From ballet to DPhil: completing a doctorate at 78

How it began

After 60 years in ballet companies around the world, I thought I knew what the rest of my life would look like. Then, at 74, everything changed – and at 78, I've just submitted my DPhil thesis at Oxford.

It started in the spring of  2020. We were living in Germany, our ballet school being slowly suffocated by lockdown. I had just learned I had a spinal condition which would stop me from teaching, both in our school and in the professional companies where I used to guest. Clinicians didn’t really seem to understand why (or how) I still needed to work with this progressively less co-operative body.

I came across a press notice about the Rosamund Snow Scholarship for Patient-Led Research, a funded opportunity for patients to research their own condition. Rosamund had recently died at the age of 46, having published and lectured extensively and famously about her struggles to modify entrenched attitudes among clinicians while she was living with Type 1 diabetes. Recognising the effects on her and on me of the clinician-patient communication barrier, I applied and to my amazed gratitude, I was awarded one of the two Rosamund Snow Scholarships which were being given that year, to research communication between clinicians and professional / pre-professional dancers facing career-changing illness or injury.

What I discovered

In the course of my ballet career, I’ve seen this problem so often -- dancers trying to explain their injury and its significance to medical people unfamiliar with top-level dance. I talked to dancers, ex-dancers, dance teachers, dance students, and physiotherapists and found recurrent themes across their narratives of childhood and training, professional careers, the moment of rupture and their subsequent lives.

I spoke to clinicians, schools and companies, and a picture began to form in my mind, a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon, composed of:

• children and adolescents obsessed by the desire to become professional dancers
• idealistic teachers pushing to develop and perfect the aspiring artists for this highly competitive profession;
• harassed, overworked clinicians attempting to restore extreme, atypical functions and capacities of which they had no experience and little comprehension, and
• the intricate forces operating within professional dance companies, battling time and straitened means to ensure artistic excellence.

Elite performers need exceptional movement range, speed, fine motor control, endurance, and outstanding virtuosity. They dedicate their lives to becoming professionals, aiming to dance for the rest of their days – their passion, however, comes at a price. For participants who could not be healed, the involuntary end of dance was traumatic, premature, and deeply destructive.

Once deprived of their cherished dancer identity, they could find no alternative self to put in its place. They had no one to be. As one said, “If I can’t dance, what am I? Who am I?”

Abandoned, bereft of identity, friends, livelihood, and function, they struggled to construct a non-dancer persona within which they might survive. Some partially succeeded, others did not. All dance people know this story – it happens regularly. What I wanted to know was why it happens, and what I could do to try and stop it.

The research process

I started building a shape and structure for my study, and was immediately impressed by the quantity of paperwork involved, even at the earliest stages.

Complex ethical issues arose, requiring meticulous safeguards to be structured, formalised, officially approved and consistently implemented. My subject was odd enough for there to be few previous studies which might have served as templates, so I did much of the preliminary work by trial and error. Having no background in the collection and analysis of this kind of data, I needed to learn fast about theory and practice – more than once I set off in a given direction, only to find myself trapped in rabbit-holes, and having to retrace my steps and start again.

Having settled on an epistemology, I needed to tackle the hours and hours of transcript. I looked at various methods, and realised I didn’t really like any of them. Some stipulated resources for which I had neither money nor people, others seemed to want me to compromise the integrity of participants’ accounts, or followed rigid procedures which diminished the warmth and colour of the dancers’ lived narratives. Finally I managed to piece together a sequence of sessions allowing me to code, sift through, and collate themes which were distributed right across my sample.

My guiding light has been my Principal Supervisor, the indispensable, inimitable Trish Greenhalgh, who, together with co-supervisors Dr Marta Arnaldi and Professsor  Caroline Potter, constantly steadied (and gently discouraged) some of my wilder impulses. Even under their watchful gaze, I’m sure I have written eight versions of each chapter before finding one that seemed viable.  

Reflections on doing a DPhil at 78

People ask how it felt to do this at my age. The truth is, inside myself I don’t believe I am 78. My age (except when it comes to dancing) is not a factor, it never was. I just get on and do it, as we all do. I recognise how lucky I am in this, and that some who may be less fortunate might recount a different experience. What I can say is that time has made me, if anything, more inquisitive and less entrenched in my views. I think I am more curious, and more intrigued by the strangeness of things, than I was 50 years ago.

What I hope will change

What I would like, would be if this research could become the thin edge of the wedge, the beginning of somehow changing how dancers are made and treated.

I’d like to see pre-professional dance training modified in a couple of important ways:

• to put more emphasis on making sure they know (and delight in) the nuts-and-bolts of how nutrition, anatomy and biomechanics in dance relate to the work they do in the studio every day, and
• to promote and give real value to other ways of working in dance which do not rely on the technical ability to execute steps oneself (design, choreography, videography, research and many other fulfilling and creative dance-based functions), so that those who can no longer dance may still work and derive complete fulfilment from other, non-performing careers.

I’d like to see professional dance companies become less straitjacketed by financial dependence, and less rigid in their internal hierarchies.

Most importantly, I’d like to see open, honest, informed, proactive communication become the norm for interaction between clinicians and ill or injured dancers. Concepts like Narrative Medicine, as promulgated by Rita Charon, could help alleviate the distress of many other “specialist” patients too -- musicians, for example, or circus artists, and others, who do not conform to conventional parameters of clinical expectation, either in their presentation or in their desired outcomes. Dance Medicine is a fascinating and rewarding discipline, and I should be delighted if my  study were to encourage its wider dissemination, as practised in the UK by, for example, the National Institute for Dance Medicine and Science.

That has been my experience as Rosamund Snow Scholar of Oxford, and I loved every second of it. After 60 years in ballet companies, and all the adventures I have lived in my often challenging but always exhilarating job, this Oxford story feels like a completely logical, deeply satisfying next step to have taken. I am more grateful than I can say for the support which has allowed me to be here.

About the Rosamund Snow Scholarship
The Rosamund Snow Scholarship for Patient-Led Research is hosted by Green Templeton College, Oxford. It was established in memory of Rosamund Snow, who was the first person to complete a PhD studying her own condition and who dedicated her career to improving clinician-patient communication.

Read more about Jeremy's journey and the scholarship on the Green Templeton College website.