“I want to dance, to dance. Not to look a certain way.”
For an art form entirely dependent on the physical form, professional dance has a terrible habit of making its practitioners hate the skin they live in. The traditional dance sector’s fixation on a very narrow aesthetic is not news, but the sheer scale of the resulting psychological damage is finally being quantified.
The numbers may come as a surprise, even to those familiar with lives lived in reach of a studio barre. A recent consultation of 339 dancers aged 11 to 25, conducted by West Midlands social enterprise Hungry2Move, found that 80% have felt they “don’t look like a dancer.” Half report feeling actively insecure during class. These aren’t cases of standard performance anxiety; this is an industry-wide feature masquerading as an unfortunate side-effect.
The findings, alongside practical strategies for creating healthier training environments, were discussed at a dedicated event at Birmingham Hippodrome on Friday, 20th March. To understand the gravity of the research, I sat down with Hungry2Move founder Romy Ashmore-Hills and Laura Gwilt, a child and adolescent therapist at Swift Psychology who provided the vital clinical framework for the project.
A Post-University Reckoning
Ashmore-Hills did not set out to battle the dance establishment. The initiative was born of a post-university crisis chat with her friend Katie, a dance graduate recovering from an eating disorder triggered by training.
“When she was telling me this, I was seeing very significant parallels in the young people on the dance programs I was working behind the scenes on,” Ashmore-Hills explains. “I was just like, this can’t be a coincidence that it seems to be happening a lot, and then the longer I was in the dance industry for, I could see that it obviously was a common problem.”
She quickly realised the sector was ill-equipped to handle the fallout. Dance teachers, having survived the same rigorous training themselves, often carried similar unaddressed trauma. They just lacked the capacity and the vocabulary to support their students.
Gwilt, whose private practice frequently supports individuals from the arts, was brought on board to ensure the consultation was psychologically safe. Even with her clinical background in eating disorders, the severity of the findings was jarring.
“I want to dance, to dance. Not to look a certain way.”
Romy Ashmore-Hills
“I didn’t expect this sense of having to constantly monitor and measure…of individuals having their self-worth ingrained so very much in their appearance would be as prominent as it actually was,” Gwilt notes. “It took me by surprise as to how many of these young dancers are actually struggling with the difficulties that I see in a clinical setting all of the time.”
The Core Belief of the Studio
Dance is an observed medium. The rehearsal rooms are clad in mirrors, the feedback is relentless, and the praise is often entirely body-focused. Over time, this constant evaluation appears to be morphing into a crippling internal dialogue.
“From a clinical standpoint, where we see this emphasis on self-monitoring… it’s having that critical voice in your head all of the time,” says Gwilt. “Some of the messages that we’ve seen come out of the study, the one that always stands out to me is ‘I don’t look like a dancer’. Core beliefs don’t just come out of thin air. Core beliefs come from our parenting, they come from teachers, they come from wider societal messages.”
This cultural conditioning is not restricted to the studio. It is a reflection of a wider societal bias that equates thinness with discipline and fatness with failure. Gwilt points out how everyday interactions reinforce this damage.
“When a friend comes to you, and they complain about their body shape, they go, ‘oh I feel fat’, we immediately go, ‘no, no you’re not fat’ because we want to do the right helpful thing,” Gwilt observes. “But even that very small message sends the signal that being fat is bad… and it’s those societal messages that we have, in particular for women and young girls.”
Ashmore-Hills encountered this embedded bias firsthand during a creative writing workshop prior to the study. When an artist described a hypothetical dancer in a bigger body ‘jiggling’, the reaction from the young participants was universally dismissive.
“All the young people in the room laughed at the idea of a dancer in a big body jiggling,” she recalls. “They wouldn’t have thought that they were doing anything wrong… It was just a, ‘oh no, that’s ridiculous, we don’t see that in our spaces’. It’s those kinds of things that are so normalised and embedded.”
The Panorama Hangover
Following the BBC Panorama investigations into abusive practices at elite ballet schools, you might assume the doors would swing open for initiatives like Hungry2Move. The reality is a sector drawing the wagons in a circle. Securing funding from the Arts Council was only the first hurdle. Finding organisations willing to host the workshops proved far more difficult.
“We had higher up, big dance organisations telling us that we shouldn’t be tackling this subject because it’s too big and too serious a subject,” Ashmore-Hills says. “That it’s not our place to do that, but my argument to that is, who else is doing it? Who do you suggest is going to do it?”
Rather than acting as a catalyst for widespread reform, the public exposure of the industry’s darker elements often triggered a defensive crouch.
“People were saying like, ‘oh, it’s such a shame that that documentary has come out,’ and, ‘oh, like, actually, it’s a whole can of worms and you can’t just sort of open it and expect to fix it’,” Ashmore-Hills explains.
The fear of accountability hangs heavy over the industry. Organisations are terrified of uncovering problems they feel unequipped to solve.
