge inspiration to me and when I forget this reason I end up questioning my career choices in general.

So my inquiry is now looking further into the training of a ballet dancer and how little time we spend in the natural environment, how that the then feeds into our careers. Also into how much intentional time we spend observing nature. I have been considering how much dancing in open air contexts may impact a ballet dancer's performance and how generally a deeper connection to nature may impact the mental health of dancers given the challenges of the profession. Therefore following a very helpful supervision with Helen I believe I have landed upon my research question:

How can a deeper awareness of and connection to the natural environment impact the mental health and artistic development of ballet dancers?

 Which will take the form of this as my title:

An exploration of how a deeper awareness of and connection to the natural environment impacts the mental health and artistic development of ballet dancers

Although I do definitely want to pursue the research around Long Covid and dancers, I would like to wait a little longer before embarking on this as the area of Long Covid is still not fully understood. 

This research around nature and ballet dancers seems to encapsulate the journey through trauma and Long Covid but also reveals a possible light, a feeling of hope in me which is asking to be pursued. I wake up in the morning with enthusiasm for the research ahead. This is how I know it is the right question.

So far, I plan to use a combination of grounded theory and ethnography

Doing interviews of classical ballet dancers who have performed both indoors and outdoors and a counsellor who specialises in dancers to see if he uses nature based treatments with his clients and if so how effective these are.  I will also be drawing on my own diaries and artwork.

I will do another post detailing my literature review but currently looking at the work of Rosemary Lee, Anna Halprin, Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan who all have a deep connection to nature in their work.

I am looking to find more male dance artists through history who have a strong connection the nature and the environment. Can anyone help me out here?

I am also in the process of exploring phenomenology in greater depth and I have to say I find it fascinated. I find myself resonating with Heidegger's ideas but when I consider his political status as a Nazis I find it hard to comprehend how they can go together and find myself less trusting of his ideas. This in itself is indicative of perception and how our perception of something changes depending on the circumstances around it. For example with dancers I often find that dancers who are kind personalities seem to become more enjoyable to watch whereas if I know that a dancer is extremely narcissistic I find this starts to be all I see when I dance and therefore I don't enjoy watching them so much however technically excellent they may be.

But I am also reminding myself that I cannot get to absorbed in philosophy because I have a deadline to meet! But I could definitely spend a whole term just on the area of philosophy!

 References

Gauch, P and Ichikama, S (1992) Bravo Tanya. The Putnam and Grosset Group: New York

Videos and podcasts currently being explored are:

Heidegger 

https://youtu.be/M_nNEN7JUiM

Phenomenology

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DtfANSetD2gv6iLygLn8m?si=oaBZm5OdQZquOOT3D9vW1g&utm_source=copy-link

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger 

https://youtu.be/8Y_HlIPRUc8

Long Covid and Embodied Practice

 

I have been further exploring the positivist and non positivist view points on life, research and my practice. Lea’s recent blog reminded me of the first time that I really questioned western medicine. I suppose I was bought up with the view that when it comes to medicine there is a more positivist view point in the sense of this is the research and therefore it must be trustworthy. However when I was recovering from the main Covid infection all was going well and although I was tired, I was confident after about 17 days that I was on the road to recovery and that all was well. But how wrong I was. That evening I had probably the worst night of my life, couldn’t breathe properly and was literally struggling so much that I ended up with paramedics and then going to A&E. After numerous tests showing very little I was told that the reality was they didn’t know if this was the same infection or if I had caught it again (although I was later told this could not have been the case). They also did not know the cause of my symptoms and simply told me that covid is a new virus and they simply didn’t know. I respected this. Unfortunately with this experience I was also experiencing judgement as a young person with covid. The treatment from the hospital lacked any real emotional support and I felt supreme guilt for being unwell and contributing to the burden of the NHS. I waited in an isolated room for 5 hrs and had to ask to be able to go to the toilet and they had to bring a commode in leaving no hand sanitizer or anything. It was a humiliating experience, and I was glad to leave the hospital, because I felt that however unwell I was I did not want to be a burden to others. But I also saw that the staff themselves were traumatized and that another covid patient was the last thing they needed. But undoubtably this also impacted my recovery, and I did not want to be around people for weeks in fear of still being infectious.

I think this was one of the most frightening aspects of the whole experience – there were no answers. They couldn’t tell me whether I would make a full recovery or not or if I would ever get better. 3 months later I was still struggling. Although in time gradual improvements allowed me to return to life, my recovered self is not the same person and I think I have not been truly honest in acknowledging that. I still struggle with memory problems, susceptibility to infections, vision problems which can’t be explained, headaches and very strange circulation issues in my hands. All symptoms which came post covid.

Long Covid remains a challenge for medics and although research is being conducted, they still don’t have answers and yet somehow these sufferers still need to keep living their lives and navigating daily symptoms and so many unknowns.

