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For Francesca Harper, Artistic Director of Ailey II (the second company of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York), acknowledging and validating the traumatic lived experiences of her students was an important first step. ‘I couldn’t even imagine what they were going through,’ she says. ‘They were at the height of their training. To be given this opportunity and to not be able to train, perform and live this dream that they’ve been aspiring toward to for so long was very traumatic.’ Ailey II were on hiatus for 18 months. Over this time, teaching and learning completely stopped, leaving the students anxious about their future careers. 

Since taking up his post in 2022, Arthur has prioritised mental health and wellbeing of students and teachers alike, driven by his own training in psychotherapy. Working collaboratively across the RAD to develop new resources, a webinar was held earlier this year in partnership with Young Minds UK charity to support adults in understanding children and young people’s mental health in order to promote safe, supportive and positive outcomes. 

‘There’s a marked difference since the pandemic,’ says Joanne Ward. The Principal of the RAD Dance School has noticed a significant rise in anxiety in teachers and pupils alike. ‘It’s across the board,’ she adds. ‘From young pre-schoolers who spent the first couple of years of their lives in covid times so when they get into the studio there’s separation anxiety, right through to advanced level students.’ These changes add to the struggles young people face. ‘I get a lot of issues from eating disorders and self-harming,’ adds ballet teacher Ruth Henry. ‘I have to talk to safeguarding a lot more deeply than ever before.’

The RAD Dance School has robust processes in place. As soon as a concern is raised, teachers fill out forms, followed up by safeguarding officials. ‘In one term, I probably fill out three or four forms, which is quite a lot,’ says Henry. From there, safeguarding teams work with students to understand the issues and provide support. 

Contemporary dance teacher Laura Heywood has supported several students through this process. ‘I’m not in the safeguarding team but I do get feedback on what is happening with the student,’ she says. ‘We’re also asked if we want to continue being a support for that student if we can emotionally handle it.’ This process feels intuitive and supportive, she says, but there is an understanding across the RAD that more can be done. 

A clear starting point for Heywood is mental health first-aid training for teachers which ‘would be amazing for everyone because there’s only so much that you can individually take on without it starting to cause your own anxieties.’ The RAD teachers have become each other’s support systems, with added support from a safeguarding manager. From this space of care, they’ve been better equipped to care for the changes in their students.

For ballet teacher Raquel Ashton, this has meant reimagining her teaching approach. ‘I decided to train as a Heartmath coach, EFT/TFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques/Thought Field Therapy) therapist and meditation teacher to bring these modalities into the classroom,’ she says, and has already used some of the breathing techniques with students at another workplace. ‘Over several weeks I noticed a change in how they were thinking and feeling. They seemed more present in class, with sharper concentration skills and effective application of corrections. We reconnected with the emotions that inspired them to want to learn to dance and this brought joy and artistry into their work.’

‘Being open, expanding, evolving, and educating ourselves is a way to support and address the issues as they come,’ concludes Heywood. ‘As long as we evolve with the times.’

These questions are equally pressing for professional dancers. At Ailey II, new approaches to the teaching curriculum were needed to create dynamic environments that could adapt to the new realities of students and dancers unable to practise what they loved for over a year. ‘We brought in a wellbeing coach for a yoga and mindfulness series,’ Harper says. ‘We had students bring out their notebooks and journal so that they could also develop their own practices to provide outlets and create safety practices for themselves.’ 

For all their benefits, these approaches can be short-term or short-lived – and even harm as much as they heal. Mindfulness and psychiatric treatment, for example, can individualise mental illness, telling us the causes of suffering are inside, for us to silently examine in isolation, without pausing to examine how social determinants – such as low income, poor housing, adequate access to healthcare and political laws – negatively impact our wellbeing.

Over in Sweden, GöteborgsOperans Danskompani have buildt a robust programme focused on preventative measures of care. ‘The Sustainable Dancer’, created by Liselott Berg, the company’s administrative manager, has been operating since 2017 to ensure professional dancers can have long-lasting careers. Its holistic approach encompasses mindset, physicality, recovery and nutrition. 

‘It was difficult during the pandemic,’ Berg says. ‘We hold auditions for each work we do here, so pressure and stress are built-in factors. Even before the pandemic, we saw that we needed to make complementary resources [for mental health] and to offer support.’ The dancer Duncan C Schultz had joined GöteborgsOperans at the inception of the programme, and quickly saw its value and positive impact.

‘When we started, we had a physical trainer,’ he says. ‘I understand the importance of the physical aspect. But on the other side, mental health and emotional health of the body aren’t so often focused on in the dance world. So, throughout this process of building this programme, we have expanded that in the last years to include mental coaching and emotional support.’

