Parenting, Roma feminism, and dance: cultivating an egalitarian dance-research environment

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the working relationship between the director of an HE institute in the UK, and an artist-researcher navigating the higher education dance working environment and motherhood. The paper draws on personal experiences, sections labelled vignettes that highlight a tension faced by the individual and reflects on how the director of a HE institution in the UK facilitated egalitarian work environments through her charismatic leadership style. Such leadership from a senior female colleague allowed me to live out my Romani feminism and encouraged an inclusive work culture within higher education and the dance sector.

KEYWORDS:

• Motherhood
• dance
• charismatic leadership
• feminism
• Roma

Introduction

Starting from the idea that parenthood in dance encompasses a broad spectrum of experiences and is expanding and discussed critically through research projects and scholarly inquiries, there is still a gap in understanding of where the tensions lie and which leadership styles encourage women in dance to continue their careers, progress, develop into senior leaders and hold high-level positions in the dance sector post baby. Since there is limited scholarship around parenthood and dance, there is a significant lack of understanding on how women from the Global Majority¹ community navigate dance spaces as a parent. This perspective from a global and diverse community of dance researchers, dancers and practitioners should be examined as we know that institutional frameworks exclude the Global Majority from mainstream spaces (Ahmed 2012). Ignoring one’s positions and hierarchies impedes change therefore, to facilitate political and human agency and allow for situated knowledges (Haraway 1988a) to emerge Dialogic feminism (Puigvert 2001) has the potential to challenge dominant canons and in this context, helps interrogate parenthood within dance. Through egalitarian modes of working, counternarratives develop and embodied stories and multiple voices are respected and encouraged to surface. This paper draws on Puigvert’s (2001) concept of the other women, women often excluded and subjugated who sit outside mainstream spaces, and explores how an artist-researcher was supported to live out her Romani feminism and disrupt cycles of inequalities. This paper leans into feminist discourse to reflect on personal stories and located knowledges and postulates that through a leadership style that is built on empathy and charismatic leadership (Conger & Kanungo, 1988) principles, dialogic conversations are held and egalitarian spaces are constructed that could benefit women in Higher Education (HE) and the dance sector.

This paper will discuss how the director of a HE research centre in the UK, created a dialogic space for female dancers and researchers to live out their motherhood on their terms. I will draw on personal experiences, sections labelled vignettes that highlight a problem or tension and expand on the support offered. These four vignettes will make a case that through a leadership style that facilitates egalitarian work environments, I was supported to honour my Roma cultural traditions to exclusively breastfeed and be with my child for the first two years of their life while working full time. Having this backing from a female senior leader allowed me to live out my Romani feminism and encouraged an inclusive work culture within HE and the dance sector. The next part of this article will frame who the Roma community are within Europe, briefly discuss Roma feminism and the importance of family structures within the community.

Roma feminism

The Roma population is among the most vulnerable population ethnic minority group in Europe, and still confronts situations of social exclusion, denial of resources, human rights abuses and limited access to services (Powell and Lever 2017). This reality is a consequence of multiple burdens of social discrimination for their ethnicity, for their socioeconomic status and, in some cases, for their migrant background. Members of the Roma community are still suffering negative consequences translated into low expectations in their educational careers which reduces the opportunities for social inclusion (European Economic and Social Committee 2018). Moreover, the situation of Roma women is especially vulnerable because the gender factor of discrimination is added to the previously mentioned (Aiello, Puigvert, and Schubert 2018) and through this complex and multi-dimensional reality, Roma women are often found in situations of poverty, unemployment, and involuntary migration. Roma sociologist and feminist Angéla Kóczé, has claimed that Roma women suffer varying degrees of oppression and this locates the Roma into a multidimensional social order (Kóczé 2022). This social structure is complex, and expanding fully on the social reality of Roma women is outside of the scope of this paper. Yet, for this writing, highlighting that Roma women face intersectional discrimination that affects several aspects of the Roma woman’s reality including how they engage in the workforce, is essential.

