Alumni story: Jeremy Leslie-Spinks

After 60 years working in international ballet, I came to the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences to undertake a DPhil, researching dialogue between clinicians and ill or injured dancers.

After many adventures in a challenging, exhilarating career, the DPhil felt satisfyingly like the logical next step. I had been diagnosed with a spinal condition which would stop me from teaching professional companies. My clinicians couldn’t understand why I still wanted to work with this disintegrating body. By chance, I read about the Rosamund Snow Scholarship for Patient-Led Research, which allowed patients to research their own condition and experiences. Rosamund Snow died at 46, having published and lectured extensively about inadequacies in clinical communication while living with Type 1 diabetes. Recognising something of a kindred experience in the medical communication barrier, I applied and, amazingly, was awarded a scholarship to investigate communication between clinicians and dancers.

My subject being relatively esoteric, I had to learn on the job about complex ethical issues, theory and practice, straying down countless rabbit holes, retracing my steps and starting again. I eventually found a way to analyse my data without losing the warmth and colour of the dancers’ lived narratives. My Principal Supervisor, the indomitable Trish Greenhalgh, with co-supervisors Marta Arnaldi and Caroline Potter, steadied (and gently discouraged) my wilder impulses. Even so, I probably wrote eight versions of each chapter before finding the right one.

I’ve seen many dancers trying to explain their injury to medical people unfamiliar with dance. I interviewed some of them, and a picture emerged of:

• young people desperate to become dancers
• idealistic teachers striving to perfect artists for this competitive profession;
• clinicians attempting to restore specialised functions and capacities outside their experience, and
• dance companies, juggling time and straitened means to ensure artistic excellence.

These performers needed exceptional flexibility and strength. For them, defining themselves through dance, career loss was traumatic, premature, and destructive. As one said, “If I can’t dance, what am I? Who am I?” They struggled to build a non-dance life within which to survive. Some partially succeeded, others did not. All dance people know this story – it happens constantly. I wanted to know why it happens, and what could be done to help.

Jeremy Leslie-Spinks performing

I’d hope this research could be the thin edge of a wedge, changing how we make and treat dancers. 

I’d like professional dance training to encourage delight in nutrition, anatomy and biomechanics, and to promote other disciplines (design, choreography, videography, research, creative dance-based functions), offering expanded career options to ex-performers. I’d like dance companies to become less financially dependent, less rigid in their internal hierarchies. I’d encourage dissemination of Dance Medicine. I’d advocate for informed, proactive clinician-dancer communication. Concepts like Rita Charon’s Narrative Medicine could also help other “specialist” patients – musicians, circus artists, people outside conventional clinical paradigms. 

People ask about my age, but actually, inside myself I don’t feel 79. I’m probably more intrigued now by the strangeness of things than I was 50 years ago. I just got on with it, like everyone else. I’ve loved every second of Oxford and I’m grateful beyond words for the support which sustained me here.