The company worked closely with experienced coaches Tomas Enhager and Anna Wilson, who were able to compile unique profiles of dancers’ physical, mental and psychosocial health to offer tools dancers could use to discover things they needed to address or whether they needed someone to talk to. ‘There were people crying and it was very personal,’ Berg says. ‘I think it helped during the pandemic, to show that they weren’t alone.’

‘I did experience it myself,’ Schultz adds. ‘The question of “what is the importance of the artist when the art form can’t be shared?”’ Now that the company is again rehearsing and touring, the programme stands as an empowering tool to navigate difficult situations. ‘It was definitely a teaching experience of communication for us,’ Schultz adds. ‘To be able to speak the needs of the body, of the mind, to bond stronger as a group and be more supportive with no pressure if we need rest.’

This is fundamental to Harper’s vision of Ailey II, where all the dancers are supported to ‘be advocates for themselves and have that resilience. It’s not only being a dancer, but being humanitarian and vocal advocates.’ Ultimately, it’s about creating programmes, resources, and environments where dancers feel safe and, within that safety, using dance to creatively grow and be nourished. 

Isaac Ouro-Gnao is a Togolese-British multidisciplinary artist and freelance journalist.

Emily Nash is a Bristol-based illustrator and designer. emilynashillustration.com

The eco-system of social media sees the creation of thousands of apps each month. The iOS app store, for example, hosted over 31,000 app launches in February alone. The marketplace therefore includes competition for attention, maturation and integration into as many lives as possible. Formerly called Musical.ly, TikTok – an app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, that allows users to create and share short-form videos – shed its original title in 2018. Widening its proposition beyond lip-synced music and audio clips and ousting competitors like Instagram and Snapchat, it was the most downloaded form of a social media application in 2022. It now serves as a primary search server, entertainment hub and crutch for millions of global consumers.

In music, TikTok has significantly shifted the way in which promotional campaigns operate, particularly in western-facing climates. Songs such as Miguel’s Sure Thing, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and Say So by Doja Cat have seen a boost in sales or the emergence of a hit due to the platform’s challenge culture – where creators challenge followers to perform a particular song or dance, and which took off during the enforced isolation of pandemic lockdowns.

We also see a relationship between music and dance entrenching itself, reinforcing the age-old connection between the two mediums and embracing choreography in new ways. Haley Sharpe’s original routine to Say So helped make it a juggernaut success because of the viral dance compilations that followed and incorporated hers across early 2020. Singles by Megan Thee Stallion, Roddy Ricch and Cardi B met similar success, receiving dance challenges of their own. Hip-hop and pop, in particular, attract dance challenges that directly relate to the national (and international) chart-level success of singles.

Dance remains central to TikTok. In April, for example, a Sierra Leonean soldier shared a video balancing the joy of the art form with her duties in the military. Young children dancing to songs tend to trend also: Canadian media outlet Much Music recently shared a visual of an infant nailing a sporadic dance to Lil Uzi Vert’s Jersey club anthem Just Wanna Rock. The emotional pull of dance translates into escapism, as well as artists’ campaign rollouts.

TikTok is still in its relative infancy: it entices consumers through a myriad of ways and entry points that are only growing. From cooking, to travel vlogs or dance crazes, the use of the platform is so nuanced and specific that each and every ‘For You’ page completely varies in what it serves up to the individual. In this context, building a platform and consistent audience, not to mention striking a piece of content that might go viral, proves difficult. 

Members of the Royal Academy of Dance’s social team reiterate this message. Their steady 21,800 follower base on TikTok has taken nearly two years to nurture – and the team still don’t have a bonafide blueprint for nailing the tumultuous TikTok algorithm. Niamh Carey-Furness, Digital Communications Assistant at the RAD, outlines the difficulties in attempting to recreate the connection felt in their most viral TikTok, which depicts children looking through a window at older RAD dancers.

‘[The clip] was a complete accident,’ she says. ‘We posted it because we thought it was cute, but we never expected it to go so viral for us. Do we have an insight or strategy? We’re experimenting. We are trying to see what people want to see and to define the emotional hook, because that visual did a lot.’

Many brands are in a similarly grey area with their relationship with TikTok’s algorithm. Adidas’ TikTok account, for example, boasts over four million followers; one recent visual amassed 331.5k views but another posted shortly after it just 20.3k views. Brands vie for attention on the app, yet unlike more reliable sources of social marketing campaigns like Instagram or Facebook, TikTok still exists in a tricky domain.