To help understand the scope of discrimination faced by women from the Roma community, social scientists and feminists have drawn on Dialogic Feminism (DF), a sociological theory developed by Lidia Puigvert in 2001 and further advanced by Romani feminists (Beck-Gernsheim and Beck 2001; De Botton, Puigvert, and Sánchez-Aroca 2005). DF relies on scientific information and data collection processes that are inclusive of those individuals with lived experiences that are often excluded from academic spaces. DF invites participants and researchers, through dialogue, to build a collective knowledge that promotes relationships based on solidarity, and favours healthy relationships that are egalitarian (Ruiz-Eugenio et al. 2020). DF was developed by a group of feminists who saw a disconnect between those within the Academy and those ‘other women’ (Puigvert 2001). The concept has gone on to inform Romani feminism as the theory facilitates Roma women from various backgrounds to develop and live out their social traditions on their terms.

DF evolves and responds to lived experiences and social realities of the women whom are directly implicated. One instance where this Romani feminism reveals itself and is honouring a diverse set of beliefs is with family structures. Children are central to the Roma community, motherhood is seen as a special period, and a child is considered a blessing. The Roma raise their children in a number of ways, which varies from situation to situation. Some Roma women stay home and others choose to work and leave the child with close family members and oftentimes, children join parents at work and learn the family trade from a young age. As the community operates in an inter- and intra-generational family structure (Aiello 2016), relatives and extended family are heavily involved in the raising of the child.

Breastfeeding is another aspect of Roma motherhood that is tied to Romani feminism as it is a decision that reflects a Roma woman’s choice and reality. Health visitor and researcher Philippa Burden, a Darzi Fellow and part of the Healthy Communities Programme Kent, from the NHS Foundation Trust, co-produced a film with Slovak Roma women in Kent, UK. The film Roma mothers talk about breastfeeding² was selected by Public Health England as a resource co-created by the Slovakian Roma community. The work is a great example of the breadth of Romani feminism linked to breastfeeding and offers stories linked to motherhood. Condon and Salmon (2014), members of the faculty of health and applied sciences, in a study with Gypsy Roma and Traveller³ mothers found that English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish Travellers are unlikely to take up breastfeeding. Social scientist Kate Pinkney (2011) in her study on infant feeding practices with Gypsy and Traveller women found that numbers are extremely low, showing only 3% take up the practice in the first six weeks. Condon and Salmon (2014) observed that breastfeeding is not seen as part of the Gypsy and Traveller culture and can be viewed as an ‘immodest act’. Whereas in the Roma culture, breastfeeding is very much a part of the community’s feeding habits yet needs to be done in private (Condon and Salmon 2014).

Positioning myself in the conversation as a Roma woman is significant, as this backdrop informs my personal decision to try to breastfeed. This choice was initially at conflict with that of a career within academia and the professional dance sector, as going on maternity leave meant I had to step away from my dance occupation. At the same time, I wanted to live out my Romani feminism on my terms but was also aware that the sector and my personal experiences of navigating a freelance dance world, conflicted with this wish to stay with my child as long as possible and honour exclusive breastfeeding. Later I will expand on the way that I lived out my Romani feminism and was supported to do so by the director of the dance research centre in the UK. However, at this point expanding on the leadership styles within the dance sector will underpin the next portion of the paper and frame the vignettes section of the article.

Leadership discussion

Research on female leadership is expansive and has focussed on styles, behaviours, comparison analyses, as well as how leadership exists in relation to men. Psychologist Alice Eagly has studied leadership and gender biases for decades and generated a significant amount of data that offers insight into the domains of leadership in which women have made progress. In 2007, Eagly claimed that ‘transformational leaders mentor and empower their subordinates and encourage them to develop their potential’ (p2, 2017). According to the World Bank Group (2017) we know that 40% of women make up the global workforce but of this population only a small percentage are in managerial and senior leadership roles. The question of why women are not considered or taken seriously for some roles and if they do attain a senior role how they achieve those positions, begs to be asked. Player et al. (2019), researchers in psychology, have identified that there is a difference between leadership potential and leadership performance for men and women, concluding that men are preferred and more likely to be hired when they concretely exercise and perform their leadership. Women, on the other hand, were not hired when they demonstrated and acted their leadership and were more likely to be employed when they were seen to have the potential to be leaders. Heilman et al. (2004) state that when women demonstrate success in leadership roles they can be penalized as they violate gender-prescriptive norms. Men, on the other hand, are maintained in or more likely to be promoted to senior leadership positions (Koch, D’mello, and Sackett 2015).

