Who Is Educating the Dance Educators?

“If you're in dance, why didn't you study a dance degree?”

It is a reasonable question. After spending 28 years dancing, teaching and choreographing across 15 countries, pursuing a degree in dance might have appeared to be the natural next step. But by that point in my career, I wasn't looking for more knowledge of dance itself. I was looking for answers to problems I had been observing for years, particularly in how dancers were trained, how skills were developed, how physical demands were managed and how educators determined whether their methods were appropriate. I had already been incorporating scientific principles into my teaching, but I wanted a deeper understanding of the evidence behind them. Increasingly, I was finding that the questions I considered fundamental to responsible dancer development were not being answered in sufficient depth by the educational resources I was encountering within dance.