Editorial, special issue: dancing, parenting and professional challenges

Welcome to this special issue presenting original research on the theme, Dancing, Parenting and Professional Challenges. I am grateful to my associate editor, Doug Risner and guest editor, Ali Duffy, and many peer reviewers who have generously given their time and astute insights, and especially to the contributing authors whose papers comprise this important special issue.

Theme-based special issues in Research in Dance Education seek to inform, improve and enhance the value and integrity of dance education research through engaging inquiry and critical examination as part of the journal’s mission to nurture, stimulate and promote research in dance education around the world. Since the journal’s inception in 2000, special issues have comprised numerous and timely topical themes including technology and dance (2008), creativity in dance (2009), best practice in dance making (2011), the life and legacy of Linda Rolfe, founding editor (2012), practising research in dance (2015), dance pedagogy in theory and practice (2016), dance futures (2017), dance and work (2019), intersectionalities and identities (2020), and dance, health and wellbeing (2022). All special issues are accessible in the journal archives on the Research in Dance Education website. The call for the next special issue ‘Leadership and Dance’ is out soon.

The collection of articles presented here illuminates the need for research and scholarship about dancing parents and reflects the growing interest in parenting and the importance of equity and quality of life for dancers, dance students, and dance educators with children and those contemplating starting a family. The articles reveal challenges and barriers that face dancing parents as they navigate the tensions between parenting and dancing. The special issue takes its focus on dance educators’ and dancers’ experiences of pregnancy and parenting when dancing, that require a myriad of professional, personal and highly individual choices that vary widely in terms of when and how dance professionals contemplate and navigate parenthood. Moreover, becoming a parent, whether planned or unplanned, may align with significant portions of parents’ dance careers. Contemplating when to have a child, foster a child, or adopt a child while navigating a dance career can produce numerous complexities for parents.

A growing body of literature examines the intersections of the dancing body, rapidly evolving parental roles, and discipline-specific hierarchies and practices that uphold or dismantle power and privilege across the dance field (Sanders 2008; Vincent Dance Theatre 2009; Duffy 2018; Musil, Schupp, and Risner 2022; Pickard and Ehnold-Danailov 2023). This special issue seeks to raise awareness to the ways in which historically and socially constructed inequities affect and reproductive challenges and the ways in which intersectional elements related to identity, opportunity, privilege, power, and authority play out in parents’ lives and career livelihoods. Within the scope of various dance sectors and settings, this special issue focuses on parenting experiences in dance: learning from parents, as parents, and working with parents, to better understand and enhance their lives.

Some of the primary factors contributing to parents’ experiences in dance include: timing of a pregnancy, fostering or adoption within the context of the fields of dance and dance education; undertaking parenting responsibilities within the frameworks of inflexible job requirements and promotion systems; making space for dance and family life to coexist; negotiating career, family expectations and roles throughout a child’s lifespan; and negotiating bodily changes occurring as a result of pregnancy or parenting in relation to the physicality and of learning and teaching dance. From a large mixed-method research study in the US on Dancing While Parenting While Dancing (n = 349), Pam Musil, Doug Risner, and Karen Schupp noted in their recent book, Dancing Across the Lifespan: Negotiating Age, Place and Purpose (2022):

For professionals operating in dance and dance education, in particular, issues related to the interconnected responsibilities of parenting and career remain especially tenuous, due in part to the exacting physical virtuosity required of dancers. The fact that work and employment may occur outside of ‘regular’ business hours, in addition to the intense focus and drive required to succeed in dance present exceptional challenges for those who dance and teach dance while parenting. (Musil et al., p.131)

With regard to dance educators and pregnancy, Ali Duffy has noted that:

The expectations to keep an active physical teaching load while pregnant and in the postpartum period has contributed to diastasis recti among other challenges … it is important to address this topic since most postsecondary dance faculty are women, and the bodily changes that come during and after pregnancy may affect women’s dancing bodies for the rest of their lives. (p. 37)

In addition, Duffy argues that the competition between a women’s clocks (both biological and in relation to tenure and promotion in a US context) often means that many women in faculty in postsecondary education wait longer than average – often after completing advanced degrees (PhD, EdD) and securing tenure – to have children.

