Ballet Ireland in Conversation with Anne Maher (Artistic Director)

This fortnight, the studios at DanceHouse are full. Students from across Ireland and beyond have given up an entire week or two of their summer to take ballet class, learn repertoire, and be corrected, repeatedly, in front of a mirror. Somewhere, a parent is surely quietly wondering whether ballet is worth the hours it takes, and whether the time might be better spent on practical study and schoolwork.

Anne Maher would like a word.

There is still an assumption about dancers that because so many leave formal education early to pursue professional training, they must not be particularly bright. Having spent nearly three decades as co-founder and Artistic Director of Ballet Ireland, and as a former professional dancer herself, Anne has spent a career watching that assumption get it exactly backwards.

“To be successful in this industry, you have to be very intelligent,” she says. “And the intelligence dancers develop happens to be precisely the kind employers everywhere say they cannot find.”

 

WHAT PROFESSIONAL BALLET ACTUALLY DEMANDS

 

“A dancer in a corps de ballet must hold their own line while remaining absolutely aware of the other bodies moving around them. They must listen to the music, count, breathe, perform, and adjust in real time when something goes wrong, because on a live stage something inevitably will. I have danced open-air performances in Italy with insects sticking to my skin and the evening dew making the stage slick underfoot, and the audience never knew. That is not merely toughness. That is the ability to process an enormous amount of information under pressure, and deliver anyway.”

Then consider what the training demands. Nobody is making a dancer do any of it. A dancer learns to push through morning class, through injury management, through rejection, through the ten-thousandth repetition of a step that will last four seconds on stage. “By the time they reach a professional company,” Anne says, “their self-motivation and initiative is ingrained into their mental operating system.”

It is difficult to find people who are superb at working within a team and equally capable of working entirely alone. Most modern workplaces struggle to find either. Dancers arrive with both.

And the list goes on. Dancers tour from a young age and often speak several languages. They understand hierarchy, and how to take correction and direction without ego. They know how to get the job done, because a performance cannot wait for a committee. They have discipline, coordination, spatial awareness, and an intimate understanding of deadlines. (The curtain rises each night whether you are ready or not.)

 

WHAT BALLET TRAINING TEACHERS A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD

 

None of this arrives fully formed with a professional contract. It is built slowly, in rooms exactly like the ones at DanceHouse this fortnight.

Watch a class. A student is given a combination once, at speed, and is expected to retain it. They must reproduce it musically, in a room full of other people, while a teacher corrects a detail of their shoulder that has nothing to do with the steps they are still trying to remember. They will get it wrong. They will be corrected in front of their peers. They will do it again immediately.

Strip away the tights and the mirrors and describe what is happening in that room: a fourteen-year-old is learning to absorb complex information quickly, receive critical feedback without collapsing, hold their own position while tracking twenty other people, and try again seconds after failing in public.

There is no module for that. There is no way to teach it in a lecture hall, because it cannot be explained, only practised. It is learned rigorously, in the studio, and it transfers to absolutely everything.

 

ALONGSIDE SCHOOL, NOT INSTEAD OF IT

 

This is worth saying plainly, because it is often heard the wrong way round. The argument is not that the studio replaces the classroom. Most of the students at the Intensive this fortnight will sit their Leaving Cert, and the great majority will build careers outside dance. That is exactly the point.

What the studio offers is a set of capacities the classroom is not designed to build. Headlines abound with employers saying graduates arrive well educated and underprepared for working life: unable to collaborate, unable to self-direct, unable to persist. Those three things are precisely what a dancer spends their life practising. A student who trains seriously is not taking time away from their education. They are getting a second one, running in parallel, in the subjects nobody examines.

 

WHERE DANCERS GO AFTER PERFORMING

 

“I think about this often when our dancers move on from performing, as I did and as every dancer must eventually,” Anne says. “These former dancers go on to thrive in medicine, business, teaching, technology, production. They are, in my experience, some of the most employable people you will ever meet, precisely because of their unconventional education.”

So the next time someone tells you they trained as a dancer, resist the old assumption. You are most likely talking to one of the most disciplined, adaptable and quietly intelligent people in the room.

And if you have a young dancer at home, currently spending their summer being corrected in a mirror: the hours are not a distraction from their education. They are part of it.

 

TRAIN WITH US EACH SUMMER

 

Ballet Ireland’s Summer Intensive runs each summer at DanceHouse Dublin, offering professional-standard classical training to students from across the island. Details of next year’s programme will be announced on our website and social channels in the coming months.

Anne Maher is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Ballet Ireland, Ireland’s national ballet company.