Title: Reclaiming Grace: Dance, Motherhood, and Resilience
Description:
This workshop follows Lara Turk, a Covent Garden Royal Opera ballet dancer who is also a mother of three children, throughout her dance-mother-dance journey. Through her movement portraying the warmup process as well as ballet sequences, she is exploring dancers-mothers, their lived experiences of rejection, resilience, and transformation within a discipline that often demands perfection and denies vulnerability. Many professional dancers face exclusion from the ballet community after becoming mothers – whether through loss of roles, lack of institutional support, or the persistent stigma around the maternal body. This exclusion not only disrupts their careers but also profoundly affects their mental health, particularly during the fragile period of postpartum recovery. Feelings of invisibility, shame, and displacement frequently intertwine with the physical challenges of returning to dance.
Reclaiming Grace aims to create a space for empathy, visibility, and dialogue through movement, music and drawing. The session will include live, improvised performance by dancer-mother and a violinist, open drawing session of movement by participants, and a collaborative movement workshop inviting the audience to engage physically and emotionally with the dancers’ story. Through these embodied interactions, the workshop will reveal the strength and sensitivity of maternal bodies and question the rigid ideals of beauty and endurance that dominate ballet.
By witnessing, drawing, and moving together, participants will contribute to a collective act of recognition – fostering hope, solidarity, and a call for change within the ballet world. This workshop seeks not only to make the struggle of dancer-mothers visible but also to affirm their resilience and rightful place within the artistic community.
Structure:
As the spectator walks into the room, Lara will be in the middle of the room (Morris Room), with a dance/movement space marked out with masking tape. Her performance, a mix of ballet warm-up exercises as well as ballet sequences will be accompanied by live violin music by Jan Regulski (20 years member of Philharmonia Orchestra). The spectator will also be able to hear Lara’s voiceover telling her story from a speaker to get to know her experience better while watching her dance. There will be a short range projector (maybe two) placed on the floor, projecting b&w recording of the artists(Olga Szynkarczuk)drawing process of a ballerina moving (Yuka Ebihara, Primabalerina of Warsaw Grand Theatre). The lines drawn by hand in white charcoal on black paper will be projected onto Lara’s movements to enhance the cyclical, universal repetitiveness of dancer-mother-dancer stories. There will be A1 size 70g Tracing paper lying around on the floor as well as some small ual notebooks. These will be accompanied by paint sticks and acrylic/posca markers. The artist(me) will be present in the room drawing Lara during her performance, holding paper between dancer and projection and potentially hanging finished pieces on wires spread across the room for the spectators to witness. The spectators will be gently encouraged to sit on the floor and draw either on tracing paper or in the notebooks and to witness their work interact with Lara’s moves. There might be (if possible) a round paper lamp/sculpture, made from finished tracing paper drawings combined with multicolour threads, hung from the ceiling and attached to 360 slow rotating motor as an additional element combining movement, drawing and layered experiences of dancers-mothers.
What I will need:
- 1 projector, 1 laptop computer, connection cable (I will provide the second projector and computer)
- 20 – 30 sheets of A1 size 70g Tracing paper (from UAL art shop)
- acrylic/posca markers in various colours