Since the moving body is central to both the experiences of dancers and dance educators and their ability to engage artistically and pedagogically, parents in dance rely on innovative approaches to teaching, training, assessment, creative process, community engagement, and work-life integration. Therefore, this special issue seeks to address critical issues that pregnant people and parents face as related to perceptions and consequences of significant, sometimes unpredictable bodily changes, and the necessity for pedagogical adaptations and innovations during pregnancy and parenthood. To these ends, the call for papers for this special issue welcomed contributions that address any of the following themes and related topics:

• Challenges and opportunities for pregnant people and parents working in dance education;

• Perceptions and experiences of pregnancy and parents’ bodies in dance and dance education;

• Historically and culturally situated issues of inequity and marginalization of parents in dance;

• Organisational, institutional, and workplace policy, support and mentorship practices in dance as related to pregnancy and parenthood;

• Innovative approaches to negotiating dance pedagogy, teaching methods, and artistic practice during pregnancy and/or throughout parenthood.

By exploring lived experiences, emergent political, sociocultural, and workplace issues, and pedagogical adaptations and innovations, this special issue initiates expanded discussion about parents in dance and promotes ideas to positively impact dancing parents and their families, employers, institutions, communities, and the international dance field at large. This special issue provides new insights into historical, social, political, economic structures and/or educational policy, pedagogy and practice relating to dance broadly and the experience of pregnancy and/or parenthood more specifically. In addition, the articles presented here provide important avenues for integration into women’s and gender studies research, social sciences research, and/or dance science research and somatic practices for pregnant mothers, people with children including fathers and other carers. Moreover, the work of contributors to this special issue provides opportunities and vantage points for exploring inequities affecting pregnant people and dancing parents, as well as the impacts on physical and mental health, well-being, participation and belonging, opportunity, inclusion, community, and social engagement.

We open this special issue with Professional Contemporary Dancers Becoming Mothers: Navigating Disrupted Habitus and Identity Loss/Evolution in a UK Context by Editor in Chief of Research in Dance Education, Angela Pickard and co-author Anna Ehnold-Danailov. This article explores, through qualitative interviews of 30 contemporary dancer-mothers based in the UK, how female-identifying dancers navigate pregnancy and parenthood, often experience a coinciding sense of ‘disrupted habitus and embodied identity,’ The work uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to frame analysis of ‘rules of the game’ of the dance world and exclusions that are perpetuated, particular for female-identifying dancers.

The next article is Negotiating Dance Academic and Parenting: A Conversation Between Colleagues and Friends by Dana Milovanovic and Darby Wilde, is a collaboration of authors from Cyprus and the US. This article stages an autoethnographic, performative discussion between the two mother-dancer-scholars framed by a theoretical and literary structure, all of which unpack issues and complexities of motherhood in dance academia. Next, Rosemary Cisneros’s paper, Parenting, Roma Feminism and Dance: Charismatic Leadership Style at C-DaRE Facilitates An Egalitarian Dance-Research Environment, opens space for experiences of women in postsecondary dance who represent the Global Majority to be highlighted and examined. Importantly, Cisnero argues that leadership approaches and institutional frameworks for empowering parenthood in postsecondary environments are key to women’s advancement after motherhood.

Through analysis of 110 participant responses, Guest Editor, Ali Duffy’s article, Surfing the Raging Sea: Pregnancy and Motherhood in Dance During a Pandemic, highlights the challenges, inequities, and adaptations mothers in dance were faced with during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants’ words point to areas of positive benefit and of needed growth and change in dance industries and workplaces and reframe the ways we construct our ideas of motherhood and expectations of mothers. The final article: Dancing into Maternity: The Lived Experiences of Vietnamese Professional Dancers, by Anh Phan, examines the lived experience of eight Vietnamese women who intertwine professional dancing and teaching with motherhood in order to highlight little-known professional challenges of dancing mothers in Vietnam. Phan argues for greater awareness and public discussion of the challenges new mothers face as they return to dance following childbirth.

We are sure that you will find the research in this special issue on this important area are engaging. This work relates to wider discussions around inclusion for sustainability and longevity in the profession as a dancer/educator.