Britain’s Northern School of Contemporary Dance (NSCD) because it is “built around white European ideas” and is too “gendered”.
The school has dropped ballet from its auditions process because of its “potentially contentious nature”, according to The Telegraph.
“It is essentially an elitist form. Young people need to pay to take ballet classes as a general rule and for a vast number of potential students, they’ve not had access to ballet,” explained the head of undergraduate studies at the dance school, Francesca McCarthy, in comments to the notionally right-leaning newspaper.
“It is a very specific form that is built around particular white European ideas and body shapes that are often alienating to young people who do not fit that aesthetic ideal,” she asserted.
“There are issues relating to body, money, language and movement vocabulary.”
McCarthy also complained that ballet “has strongly gendered roots in terms of the movement vocabulary,” referencing the fact that “most of [the NSCD’s] ballet staff were trained at a time where divisions in the teaching of ballet were clear and men lifted women.”
She conceded that over time there was “a shift”, but insisted that the status quo is “still problematic in relation to [the] inclusion of non-binary and trans dancers.”
Gendered language in ballet is also supposed to be an issue, with The Telegraph noting concerns about the fact that there is a clear division between female ballerinas and male danseurs in ballet.
Implicit gender roles and gendered language is evidently a matter of great concern to the NSCD, with McCarthy saying that the use of gender-neutral terms like “dancers/people/folk/everyone/everybody” are encouraged and efforts made to “try and embed the use of they in terms of pronouns in order to not make assumptions about a dancer’s identity”.
Woke language policing like this is endemic in British educational institutions, with Breitbart London reporting just days ago on the far from unique case of the University of Bristol banning “gendered” and “age-related” terms that could cause offence, such as “mankind” and “baby boomer”.
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