Hannah Martin – member of Birmingham Royal Ballet, content creator and former medallist in the RAD’s Genée International Ballet Competition – has close to 5,000 followers on the platform. She concurs that the app is ‘difficult’ and says that when trying to garner a following her particular network relies more on Instagram.

Instagram is seen as the more stable of the two. We’d tend to use that platform more to build our network and source opportunities,’ she explains. TikTok, even with its expansion into longer video formats, still prioritises shorter-form content. Styles such as tango or ballet, which involve thematic story-telling and longer-form expression, must adapt to the shorter-form medium for a chance of a breakthrough. 

‘I personally struggle with the clickbait nature of the app. It’s often tricks or funny, short, relatable content – which I enjoy watching, but find harder to create, because I prefer longer-form creation,’ Martin explains. ‘With TikTok, you get only a snapshot and I think it can be unhealthy for dancers. You only get 10 seconds of a snapshot, but in reality, a ballet performance can be three hours long.’ 

There are also safety concerns around dance content. After attempting the Footloose trend last year, the actor Kyra Sedgwick went public about suffering a wrist injury, while back in 2020, a TikTok user named Allison documented popping her knee out after trying Cardi B’s WAP viral trend. Louise Molton, director of education and training at the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, has noted that repetition of dances without qualified feedback can develop bad practices. Keshia Dodd, the RAD’s Lead Social Media Officer, reveals that similar concerns govern how they use their own TikTok platform.

‘Each of our videos has to go to a team of professionals who advise whether a clip we want to post aligns with our practices and doesn’t promote bad technique,’ Dodd says. ‘There was one clip that I found beautiful, but we had to scrap it because it didn’t fall in line with what the team deemed appropriate.’ Whilst advocating for entertainment and freedom of expression, Dodd reiterates the responsibility she and her team carry.

As dance has become a leader across TikTok it has had to reckon with intersectional instances of controversy. Perhaps the biggest is around credit for particular dance moves. When the celebrated TikToker Addison Rae made a guest appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in 2021, she performed – uncredited – a number of dances, including those from popular creators including Mya Nicole Johnson, Chris Cotter and Dorien Scott. Fallon subsequently invited the creators to break down their dance moves and took accountability for his lack of effective curation. 

All too often minorities, and specifically Black creators are erased from the popular narrative: an issue that doesn’t just affect dance, but cultural production at large. A Black TikToker strike in America in 2021 protested the lack of credit. That same year JaQuel Knight, best known for his work with Beyoncé, founded Knight Choreography and Music Publishing to tackle the lack of knowledge in acquiring licenses for choreography and allow dancers to gain legal protection for their moves.

‘We have to get better at giving credit,’ Dodd notes. ‘It speaks to a wider issue of people not respecting creative careers, but it is getting better. We have to just keep pushing ahead and fighting this fight.’

TikTok’s dance culture can also have a wider impact. In March, five young Iranian women posted a video of themselves dancing the Calm Down challenge without head scarves, in defiance of Iran’s severe modesty laws. The clip went viral and the young dancers were reportedly arrested – yet their protest continues to circulate.

Nicolas-Tyrell Scott is a London-based music and cultural journalist writing for Pitchfork, GQ, The Face, Huck, Dazed and others.

Vincent Cecil is an illustrator and graphic novelist, currently working on his debut graphic novel/webcomic retelling of The Great Gatsby.

Running a dance company in Potskhishvili’s father’s era, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, remained a dangerous act of defiance. Potskhishvili recalls, ‘my father risked a lot to keep up in dance through the Soviet time. Even though Stalin was Georgian, the Soviets did not like any culture that was about Georgian nationalism. The adult company was censored by the communist party machine into the 1990s.’

Little Stars’ name, according to the company’s origin story, was inspired by dissident Soviet ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev’s comment at an early performance by the young company in New York, a few years before his death. ‘I want to thank Gelodi Potskhishvili and the team of the choreographers who have prepared these little stars so professionally,’ Nureyev is reported to have said. He was presenting emerging dancers at an event, Potskhishvili tells me, at which he was too frail to dance himself.

In the rehearsal room at Chavchavadze Avenue, the music strums into a crescendo of Georgian panpipes as dancers part like a supple wave and 12-year-old Marisha Loladze takes the stage. Loladze dances ‘jeyran’, a twirling female dance with febrile footwork, elegant outstretched arm positions and fluttering hands that combines classical ballet with hunting dance traditions from the southern Caucasus. It is said to call to mind the gazelle, the light-footed antelope native to southern Georgia; but also its hunters, who traditionally stalked it with spears. 

