Followers of Royal Ballet principal Lauren Cuthbertson cheer enthusiastically for her Juliet, Manon and Sugar Plum Fairy. But they are even more excited about her latest role, as mum to baby Peggy — born in December 2020 and already a real hit on Instagram. Cuthbertson is one of the many dancers at the Royal Ballet in London who are about to give or have recently given birth, in a well-timed lockdown baby boom.
It’s a long way from the early days of the company, when founder Ninette de Valois set the tone. “‘You’re pregnant, darling, goodbye!’ That’s how it was,” says Jeanetta Laurence, a dancer in its touring company in the 1960s and 1970s. Even now, she says: “It’s hard to think of another industry where having a baby is so intrusive to the work. I’m in awe and wonder at how they manage it.”
Juggling work and parenting is hard in any career, but the demanding hours, unpredictable working patterns and often poor pay, on top of the physical impact, mean dancing parents have challenges. Alongside all the happy baby news at the Royal, five female dancers took voluntary redundancy, almost all of them mothers to young children. “Read into that what you like,” laughs Elizabeth Harrod, former soloist and mother of three, and one of those who left.
Constant pressures
For Harrod, it’s a positive decision. “There’s no question it’s the best thing for us as a family,” she says, “but ultimately it came about from the constant pressures of juggling babies and the job. I could have six shows in one week, coming home at midnight. It makes for long days, especially when you have children that don’t sleep. You come home and you’re up every hour or two. Then you do it all again.”
She and her husband, principal dancer Steven McRae, hired a live-in nanny, a luxury Harrod admits not everyone can afford. “We made it work,” she says, “but third time around, I realized the personal compromises to myself, in terms of missing time with my children, and the toll it takes, the physical aspect of the job, I had reached my limit.”
The physical effects of pregnancy are one thing, smiling and dancing through the nausea. (Harrod stopped performing early in her first pregnancy but carried on to five months — with forgiving costumes — in the second.) Then there’s the hormone relaxin, which relaxes ligaments in preparation for birth.“I remember doing Les Patineurs and thinking, I have absolutely no sensation of control over my limbs.” But getting back to work is harder. “There’s the sense with this job that you’ve had a baby and you’ll re-appear at work with a six-pack and your pointe shoes on,” Harrod says. In this respect, a culture change is needed and something that the Royal’s healthcare director Shane Kelly says he’s actively dealing with.
Back in the studio
Harrod felt supported by her company, whereas most dancers are freelancers, with no structure to rely on. New York dancer and choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith says that the birth of her child in 2019 brought many surprises. “Thinking my body was going to bounce back, for one,” she says. The birth ended with an emergency caesarean. Nevertheless, Smith was back in the studio after six weeks. “I didn’t anticipate needing to recover from that and I still don’t feel ‘back’. Those muscles have been cut and I feel like that’s where I’ve always danced from. Now it’s finding a new place to dance from. Should I have rested, should I have waited? I’ll never know.”
There’s a psychological impact, too. “After my son was born in 2011, it blew my identity apart,” says London-based dance artist Temitope Ajose-Cutting. “I think it was almost two years before I got my head above water. With my daughter, it was four months, and I was back in the studio, but the first one, it just blew me away. Who am I? What does my body mean now? Where is security?” The conceptual ideas she explored through her work suddenly felt trivially abstract. “I’m going to go into this dingy studio and begin to explore the meaning of life via my elbows?” Now, though, Ajose-Cutting makes time to be an artist and mother, and works with “no faffing about,” she says. “Focus and direction can definitely come, but you’ve got to laugh at the huge amount of chaos, too.” Bobbi Jene Smith has also felt the effect on her creativity, not being able to get “into the dream zone” for long enough without being interrupted. “But I also think it makes me want to say more, to speak more clearly, because time is precious,” she says.
Childcare arrangements
Smith and Ajose-Cutting have both relied on informal childcare arrangements. When Ajose-Cutting worked with the Protein dance company, her daughter was welcomed into rehearsals and crawled around the studio. Kate Prince, artistic director of dance company ZooNation, was back to work soon after having her daughter. “At three months, she was asleep on my desk in the rehearsal room; at six months, she was strapped to my front while I taught.” Prince set up a crèche next to the rehearsal room and, between her mum, mother-in-law, husband and three friends, their schedule covered six days a week.
As the boss, Prince gets to set the terms, but choreographing for others can be more complicated. “I’ve encountered very different attitudes to the fact that I’m a parent and I want to make being a parent a priority,” she says, but she raves about choreographing the musical Everybody’s Talking about Jamie with director Jonathan Butterell.
Prince had worked on musicals before, when she was expected to be available 24/7. “So, I pretty much did everything I could to persuade him not to hire me,” she says. “But he kept coming back and saying, ‘Well, what would it take?’” Prince’s arrangement with Butterell meant her working three days a week. “His attitude was that work’s important, but family’s more important,” she says. “I was offered another musical not long after that. I said, ‘I want to let you know I’m a parent, I’ve just done this job and this is how we made it work, would you be open to those kind of flexible hours?’ I was taken out of the running straightaway.”
It’s even more difficult for performers, artistic director Prince admits. The idea of a West End crèche for performers’ children has long been floated, but when you get into the details, it’s not very practical, says Anna Ehnold-Danailov, from Parents & Carers in Performing Arts (PiPA). The charity encourages companies to ring-fence a budget for childcare on every production, from babysitters at auditions to nannies on tour. Just as important is being open to flexible working, job shares, delayed start times and early finishes.
And fixing schedules well in advance, says dance artist Temitope Ajose-Cutting. She says: “I’ve had many a rehearsal where I’ve gone, ‘Oh, it’s that week?’, nodding along and internally having the largest meltdown of my life because it means reorganizing at least six different people.”
Children on tour
Some dancers take their children on tour with them. New Adventures dance company, founded by choreographer Sir Matthew Christopher Bourne OBE, tours for nine months at a time, and they’ve had a couple in the company take their baby and a nanny with them. Similarly, London-based Israeli choreographer, dancer and composer Hofesh Shechter took his children on tour when they were young. His company has a “children on tour” policy, covering the expenses of bringing a carer and providing family rooms. This kind of policy makes dancers’ return to this line of work more feasible. Shechter’s executive producer, Colette Hansford, says, “In our company I haven’t met a dancer yet that didn’t want to get back on the stage. We know with dancers how instrumental they are to the work that you produce. We can’t lose those creative and wonderful minds.”
A recent PiPA survey found that, with the impact of Covid, seven out of ten respondents were considering leaving working in the performing arts. Ehnold-Danailov is concerned about the consequences for diversity and gender equality, and how that would impact leadership in an industry where there are few female directors and choreographers at the top level.
“There’s this myth that artists sell their soul to their art and there’s nothing more,” says Elizabeth Harrod. “That’s not true. People do have families, or even other interests. Flexible working isn’t straightforward, of course, but it is possible.” Harrod admits “not wanting to rock the boat by opening my mouth” in the past. But looking back, she says, “It’s up to us to start making those changes.”
© Guardian News & Media 2021