Taking the above as a starting point, how can these biases be overcome? What can be done to challenge this status quo? And how does this reality play out within the dance sector and higher education? We know that dance and leadership is an underexplored research area that requires more attention (Solomon 1983; Lee 1984; Whiteman 1992; Risner and Musil 2017; Grundstrom 2020). Dance scholars Risner and Musil (2017) offer a comprehensive overview of dance and leadership styles, specific to the United States (US), and conclude that there is a need to strategically consider future generations of dance leadership. Risner and Musil draw on (Hagood 2000; Risner and Prioleau 2004; Risner 2007; Musil 2010) and also highlight how feminist studies offer intelligence into this topic.

In 2016, leadership scholars Lisa DeFrank-Cole and Reneé Nicholson focussed on female leadership styles within classical ballet and argued that this underexplored area requires an interdisciplinary lens to better understand and generate knowledge. Such an interdisciplinary analysis allowed for DeFrank-Cole and Nicholson to conclude that women dominate the dance sector yet few rose to prominent leadership roles. Their data revealed unequal opportunities for women in areas such as choreography. In 2017, dance scholar Douglas Risner claimed that since the mid-1910s, dance higher education courses, faculty, and students have been predominantly female. Yet, when he looked at dance leadership roles in post-secondary dance institutions in the US, they were run primarily by men. Risner further claimed that the leadership areas of the sector were increasingly male-dominated. Dance scholar Ali Duffy (2021) also highlights major issues facing women in dance leadership roles within the US context. Duffy expands on particular strengths and success strategies that worked for women in those positions and echoes the findings of Risner (2017) and DeFrank-Cole and Nicholson (2016). While the researchers cited above carried out investigations outside the UK, their findings offer insight into the imbalance and lends itself to thinking about leadership roles within a global dance sector. Such a macro focus goes beyond the scope of this article and I would like to anchor us back to the UK context and leadership styles within dance HE institutions.

The workplace within HE can be multigenerational and this paper avoids an analysis of female leadership styles, as others have considered the leadership literature in great detail (see DeFrank-Cole and Tan 2021). This paper advocates for the dance sector to consider the absence of research specifically relating to leadership in dance practice. Dance studies scholar J.M Alexandre (2017) has explored dance leadership and suggests that the aim of performative research is to contribute to the intellectual or conceptual architecture of the discipline, and in the volume the editor brings together examples that help develop a framework on dance leadership. For Alexandre, dance leadership sits between the theoretical and practical space and is concerned with furthering dance and cultivating and nurturing the practice. The author suggests that dance is intrinsic and oscillates between being a solo practice or group experience where the dancers function as leaders by virtue of the knowledge and skills and the ‘gifts’ they hold as dancers. These gifts Alexandre references illustrate the dancer’s authority and are tied, inextricably, to their practice but also linked to other forms of engaging with dance content through dancing, speaking, and writing. Alexandre’s volume is opening up spaces linked to seeing the interconnected nature of dance practice and dance leadership.

Moreover, Alexandre draws on psychologist and educational theorist Howard Gardner’s idea of leadership (see Gardner 2011) and suggests that Gardner’s reflective writing on creativity appreciates the nuanced aspects of leadership within dance. Alexandre continues her writing grappling with the concepts of leadership and is drawn to Wergin’s (2007) idea that leadership is not about action but tied to process and how individuals build relationships. To her Wergin’s dance leadership is tied to:

trust that transcends boundaries; they frame problems in ways that challenge conventional thinking while acknowledging the need to work within existing structure and culture; they are not afraid to take reasonable risks; they give voice to a sense of shared purpose and future; and they exhibit patience and persistence, knowing that real change is neither predictable nor linear.

(Alexandre 2017, 17 drawing on Wergin 2007)

There are often challenges in a workplace that don’t have any obvious solutions. Therefore, such professional dilemmas require bespoke ways to frame and discuss the problem. Alexandre touches on the need to develop solutions to challenges. The willingness to understand, observe, explain, and comment on the social environment within HE and the dance sector is key to allowing one to live out their choices in a non-judgemental fashion.