Loladze would like to join an adult company one day. Jeyran is her favourite dance, she tells me later. ‘It combines techniques from classical ballet and Georgian national dance with elements of the hunting ritual, resulting in a unique performance,’ she adds. ‘In Georgia we believe that you have to dance the jeyran very well to prove you are a good dancer and it suits my personality too. Sometimes my family and friends call me jeyran!’

Georgia lost territory to Russia during the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, when South Ossetia and Abkhazia ceded to Russian occupation, a fact that still rankles with many Georgians. In recent concert programmes, Little Stars have presented folk dances of these two ancient regions (Abkhazia is seen as the cradle of Christianity in Georgia, which took to the religion in the first century): the java hunting dance of South Ossetia and musera, a martial dance from Abkhazia. The company performs in regional traditional costumes in vivid colourways.

‘We [perform these dances] in the fervent hope that these territories will one day be returned to Georgia,’ Potskhishvili says of his decision to stage the dances as an ongoing gesture of political protest in the company’s programmes. ‘These territories are shown on ancient maps to be ours; and are ours in our hearts.’

Nine-year-old Kirile Oqrokvercxisvili fixes me with an enthusiastic smile as he springs forward on pointe. Oqrokvercxisvili is a favourite with Little Stars audiences: tiny and spry, but with the power of a dancer three times his age. He tells me that Little Stars is the ‘coolest troupe in the world,’ and particularly loves dancing a character called Mamber in the concert that Little Stars will tour from September. Mamber, he says, is a young boy with ‘a strong and fighting spirit, who [has] many adventures and finally regains the honour of his family.’ It’s a tale based, Potskhishvili tells me, on an old Georgian coming-of-age folk legend: ‘we need our folk stories now more than ever.’

Sally Howard writes for the Sunday Times and others, and is author of The Kama Sutra Diaries and The Home Stretch.

‘Instead of taking a few little hops, you can open your wings and really fly,’ says Monica Mason. ‘I compare it to the moment that the Royal Ballet moved into the remodelled Royal Opera House. We couldn’t believe that all that wonderful space was ours.’

The former artistic director of the Royal Ballet is talking with pleasure and pride about the new RAD building in Battersea, for which she has been a powerful advocate and keen fund-raiser. ‘The most important thing as a young dancer is to have enough space to move in and feel free to move in. If you’re always restricted by being in a room that’s too small, you’re always pulling back on your movements, containing something that should be blossoming. Dancers improve and their work is better when they can be bigger.’

The seven full-sized studios which win such plaudits are only part of the gleaming glory of the new RAD global headquarters. Perched on the busy York Road, a main thoroughfare through the borough of Wandsworth in south west London, the organisation’s 70,000 square feet of space on the ground floor of a multi-storey residential development, also boasts a 193-seat studio theatre, a state of the art archive, a library, expanded shop, lecture rooms and offices.

On the first floor, alongside more offices, there is the RAD’s global centre for examinations, complete with a special room to house the machine that prints all the certificates sent to every successful candidate. On the ground floor, there will be a cafe, open to the street and to any passer-by, and comfortable waiting areas for the hundreds of families whose children are taught at the RAD every week. Not to mention its full-time students in the teaching of dance.

This sleek and sophisticated development has been achieved at the relatively low cost of £19.5 million. The bulk of this was raised by a little creative thinking: the old RAD headquarters in Battersea Square was valued and given to the property developer Avanton in a building swop. That left just £3.5 million for the Academy to raise; as of April, just under £700,000 was outstanding.

The new building – and the deal, which was suggested by Wandsworth Council, who wanted to keep the Academy in the borough – is the last legacy of outgoing chief executive Luke Rittner, who retired in April after 23 years in charge. ‘I can leave thinking the RAD has got its new home. No-one can take it away,’ he says. ‘It’s a very tangible feeling of accomplishment, of achievement. It’s not just my achievement. It belongs to a huge number of people. But goodness, I feel good about it.’

There was no doubt in his mind that, despite the sentiment attached to the old headquarters, that the time had come for change. ‘We were absolutely bursting at the seams, and it was in dire need of updating,’ he explains. ‘We were increasingly at odds with the legislation on disabled access, for example. I kept being invited to the opening of new buildings – Elmhurst in Birmingham, the Scottish Ballet in Glasgow – and I realised that we were way, way behind.

‘Students would begin to look at the facilities and say this isn’t what they’d expect. So there was need for change on a whole number of fronts.’

The original idea was to update rather than move, but it quickly became obvious that this would be prohibitively expensive. So Rittner began to look at alternative sites. ‘It’s been a nine-year journey,’ he says. ‘I looked all over London; then this option came up and the project started about five and half years ago.’

