This week we’re sharing tributes to all the 2024 Dance Journal Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, go to retailer.dancemedia.com.
Mavis Staines, the just lately retired creative director of Canada’s Nationwide Ballet Faculty, has been a visionary pressure in Twenty first-century ballet. A 1972 graduate of the varsity she would remodel over 35 years of directorship, Staines is admired internationally for supporting concepts about group, physique variety, and well-being for college kids and dancers.
These concepts sprang partly from Staines’ personal experiences as a ballet pupil and dealing dancer, initially with the Nationwide Ballet of Canada, the place she rose to first soloist, after which with the Dutch Nationwide Ballet. Regardless of her deep love for the language of ballet, Staines says that she was “aware that there have been counterproductive and even abusive practices” that went together with the custom. “I assumed it was a disgrace, that it didn’t must be like that.”
After an harm ended Staines’ performing profession, she returned to Canada, coming into NBS’ prestigious Instructor Coaching Program, the place, she says, she steadily fell in love with educating. Staines joined the creative college of the varsity in 1982 and was appointed its creative director in 1989, taking on from founding director Betty Oliphant. “I knew it was a possibility to discover tips on how to make genuine systemic change that might endure,” Staines says.
Through the years, Staines has thoughtfully but firmly shepherded institutional change to ballet coaching. Her initiatives by means of NBS embrace the “Not Simply Any Physique” symposium, which introduced collectively dance leaders to debate our bodies in dance; the Worldwide Audition Pre-Choice Tips, aimed toward lowering prices and workloads for auditioning dancers; and Sharing Dance, providing group packages to youngsters, adults, and folks with numerous wants. Networking internationally has been key, and Staines usually gathers with colleagues at occasions resembling NBS’ Assemblée Internationale and the “Addressing Racialization in Ballet” symposium with the Dance Institute of Washington, to brainstorm and share concepts about tips on how to evolve the dance schooling area.
Into retirement, Staines will proceed this work as a worldwide ambassador for Canada’s Nationwide Ballet Faculty. “That is actually significant now that I can select tips on how to direct my time,” she says. “It’s a lovely technique to hold linking arms with leaders and rising artists and artists world wide to steadily shift the dial in methods which can be important for conserving ballet vibrant and alive into the longer term.”