This notion that leadership can be fluid, iterative, and welcoming of possibilities, and of different modalities, resonates with my experience of motherhood at a HE institution in the UK, a research Centre led by Professor Sarah Whatley who is also the director of Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE). The director has a background in dance and now as an academic, her research focuses on the interface between dance and new technologies, dance analysis, somatic dance practice and pedagogy, and inclusive dance. From here on out Professor Whatley will be referred to as the director. Alexandre says that dance leaders have an obligation to seek and develop solutions for the challenges facing the communities in which they live and work (Alexandre 2017, 200). Female leaders are in positions to activate and instigate change. The director of C-DaRE’s forward-thinking, family-friendly approach to running her research centre allowed me to keep dancing and performing, and to meet the demands of being an artist, researcher, and new mother. This approach and her style aligns very closely with that of a charismatic leader, that is defined as someone who uses their communication skills, persuasiveness, charm, and intelligence to influence and guide others. Such leaders are seen as able to connect with people on a deep level and often are empathetic and relatable, confident, motivational, engaging, and optimistic with a pragmatic approach. Charismatic leadership is based on conceptions of Weber (1947), House (1977), and Bass (1985). Leadership scholars Sacevem et al., (2017) suggest that charismatic leaders are friendly and warm, but also strong, dynamic and powerful. Charismatic leaders are driven by their convictions and commitment to their cause (Boas, House, and Arthur 1993) and are leaders with a desire to make the status quo better.

As this paper has outlined, researchers have highlighted that there is a disconnect with females in leadership positions within the dance sector, including higher education institutions. Returning to the above reality that there are a lack of female leaders in the dance sector in the UK, this reality is even further exasperated for those individuals from the Global Majority. A British government official review titled ‘Race in the workplace’ (online, 2017) found that there is overt and covert racism in the UK workforce. The report suggests that Black and Minority Ethnic (BME)⁴ individuals in the UK are less likely to progress through the workplace, when compared with White individuals. Such barriers exist from entry and carry on through to board level which then prevents these individuals from reaching their full potential. Furthermore, the report found that transparency in organisations is crucial which allows for career ladders, pay and reward guidelines to be clearly outlined. The 2017 government report concludes that the how and why people are promoted in the workforce are built on opaque scenarios. This structural, historical bias that favours certain individuals is felt even more intensely by women and those with disabilities who come from Global Majority backgrounds (online, 2017). Smith, Greenfields, and Rochon (2021) state that for GRT communities the barriers into and staying in HE exist, in large part due to the racism experienced. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (2009) and Parliamentary Women and Equalities Select Committee (2019) suggest that prejudice against GRT communities is the ‘last acceptable form of racism.’ The GRTSB Pledge in HE⁵ was founded on the premise to help challenge this racism and to remove barriers that exist for community members within academic settings. Clark (2004) and Greenfields et al., (2021) claim that those from GRT backgrounds are reluctant to self-identify as doing so places us in vulnerable positions with exposure to overt racism. This reality creates a personal dilemma for me as to how I live out my Romani feminism.

Landing in what feels like an impossible situation and one that clearly places me in a conundrum was navigated with the director’s commitment to develop bespoke solutions that could support me and create a healthy working environment. Such a dialogic and visionary approach separated this experience from other work spaces and cultures because the director was keen to listen, trust, and advocate for a family-friendly Centre. The director allowed me to be an individual and cultivated a work space that was placid, relaxed, casual, creative, hard-working and flexible. She challenged traditional hegemonic work environments and work models.

Vignettes, situated knowledge, and narratives as evidence

Opposing repressive frameworks, maintaining a professional dance practice and balancing motherhood is not without sacrifices, some sleepless nights and a constant reflective process. Leaning into my dance training and Roma philosophy of ‘being in the moment’ and fully committing to one thing, allowed me to balance multiple aspects of my life and aided them to intersect naturally. Furthermore, the director’s trust, willingness to listen and commitment to bespoke responses facilitated a productive space that aligned with my Roma cultural values. To give insight into how I was allowed to live out my Romani feminism, I will offer four vignettes as examples where I was met with a dilemma but supported to be messy and in the moment, and to live out those choices on my terms. These vignettes expand on feminist Harraway’s situated knowledges (Haraway 1988a) and provide insight into how my own embodied Romani feminism was realised.

