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 lately retired creative director of Canada’s Nationwide Ballet College, has been a visionary drive in Twenty first-century ballet. A 1972 graduate of the college she would rework over 35 years of directorship, Staines is admired internationally for supporting concepts about neighborhood, physique range, and well-being for college students and dancers.
These concepts sprang partly from Staines’ personal experiences as a ballet scholar 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 “acutely 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 have to be like that.”
After an damage ended Staines’ performing profession, she returned to Canada, getting into NBS’ prestigious Trainer Coaching Program, the place, she says, she steadily fell in love with educating. Staines joined the creative college of the college 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 the best way to make genuine systemic change that will endure,” Staines says.
Over time, Staines has thoughtfully but firmly shepherded institutional change to ballet coaching. Her initiatives via NBS embody 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 neighborhood applications to youngsters, adults, and other people with various wants. Networking internationally has been key, and Staines typically gathers with colleagues at occasions comparable to NBS’ Assemblée Internationale and the “Addressing Racialization in Ballet” symposium with the Dance Institute of Washington, to brainstorm and share concepts about the best way to evolve the dance schooling area.
Into retirement, Staines will proceed this work as a world ambassador for Canada’s Nationwide Ballet College. “That is actually significant now that I can select the best way to direct my time,” she says. “It’s a stunning method to preserve linking arms with leaders and rising artists and artists all over the world to steadily shift the dial in methods which are important for preserving ballet vibrant and alive into the longer term.”