“Because there’s been so much toxicity within the industry for so long that has just been accepted and completely normalised, that actually to uncover that, yeah, I think there are a lot of people that maybe do need to be held accountable,” she adds.
The Performance Myth
The standard defence for maintaining narrow aesthetic parameters is the preservation of artistic excellence. There is a deeply ingrained assumption that commercial viability and physical uniformity are inextricably linked.
“I feel like art forms have got one formula for something they know works, and audiences have seen it and seen it, and they know that it’s a winner and it sells tickets, great, we’re going to keep going with this one formula,” Ashmore-Hills says. “I think it’s about widening that, and allowing other options, other people, other collaborations, other dynamics.”
While companies are doing brilliant, progressive work, it remains resolutely siloed. The industry frequently attempts to solve its image problem with superficial casting, placing diverse bodies on stage without addressing the toxic culture operating behind the curtain. Gwilt identifies this as a critical failure.
“I always say you can have diversity without inclusivity, but you can’t have true inclusivity without that psychological safety in the room,” Gwilt warns. “The training rooms and the lecture theatres and the stages, they look very diverse on the surface, but the lived experience of individuals within these settings is very different.”
Furthermore, the argument that strict aesthetic policing produces better art fundamentally misunderstands the psychology of performance. Gwilt argues that hyper-fixation on the mirror actively degrades the very art it seeks to protect.
“The solution of the dance industry of being performance-led has actually become the problem,” Gwilt explains. “Dancers who are self-monitoring and constantly observing how they look don’t actually perform as well as individuals who can be in their body… knowing what you look like actually takes us away from that freedom and that creativity and that self-expression.”
Building Psychological Armour
Neither Ashmore-Hills nor Gwilt are demanding an overnight revolution or the immediate dismantling of the professional dance sector. They are lobbying for practical, sustainable changes to training cultures. Often, the barrier is not malice but a lack of confidence among educators.
“They don’t know how to talk to young people about how they feel about their bodies because it’s a bit awkward, they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, they don’t want to make it worse,” Ashmore-Hills observes.
To combat this, Hungry2Move is developing toolkits to equip teachers with the vocabulary and resources to handle these conversations safely. Simultaneously, there is an urgent need to help young dancers build resilience against a culture that will not transform overnight.
“A big part of that is helping young dancers in particular to understand their thoughts, particularly around body image, so that they’re not automatically taking in every single critical or comparative thought as a fact,” Gwilt advises. “I always say that actually we’re not our thoughts, we’re simply just the presence that observes those thoughts. So we also want to support them in developing a more flexible relationship with some of those thoughts so that they can stay focused on what they’re doing rather than getting caught up in how they look.”
The research advocates for several targeted interventions that studios and parents can implement immediately:
- Focusing on Function, Not Form: Praise what the body can do, not how it looks.
- Normalising Change: Remind young dancers that physical changes are natural and experienced differently by everyone.
- Encouraging Critical Media Literacy: Help young people actively question the media they consume, including online content and celebrity culture.
- Modelling Self-Kindness: Avoid negative self-talk around children and promote respect for all bodies.
- Promoting Joyful Movement: Help them explore non-competitive ways to stay active.
- Listening and Validating: Acknowledge young people’s feelings regarding their appearance without instantly dismissing them.
The Agitators’ Agenda
Gwilt points out that one of the most effective interventions requires no budget and no structural overhaul. It simply requires a change in vocabulary.
“Moving away from that body-focused feedback to focusing on technique, strength, expression, because again, language becomes an internal dialogue and that’s what stays with dancers long after they leave the studio,” she advises.
“I didn’t expect this sense of having to constantly monitor and measure…of individuals having their self-worth ingrained so very much in their appearance would be as prominent as it actually was…”
Laura Gwilt
Hungry2Move continues to expand its research, recently launching a collaboration with the University of Worcester to study the 18-to-25 demographic with rigorous academic backing. They know they are disrupting comfortable, established hierarchies, but they are unapologetic about their methodology.
“I feel like we’re the people just kind of poking from behind, going, ‘but, excuse me, we can make changes. What about this? You can. Look at this…” Ashmore-Hills laughs.
It is a necessary conversation, long overdue, pushing past the hand-wringing and offering concrete strategies. It is about demanding an environment where physical capability is prized over an arbitrary aesthetic, and where psychological safety is recognised as a prerequisite for great art. The goal is not to lower the standard of the discipline, but to make it survivable.
“It’s recognising that change happens gradually through small, consistent shifts in how we speak, how we train, how we think about bodies as a whole as a society,” Gwilt concludes. “We’re not done yet. Even small changes can make meaningful differences to how young people experience dance… It’s very small, meaningful changes that are going to chip down that wall rather than just bulldozing it down entirely.”
Featured Image: Dancers calling for change at Hungry2Move workshop – Images by Anthony Shintai
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