Dance school drops ballet from auditions

The Northern School of Contemporary Dance (NSCD) in Leeds has announced that it will no longer require candidates to perform ballet as part of their auditions, calling the artform “elitist”.

The school will still give ballet classes, but lessons will be made more inclusive, Head of Undergraduate Studies Francesca McCarthy said. 

The inclusion of the artform in auditions risked excluding students unable to afford private ballet lessons, she said.

She added that it also raised issues related to body, money, language and movement vocabulary and that the dance form had “strongly gendered roots” that posed problems in including trans and non-binary dancers.

NSCD is the UK’s only dance conservatoire outside London. It said that the new policy is intended to attract a more diverse pool of dancers including those who may not fit the “aesthetic ideal” of ballet, which is “built around particular white European ideas and body shapes”.