Key to the success of the move is the contribution made by T-SA Architects and their founding director Takero Shimazaki, who took on the assignment knowing that he would be working within a space already conditioned by the building above it. All the concrete pillars that define the design, for example, are the weight-bearing part of the original development; this meant that the studios, with their sprung floors, and discrete air-conditioning and lighting, had to be placed under the gardens of the apartments, so there was no column in the centre of the space. Serendipitously, this has produced a light-well in one of the rooms that looks rather like an Anish Kapoor installation as it spreads a circle of light across the floor.

Shimazaki likes working in this way. ‘The exciting thing about adaptive working is that it is about fitting things into the framework that the developer has already laid down,’ he says. ‘You don’t impose your design. It is more about a dialogue with what you find on site.

‘We are already constrained in many ways and that’s much more interesting. The architecture industry is moving in the direction of adaptable re-use, sustainable economy of means, doing less. It makes me happy because it is about making the most of what we have, elevating what we have found.’

The results of that elevation are everywhere to be seen, from the moment you walk into the airy reception area that houses both the shop (complete with pointe shoe fitting area) and one of the largest studios. Shimazaki has kept the design simple, but welcoming, creating what he calls streets and plazas, indicated by warm, terracotta red tiles on the floor, where people can meet, chat and relax. ‘We didn’t want it to feel like lots of corridors with rooms next to them,’ he explains. ‘We wanted to turn these open spaces into something.’

In a similar way, Shimazaki found a balance between contemporary minimalism and the history of the RAD. The portraits of the past – of founders Adeline Genée and Tamara Karsavina – sit comfortably alongside the sleek, modern lines of the walls and lighting. Everything about the building says dance, but it also makes dance seem contemporary and accessible to the community who will come into the building for dance classes, for old and young, and will use the facilities for their own activities.

‘We put together a pretty detailed brief,’ says Rittner. ‘But it has been a real collaboration. It has been a real joy working with Takero. We haven’t had a single row.’ Shimazaki smiles, then adds: ‘It was very creative in that sense. Every time a problem occurred we’d discuss how to go about solving it.’

Rittner sees the new building as marking a sea change in terms of the future. ‘Obviously the building is all about a physical change, but I think that physical change will demonstrate itself in psychological ways as well. We’re no longer a little old building tucked away in a courtyard, we are right out there with huge letters above our door, making a very strong statement about our presence and our existence.’ Mason agrees. ‘I think for people coming from abroad and outside London this beautiful space makes people understand that the RAD is important. Buildings can impress.’

In deciding to support the fund-raising for the building through the Linbury Trust, Anya Sainsbury was backing that sense of both psychological and physical expansion. ‘I felt the RAD was growing and that their ideas were broader,’ she says. ‘It’s not just about space, but what they are going to do with that space. I knew about some of the things they were adding to help young people and older people to dance. At the new building they are going to really stretch out and give opportunities, particularly to the poorer kids in the borough. So many things can happen when opportunities are provided. I like that open feeling they have.’

The RAD has opened itself to many activities within its walls: there is the Wolfson Library, funded by a £375,000 grant by the Wolfson Foundation in recognition of ‘the Academy’s long tradition of excellence in dance education’; then there are the dance teacher training courses, with their full-time students, and then the board for the examinations around the world. 

But there are also 900 young people coming into the building each week for a weekly dance class, and activities such as adult dance lessons and the Silver Swans for older learners. These activities are only likely to expand, as more people discover what is on offer.

Mason loves the way that as soon as you walk into the building, there is a glass viewing area into the first studio, which also has a window that can be open to the street, so that passers-by can see what is going on. ‘You can see dance happening,’ she says. ‘So many people don’t know about dance because they have never had the opportunity. Now people can come in, visit the café, look in the windows, see dance from the top of a bus – anything that stimulates them to ask questions about what goes on in this building. And to realise that their children could very easily be part of something going on there.

‘Darcey Bussell [the RAD’s President] talks all the time about how wonderful it would be if everybody in the world had a chance to dance. I think we should aim as high as we can to give everybody a taste of it.’

She pauses for a moment, then adds: ‘Margot Fonteyn was famous for saying that it’s not the building that matters but what goes on inside the building. But what will go on in this building now will grow and grow, and in ten years we will suddenly wonder how we ever fitted into the old place. It’s a triumph in every way.’

Georgina Lawton is the author of Raceless and Black Girls Take World. She also writes for the Guardian and others.

Ellis van der Does is a Dutch illustrator and designer based in London. ellisvanderdoes.com