For Haraway, there can be ‘disembodied scientific objectivity’ (Haraway 1988a, 576), and Antonopoulou (2018), drawing on Haraway’s situated knowledge, argues that the perception of any situation is always a matter of an embodied, located subject and their geographically and historically specific perspective, a perspective constantly being structured and restructured by the current conditions. The iterative process that Antonopoulou is referencing is tied to the production of knowledge and the way it can feel like unstable grounds. In this context, the process of acquiring knowledge begins at standpoints within the body and such experiences, that might feel anecdotal, create the sense of embodied perspectives. These situated knowledges and specific ways of seeing have emerged for me in a number of contexts and offer understanding into a complex and layered process. The next section of the paper will change register and sound personal but this tone is intentional as the goal is to offer insight into how I unearthed my situated knowledge and the manner this was in direct relation to a director’s leadership style. Haraway has suggested that observation and embodied ways of knowing are geographically and historically specific to the individual. This perspective and the unconditional observation of the self is constantly structured and restructured. This acquisition of knowledge takes place in the body; therefore, the series of vignettes will frame and locate my feelings and embodied realities within the Centre. What follows are four vignettes that are listed chronologically and I will attempt to choreograph a story about my lived experiences as a dancing mother navigating motherhood in HE and the dance sector.

Vignette one: dance, pregnancies, and the backstory (September 2015)

As a dancer and artist, Romani studies scholar and sociologist, my practice at a HE institution in the UK leaned into flamenco, digital dance, intersectionality, and dialogic feminism. At the Centre, I was supported to draw from my diverse background and was included in and led various EU-funded projects which aim to make education accessible to vulnerable groups and ethnic minorities. As a dancer and choreographer, I trained and have taught throughout the Northern hemisphere and in the UK, Europe, and Turkey. As a professional dancer and artist, I straddled the decision if I wanted to have children wondering how I would manage and balance a performing dance career and a family. In addition to the work-life questions I also had the cultural components to navigate coming from a Roma-Serbian-Spanish-American background where the challenge of honouring certain traditions conflicted with my travelling professional performance and academic career. Also, as a Roma woman I decided to breastfeed and stay with my children for the first 2 years of their life. The tension of how it would all play out and what would be at stake revealed itself in 2015 when I learned that l was pregnant.

In 2014, I was hired at a HE institution in the UK as a senior research assistant for the EU-funded project, Europeana Space.⁶ There were five pilots and C-DaRE was not only lead of the Dance Pilot but also coordinator of the project. Fast forward to September 2015, my first daughter was born and by the end of October I was back online and working. A source of pressure was knowing that after four weeks of having my first child, questions around how I would return to a full-time dance research position while breastfeeding and caring for my newborn would actually play out. The director of the Centre, whom is also my boss, said to me, and at staff meetings with colleagues present, that C-DaRE was a family-friendly work space and that I could bring my child with me where appropriate. My colleagues supported my decision to come back to work and bring the baby with me to certain meetings and events. Note this was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic where agile working schemes and family-friendly spaces were an anomaly see (Image 1).

Image 1. Baby Yasemin-Anaya at C-DaRE (Coventry, UK) January 2016.

The director allowed me to decide and define the working terms. The ability to choose the length of my maternity leave and to have a flexible work environment allowed me to recover from a traumatic birth experience while also still contribute to the E-Space project. It should be noted that my husband regularly came to the office with me and baby was always welcomed at the Centre, which allowed me to carry my daughter in a sling. This body-to-body contact with my daughter was important to me and living out my personal decisions within this public space created an unconventional environment. This work culture was permitted because of the director and the support from my colleagues and husband.

Vignette two: E-space digital dance day and tester (March 2016)

For the same project, the EU-funded Europeana Space Dance Pilot developed adaptations of existing software, held by two partners IN2⁷ and FCSH-UNL.⁸ Within the dance pilot, we developed two digital dance tools and were required to organise user-test sessions. On the 16th of March, 2016 we organised the E-Space Digital Dance Day (EDDD) where we tested the tools with academics, dancers, and students. At the time, of my firstborn was five and half months and still very reliant on my breast milk. I was an organiser of the event and needed to ensure I was present for the entire session including the pre and post meetings. This meant I needed to bring my child with me while also help facilitate the conversations. The stress of how to run the full-day event with over 35 people in attendance as well as meeting baby’s needs, was a point of fear. My colleagues from the dance pilot, a researcher and the director were present and helped run the day and took over as and when needed. I comfortably breastfed the baby and she was in the space the entire day. Towards the end of the EDDD user-testing day, the baby had a massive meltdown and I had to leave the space for 30 min. The fear of being hyper-visible and showcasing my version of motherhood in this public environment was exhausting and an emotional messy process. The complexity of my embodied experience of struggling to meet the demands of an academic environment while also negotiating the fluctuating needs of the baby during the event illustrates the vulnerability and pressure I felt. The embarrassment I felt towards the guests and towards my colleagues was heavy, but the director insisted that I stay in the space and was warm and supportive throughout the day see (Image 2).

