Via Arts and Letters Daily is this article about how political correctness is undermining the quality of ballet in Britian. (As an interesting sidenote, the article is the result of an interview with a gentleman participating in a roundtable for Battle of Ideas at the end of October.)

Dance instructor turned critic Jeffrey Taylor attributes the decline to taboos about touching dance students and subjecting them to rigorous training regimines the teachers themselves experienced.

“Taylor is horrified. ‘Touching is essential! The classical ballet technique is one of the most unnatural physical regimes ever invented by man…Children cannot be coaxed into these positions by words alone: they have to be shown. There is no way a child can understand how you straighten out your lumbar region, how you tuck your hips underneath you.�”

“Another of Taylor’s laments is the non-judgemental current creeping into ballet. Just as touching is now banned, so too are the physically punishing regimes that were once the mainstay of ballet training. ‘Today it’s almost official: you never tell a child what to do unless they are willing to do it.’ This just doesn’t work. There comes a point [in ballet] when you have got to do as you are told, whether you understand or approve.”

I haven’t heard of too many similar cases in the US, but then I am not in the dance world. One thing I do know is that the concerns about inappropriate touching, while protecting the teacher, can tend to confuse the students.

One of the dance teachers on campus is careful to ask if she can touch a student before making contact to correct a posture. It turns out that some of the students find this creepy. A rank your professor website had a few comments about the professor’s sexual hang-ups based specifically on the fact she poses the question.

I am interested to find out how prevalent this is in the US. I think I will drop a note to Doug Fox over at Great Dance and see if he would be willing to address this either in a response or on his blog.

I am also going to ask some acting teachers I know if this sort of thing has become a bigger concern of late. There isn’t as much touching necessary when teaching acting as with dance. I wonder though if David Mamet’s works are banned from the scene list for fear of offending other students.