"Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer"
About this Quote
Bull’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to an industry that prides itself on control. Ballet training is famously totalizing: it colonizes schedules, diets, posture, even the way you think about pain. By placing “vulnerable” and “adolescence” up front, she reframes the studio not as a neutral place of improvement but as a developmental pressure cooker. The real subject isn’t technique; it’s identity formation under surveillance.
The syntax does a lot of moral work. “Never mind as a dancer” is the pivot: it demotes the art form’s usual hierarchy, where the dancer’s value is synonymous with output, and restores the primacy of personhood. In a culture where “discipline” is often code for obedience, “train the whole person” reads as a counter-program: teach body awareness without body policing, ambition without self-erasure, resilience without normalization of harm. It suggests that what looks like “professionalism” can be a sophisticated kind of grooming, especially when adults hold all the power and young people are desperate to belong.
Context matters here. Bull came up in an era when ballet’s aesthetic ideals were narrower and its pedagogical methods harsher; she also straddles the shift toward dancer welfare, psychological support, and broader debates about mental health in elite sport and the performing arts. The quote’s intent is pragmatic as much as ethical: a dancer with a stable self, a life outside the mirror, and language for boundaries is not just safer, but better equipped to sustain a career. It’s a call to stop confusing fragility with excellence.
The syntax does a lot of moral work. “Never mind as a dancer” is the pivot: it demotes the art form’s usual hierarchy, where the dancer’s value is synonymous with output, and restores the primacy of personhood. In a culture where “discipline” is often code for obedience, “train the whole person” reads as a counter-program: teach body awareness without body policing, ambition without self-erasure, resilience without normalization of harm. It suggests that what looks like “professionalism” can be a sophisticated kind of grooming, especially when adults hold all the power and young people are desperate to belong.
Context matters here. Bull came up in an era when ballet’s aesthetic ideals were narrower and its pedagogical methods harsher; she also straddles the shift toward dancer welfare, psychological support, and broader debates about mental health in elite sport and the performing arts. The quote’s intent is pragmatic as much as ethical: a dancer with a stable self, a life outside the mirror, and language for boundaries is not just safer, but better equipped to sustain a career. It’s a call to stop confusing fragility with excellence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Training & Practice |
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