Image 2. Rosa Cisneros at the “Freeze! Challenge the Hierarchy: Researcher, Artist, User!” SIBMAS Conference (Copenhagen, Sweden) May 2016.

Vignette three: WhoLoDancE project and motion capture (May 2016)

This third vignette will explore my process of being an artist-researcher at the research centre. This decision to return after four weeks of giving birth allowed me to actively contribute to the EU-funded WhoLoDancE project⁹ that developed and applied breakthrough technologies to dance learning environments. Within the project there were five key objectives but I will focus on the enriched choreography element relevant to this paper. The WhoLoDancE tools were geared to build and structure an interactive repository of motion capture dance libraries. The motion captured dances were ballet, contemporary, Greek folk dance, and flamenco.

C-DaRE was a partner on the project and we led on the research strand and also were tasked with offering the flamenco content. The project’s official start date was January 2016 with an end date of December 2018. At the time the project started, my daughter was 3 months old and the project timeline suggested that in May 2016 all the partners were expected to fly to Amsterdam, Holland to record the motion capture footage with Motek Entertainment,¹⁰ an industry partner. The planning sessions with Motek Entertainment via skype highlighted just how much my body had changed but I felt equally strengthened and empowered by surviving child birth. In 2015, I became pregnant and danced, performed, and taught until I was 8 months pregnant with my first daughter. The dancer in me struggled with the ever-changing new body I was constantly waking up to therefore, preparing for a major motion capture session in May 2016, terrified me. The reality of people relying on me to produce expert sequences, prepare tutorials prior to the actual capture sessions, and deliver these to a team of technologists that have a history of working with the best in their fields, was daunting see (Image 3 and Image 4).

Image 3. Rosa Cisneros with Baby Yasemin-Anaya, Dr Hetty Blades and Prof Whatley at the ESDD (Coventry, UK) March 2016.

Image 4. Images 04 & 05: Rosa Cisneros at the Motek Entertainment Studios recording flamenco motion capture session (Amsterdam, Holland) May 2016.

Dancing and performing for the three-day motion capture session in Amsterdam, in May 2016 was intimidating but powerful. I observed that the trust and settling into just being myself and trusting my previous dance ‘technique’ allowed for me to perform and dance from a confident place. That agility and internal strength was surprising and I was reminded that the body keeps score and is able to rely on years of training. It is also worth mentioning that at the same session, the Motek Entertainment team was aware that I was travelling with an eight-month-old that would require me to breastfeed at times outside of scheduled breaks. This willingness to support my parenting and bodily needs was respected by everyone on the WhoLoDancE team, especially the director of the Centre. The Motek partner had a driver that was tasked with transporting the team around and they sourced a child seat and chartered my husband and child back-and-forth to the sessions, so I could breastfeed, hold my daughter in a sling during breaks and meet her needs as and when she needed. This comfort and flexibility accommodated offstage positively affected my onstage, motion-capture performances. I could comfortably deliver and meet the physical and psychological demands of recording a motion capture session with a twenty person crew because, I was seen as a dancer with caring duties who required a flexible work schedule. I could be the mother I wanted to be while still perform and deliver high-quality dance content to a state-of-the-art dance research project. This event and process and the filming session were transformational and very special, and the director advocated for this adaptability see (Image 5).

Image 5. A researcher and Motek Entertainment team at the Flamenco Motion Capture session (Amsterdam, Holland) May 2016.