I believe it was at this point that my notions of positivism altered, and I began to realise that world is complicated and that perhaps not all answers are definitive anyway.  Recovery taught me that my mind and body were not separate entities, and that continued progress required me to address both aspects of mind and body. Burkitt describes Cartesian dualism as body being ‘located in time and space’ and ‘separate from a mind that was a substance in itself, but immaterial, non-temporal and non-spatial substance’ (1999, p.17) But I feel that as an artist you can only reach a true point of artistic integrity if you have reached a point of embodiment. I have not yet reached that point as an artist and I feel that it is the amalgamation between the knowledge of my mind, the training and health of my body which is lacking. Currently they work separately. My journey is to find out how I can make this link and become a truly embodied being. There seems to be something in all this about acknowledging that I am not the same dancer that I was and that is OK.  To realise that I can’t simply divide what my mind and body have been through from my practice. I do believe that I have been doing this. Expecting them to function as they did before getting through such a challenging experience. 

As I explore further into my inquiry proposal, I am now finding the area of trauma to be so vast and therefore look to focus on the trauma of Long Covid specifically. I am looking to perhaps interview other dancers affected by Long Covid as well as draw on my own experience. If anyone knows of anyone who might be able to help in this research process do let me know.

Bibliography

Burkitt, I (1999) Bodies of Thought. London: Sage Publications

A collage I created during recovery from Long Covid

Dawn and embodiment

A little clip of the rehearsal process for Dawn solo from Coppelia (video starts at 45 seconds)

As I embark on this first stage of 2023 I am busy in a number of areas. Currently rehearsing for Coppelia and preparing to dance The Dawn and Prayer solos. Allowing myself to become emersed in this concept of dawn and how that translates to balletic performance. The feeling of new light, new beginning, awakening and illumination. It feels enriching.

Yet as I seek to embody these concepts through movement, I am simultaneously challenged by the ethical considerations of a ballet environment. Pointe work for example involves some degree of unavoidable pain. How do we convey this to young people as they begin to dance, how is it ethically right to be doing ballet in the first place? 

Considering this notion of the ethereal woman which ballet has evolved from. Am I wrong to be part of this system when there are so many aspects I disagree with? These are just some of the questions floating around in my head at the moment. I have always wanted to use ballet to help people but I am part of a system which one cannot deny can be sacrificial and destructive. 

Olga pointed this out in relation to Anna Pavlova on one of my previous posts. 

Is it possible to achieve an ethically sound environment in classical ballet, if no one danced through pain then there would be no cast most nights! It is a very difficult one to navigate. Sometimes I am trying to articulate to my students this notion of good and bad pain and feel like a fraud as the line is so grey. For me I would say that for example any pain on the skin such as a corn, blister etc would come under the pain threshold that has to be dealt with but you can hardly call this good pain, yet I can't ask for time off because of a blister. Yet a blister can be agony if you dance on pointe. The psyche that a dancer must develop to dance through pain could be problematic for other areas of their lives. If they learn that they must endure pain or trauma, they may ignore signs of serious illness or injury. 

Sometimes I wake up and wonder what it all means, what was all this for? This calling that I feel so deeply to dance. Is it to be listened to. Is it the spiritual calling, has it been placed there by someone else in my childhood? How do I know the difference. Lea was talking about these notions of different brains which really resonated with me. Currently I seem to be at a place in my life where I am trying to understand these different brains. Are they really different? As an embodied being, is it possible to truly feel whole or will I always feel a certain amount of fragmentation? I have been returning to earliest memories of dancing in my childhood and I remember the joy of the music and the feeling of wanting to share that joy with those around me. Somehow when I danced, everything felt OK. I felt interconnected to the world in a special way.

I have always sought to use dance to reach people in an authentic way. There are times when I feel I achieve this and times when I don't, but recently more than ever I feel a need to strive for new avenues. I feel a new chapter surfacing in me. Sometimes it scares me... yet another unknown but I also remember that with every unknown comes possibility, new light and new awakenings and there I have come full circle back to my Dwan solo! 

Perhaps this post encapsulates the idea of embodiment and indicates just how interconnected our lives, work and research really are.

Areas of Wonder

 

 As I debate areas of wonder at the moment I have been considering how on the one hand I am fascinated by the area of trauma and how current ballet dancers find the process of returning to dance following trauma. On the other hand, I am also rather enticed by a more historical research project looking at how trauma may have affected the performance of dancers through history. Somehow the historical approach feels less daunting to me. Why might this be? There is a sense of security about the past, we know what happened and there is concrete evidence to draw on. More current research of recent times feels less certain and more precarious. Although there is always an element of history within every research project, I am currently exploring where I would want the main focus to be directed. 

As I wonder I also think about the genre of ballet and it's place as a healing art form in the recovery of trauma. There is much research and evidence for dance movement therapy but how does the disciplined and in some ways famously trauma inducing art form of ballet sit within all this? Is there potential for ballet to help someone to recover from emotional trauma? Or does the art form cause further problems, or does it depend on the trauma? What about those watching ballet? Can the watching of ballet help those who have experienced trauma to move on?

What is the impact of emotional trauma on the artistic integrity of ballet dancers? 

How have dancers through history been influenced by trauma?

 My role as a researcher will be closely linked within this as it is an area close to my heart. I hope to draw on journals from my recovery process from Long Covid but also perhaps from experiences of bullying as a child.

I am currently in the process of working with two different charities. One is just in the process of being set up to support the mental health of dancers and I am proud to be a trustee on this charity. The other is an Anti bullying charity called 'We are Stronger' and I am in the process of planning a dance film for this charity. I would very much like my inquiry to benefit the work I do for both these charities.

Always value any thoughts that my MAPP cohort may have. Thanks so much.