Why Dance Matters

Phil Chan is a dancer, arts advocate and activist born in Hong Kong and now based in New York. With Georgina Pazcogin of New York City Ballet, he co-founded Final Bow For Yellowface in 2017. Provoked by stereotypes of Asian characters and culture in classic ballets – mostly notably in The Nutcracker – their campaign has already had impact in the US and beyond, offering resources for companies stri...

Dance, and especially ballet, can sometimes seem remote from people’s lives. How do you bolt it into the heart of a community? The answer often lies with an RAD Teacher. In this case, Victoria Treviño, who teaches in Mexico City, has used ballet to change the lives of young people facing very challenging circumstances. After the ballet school she taught at was suddenly and unexpectedly forced to s...

The choreographer Cathy Marston has a rare gift for telling stories in dance. Now a major player in leading ballet companies (including The Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre) that until recently were a boys’ own club, her starting point is often literature or history – in ballets about Jane Eyre or Lolita, Queen Victoria or Jacqueline du Pré. One chapter in the Oxford Han...

Gurinder Chadha doesn’t make dance films or musicals – but with the slightest nudge, films like  Bend It Like Beckham ,  Bride and Prejudice  and  Blinded by the Light  could easily become full-blown song-and-dance spectaculars. On  Why Dance Matters , Gurinder describes how dance formed her own British-Asian identity – from kathak classes to daytimers – and how she e...

Xander Parish tells a story of snatching triumph from the jaws of frustration. After a great start – winning a silver medal in the RAD’s Genée International Ballet Competition (now named The Fonteyn) and joining The Royal Ballet – his career seemed to be going nowhere. Then a coach from St Petersburg visited London, saw Xander’s passion to prove himself, and snapped him up for the Mariinsky Ballet...

Why Dance Matters is a series of conversations with extraordinary people from the world of dance and beyond. It traces the impact of dance on their lives and asks why dance matters to them – and why it might matter to us all. The RAD inspires the world to dance, and we hope these insightful personal conversations – hosted by David Jays, editor of Dance Gazette, the RAD magazine – will delight and...