Vignette 4: SIBMAS conference and travelling with family (June 2016)

Philosopher and sociologist Monika Rogowska-Stangret draw on Haraway and suggests that situated knowledge is ‘a strong tool’ (Haraway 1988a, 578) that preserves and is aware of how standpoints are constructed (Rogowska-Stangret 2018). The idea of choice and the way this decision is presented influences what a decision-maker chooses. Therefore, this next example might appear anecdotal and trivial, yet for me was a marker in my career at a HE institution in the UK. In 2016, while attending the International Association of Libraries and Museums of Performing Art¹¹ (SIBMAS) conference in Sweden the E-Space Dance Pilot team was invited to present a panel discussion, and I had a paper at the event. This was an international conference mainly for dance/art-related academics, professionals, archivists and practitioners, with over 150 participants in attendance. On the journey over to Copenhagen the airline broke my daughter’s pram and so I was tasked with finding a solution to fix the travel system. I excused myself from the conference dinner that night but was nervous of the impression and flexibility I was asking for upon arriving. However, when I rang the director and explained the situation she was comforting and offered to help in any way she could.

The following day during the lunch session my family were near and I had to excuse myself to breastfeed my nine-month-old child. The guilt and fear that I would be seen as unprofessional haunted me during that nursing session. When I returned to lunch, my colleagues greeted me with warm smiles yet I was trying to wave my family away in the attempt to maintain a level of professionalism in front of colleagues. In a matter of minutes, the director welcomed me back to the table and asked to see the baby. She not only invited the family over for the meal but engaged the entire time with me and the family. Apologising to the group and wondering if the presence of a personal situation within a highly professional and academic environment, was irritating others was very alive in my body. Yet, the permission to hold my baby and to blur the lines between the personal and professional was only possible because of this genuine interest by the director to see me as a person and not as an employee. The director set a tone for the lunch and for the way I could live out my motherhood throughout the entire conference. Haraway’s strong tool comes to mind in this instance as the director positioned herself to blur the line and encourage my family to enter the space, with her actions acting as instruments of disruption that helped produce new knowledge within my body see (Image 6).

Image 6. Rosa Cisneros and the Motek Entertainment team at the Flamenco Motion Capture session (Amsterdam, Holland) May 2016.

Final discussion

The four vignettes presented above outlined a director’s radical leadership and permission to exercise my cultural traditions and honour practices that aligned with my social, cultural, and academic values. When I shared with the director that I was pregnant and also keen to take a four-week maternity leave, I was met with joy and excitement for the baby and also supported to decide the length of my maternity leave. As a result, I negotiated these various terrains with fear, anxiety, and curiosity and learned how to be confident in the choices made through letting go of the extraneous and trusting that the director’s reassurance and support was honest. As I eased into motherhood and being an academic, juggling multiple projects, roles, and healing after birth, I felt supported to pursue and research issues that arise in practice. I was also urged to bring in my social justice work and co-creative initiatives. The director respected my professional dance background and training, as I was classically trained in ballet and flamenco, and allowed those techniques to pepper the research being pursued. The director encouraged the artist-researcher strand and my interdisciplinary interests in Roma, African Dance Diaspora, and Hip Hop to enter the Centre.

Personal and professional challenges were not absent from my career. Rather than avoid them or be asked to make a decision that would have excluded and alienate me from a dance community that I wanted to continue to be a part of, a director’s permission, support, leadership style and willingness to trust me and my decisions, allowed me to navigate the various barriers. I never felt alone and at every juncture of those first years of motherhood, I was lifted, respected, and celebrated. Motherhood is not without its hurdles but rather than feel the need to hide these obstacles, I was aided and supported to share and process my experiences as openly as I wanted to. Through a director’s charismatic leadership there was a blurring of the private and professional as it allowed me to fully embody my motherhood and Roma feminism without the need to compartmentalise myself. While this is not a decision many might want to take and make, I am comfortable with this decision as it reflects my version of dialogic feminism building on embodied situated knowledge.

My colleagues at C-DaRE were also very generous and made space for my Roma feminism and this acceptance, is linked with a director setting up a dialogic space where different modes of working styles and permission to be a multi-faceted person, was allowed. Not all individuals from the wider university were keen to support this ‘blurring’. I recall taking the lift with baby and pram, and an individual at the university said ‘so how long is this going to last? How long do you think you can bring it to work?’ The tone and the ‘it’ in the phrase felt like an attack on the decision to bring my child to work. And while I was offended and hurt by the question, I remembered that C-DaRE’s work culture and environment was unique and the freedom to come as a whole person and not have to fully perform my professionalism, was rare. This freedom and permission to be seen as a person and the transformational element it had on my career is at the crux of why I am sharing this story through these vignettes. How can HE institutions and the dance sector support more mothers and dancers to find a healthy balance between the work-home life? Could adopting charismatic leadership skills support mothers to honour their parenting style and generate a more equitable and healthy workforce and dance sector? My story and this positive experience serves as evidence for the wider dance sector to consider how improvements can be made in their contexts. The responsibility of change sits with all of us and navigating what is and imagining what could be allowed us, those in the sector, to weave together a new future. Advocating for a workforce that celebrates fragmentary reflections and messy realities where issues that are hardly talked about can be brought to the forefront and adequately supported through love, kindness, and charisma, is the impetus for sharing.

