The Challenges, Surprise Benefits and Tools to Cope Sophie Bress of Pointe Magazine and Clare Guss-West Despite what it looks like onstage, anyone who’s ever taken a ballet class can tell you the art form is far from effortless. Not only is it physically taxing, it’s full of emotional and mental difficulties, too. According to Clare Guss-West, MA, a researcher specializing in attention and dance who works with artists and teachers at companies like The Royal Ballet and the Finnish National Ballet, these difficulties are made even more challenging by the sheer amount of information dancers try to focus on and process at one time. “Dancers are trying to hold on […]

Its well researched and documented that individuals suffering from an attention deficit (ADHD) have many more challenges with the learning and coordination of motor skills than individuals without this barrier to learning. So we might imagine that the profession of ‘dancer’ would not be an obvious fit when thinking of a suitable career path. Yet surprisingly, the dance sector boasts a higher than average percentage of individuals with ‘overactive brains’ and displaying the recognised symptoms of ADHD, than the general population. (Shuliman and Terry, 2017) Further research is necessary to understand whether it is the sheer amount of information that dancers are required to process and focus on at any […]