When Etta Murfitt’s mother died of ovarian cancer in 2005, her father, Dennis, moved into her family home, along with her husband, Petrus and daughter Isobel. ‘It was great,’ Murfitt says, ‘because my daughter was eight and Dad was a very fit 80 year-old. He’d pick her up from school and cook dinner.’ Murfitt, who is Associate Artistic Director of New Adventures and a dancer and choreographer with a career spanning more than 40 years, refers to him as ‘Isobel’s carer for a good four years,’ adding, ‘he was amazing. There’s something wonderful about a young person talking to a really old person about their experiences, having funny political debates and finding out what life was like.’

Then, when her father was around 88, things started to shift. Dennis contracted a urine infection and serious dehydration and hallucinations followed. Murfitt found her father at home in a ‘sort of trance’. He spent six weeks in hospital, also contracting pneumonia. ‘It all sort of escalated from there,’ Murfitt says. In hospital, Dennis became more confused; when he came home, Murfitt struggled to secure a care package from her local council. 

Then her father had another fall. In hospital again, doctors found that Dennis had suffered several mini strokes. Once again he contracted pneumonia in hospital; once again she found it difficult to secure care. Increasingly fragile, Dennis could barely be left alone. The uncertainty began to take its toll on Murfitt’s family life – and her work. She has collaborated on many of Matthew Bourne’s celebrated New Adventures productions. ‘I’d be away for four nights working on a show, constantly worried about what was going to happen.’ Dennis had bonded well with one carer during his last hospital stint, and Murfitt asked her to care for him five days a week. ‘My dad was quite dapper: clean shirt, clean shave. But he would never let me help him with anything like that, so this carer was great.’

Just when Murfitt’s family routine seemed to stabilise somewhat, her husband Petrus, who taught at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, died suddenly of a heart attack in 2014. ‘That threw everything up in the air again. My carer had her own family situation so couldn’t look after my Dad, and we were all grieving. My dad especially, felt as if the loss of Petrus was catastrophic. He kept saying, “it should have been me.”’ Murfitt recalls that her anxiety was through the roof: ‘I was desperate. An amazing woman, who was in a senior position at the council, came to the house. She saw how I was barely functioning. Thankfully she arranged more care.’

Dance can be an unsparing career, whether performing, teaching or studying. It demands long hours and dedicated regular practice – but these can be difficult to balance with an equally demanding home life. Murfitt is honest about how both grieving for a tragic loss and working in the arts impacted her ability to source proper assistance. ‘It is so difficult to know what to ask for,’ she says. ‘I work for a dance company and I was away all the time so the level of care I needed wasn’t really predictable. They’d ask “you need care overnight?” And I’d say no, just one or two nights this week, then nothing next week. People didn’t get it.’

Penny Cotton, Head of Global Membership Services at the RAD, notes that the RAD is particularly attuned to these pressures for dance teachers and students who are also carers, and have put in a number of measures to support them. ‘We launched the requirement to participate in Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in 2013 and felt it was important to recognise that registered teachers have commitments outside of their dance teaching careers. CPD activities can be accessed in-person or online, ensuring teachers from all over the world have the opportunity to connect with their fellow teachers,’ she notes. 

For teachers who have onerous caring duties, Cotton explains they can apply for full and part exemptions each CPD year. There’s also a Teachers’ Hardship Fund, introduced in 2016, to support teachers financially with their annual membership subscription, and the RAD Teacher category, for professionals who may need to take a break from dance teaching, but want to stay connected to the RAD, as well as the Wellbeing Toolkit for teachers and students, which provides mental and physical health resources.

‘I have never wanted to be seen as a carer,’ says Deborah Preece-Brocksom, an RAD teacher and co-director of the Dance Centre, Peregian Springs in Queensland, Australia. ‘What I do just seems like family to me.’ Caring is nonetheless what she has done – for her friends and mentors Jacqueline (known to all as Jonnie) and Jack Floyd, former stars of the variety stage. 

‘Jack and Jonnie were known in the dance world as Floyd and B’Nay,’ Preece-Brocksom explains. ‘They danced in the first television broadcast from Crystal Palace and danced in a Royal Command performance where the king remarked “this is the second time I’ve seen you two dance this week!” – he had also seen them in a West End show. They were very prominent in the RAD organisation of Australia, and when my husband Richard and I came to Australia they saw a newspaper article about us and asked us to dinner. From there an extraordinary friendship blossomed, that turned into a family.’

Like Preece-Brockman, Floyd and B’Nay were British born. ‘Although decades apart, we had almost the same British RAD upbringing,’ she recalls, ‘and as dancers we had so much in common as we had danced in so many of the same theatres, even remembering the same awful dressing rooms!’ They began meeting for lunch every Sunday – Preece-Brockman relished their stories of performing with Judy Garland and Michael Jackson, and ‘they helped me tremendously with running a dance school incorporating the RAD system.’

As the years passed, the weekly visits increased, to give the couple the extra help they needed. They had no children and ‘a strong love between us all had grown and flourished, the passion for dance and dance teaching being the bond that tied us together,’ says Preece-Brockman. ‘When the time came that they needed serious help,’ says, ‘a small cottage/unit was built where our vegetable plot used to be in our side garden as Jack said he needed more space to tap dance!’ Soon ‘caring just seemed to be part of daily life.’