Conclusion

Reflecting on my arrival to C-DaRE it appears there was a lot at stake for me for many reasons. I was learning the British academic working culture which appeared to be at odds with my intention to honour my Romani background and motherhood. I was acutely attuned to the reality that my race, social status as an early-career researcher, and a foreigner, as I am not from the UK, created anxiety about how I should enter spaces and how I would be perceived. Part of my experience of being from a Global majority background falls out of the scope of this paper but I mention here as to frame the pressure, emotional labor, and thinking that impacted my decision-making process that first year of starting at the Centre and developing new working relationships. Grappling with concepts of feminism and gender equality, I dove straight into the Centre and unapologetically stepped into my cultural traditions and values, despite the emotional conundrums I was experiencing. My risk taking and conviction to lean into my Roma feminism was due to a director’s acceptance who celebrated my activist nature, ethnic background, and dance training.

The narratives I offered through the vignettes have highlighted how I choose to blur the professional and the personal. The complexity of dilemmas acknowledged in the stories are nuanced and the charismatic leadership encouraged my Roma feminism to exist. These examples highlight the support from a senior female leader while at the same time illustrates how I overtly honoured by cultural traditions and allowed them to enter a historically exclusionary space. Without a director’s charismatic leadership and commitment to creating a family-friendly research centre, I would not have returned to work or managed to maintain my dance practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemary (Rosa) Kostic Cisneros

Rosa Cisneros is an artist-researcher at C-DaRE (Coventry University) with a background in dance, sociology, gender and films. She works closely with several charities and NGOs in the UK and Europe and leads several small and large-scale projects. Her work aims to make dance and education accessible to vulnerable groups and ethnic minorities, and she also works closely with freelance artists developing ethical and equitable standards.

Notes

1. Global Majority is a collective term that refers to people who identify as Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or have been racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’. https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/-/media/files/schools/school-of-education/final-leeds-beckett-1102-global-majority.pdf.

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edn6Dy5ZLHk&ab_channel=CHSSKent.

3. GRT Communities is a term used in the UK where Gypsy and Romani Gypsies form the largest group and originally descended from India. The term ‘Roma’ used at the Council of Europe refers to Roma, Sinti, Kale and related groups in Europe, including Travellers and the Eastern groups (Dom and Lom), and covers the wide diversity of the groups concerned, including persons who identify themselves as Gypsies. Travellers of Irish heritage consider themselves to be the indigenous population of Ireland. New Travellers originated mainly from the settled British population to seek an ‘alternative’ way of life. See: http://a.cs.coe.int/team20/cahrom/documents/Glossary%20Roma%20EN%20version%2018%20May%202012.pdf.

4. BME: Acronym for Black and Minority Ethnic. There are many different ways to refer to people from ethnic minorities. At the time of writing, Global Majority is the preferred term.

5. GTRSB in HE Pledge.

https://www.bucks.ac.uk/about-us/what-we-stand/gtrsb-higher-education-pledge

6. Europeana Space Project: https://www.europeana-space.eu/ Europeana Space was a three year project with twenty-nine consortium partners and provided an open environment for the development of applications and services based on digital cultural content. The use of this digital environment fostered a series of vigorous, wide-ranging and sustainable programmes where cultural heritage was at the centre of all of the project’s activities.

7. IN2: https://in-two.com/.

8. FCSH-UNL: https://www.fcsh.unl.pt/en/.

9. WhoLoDancE Project: http://www.wholodance.eu/.

10. Motek Entertainment: https://www.motekentertainment.com/portfolio-items/wholodance-2/.

11. SIBMAS: https://www.sibmas.org/ Since 1954, SIBMAS has been the international network of cultural heritage in the performing arts. The organisation is spread across 35 countries around the world, and gather individuals and institutions documenting circus, dance, film, opera, theatre and puppetry.