The story of Mavis Staines’ profound teaching career, defined by her visionary approach to education within one of the most historically rigid dance forms, starts at the bottom of a staircase, her wrist shattered.
In 1981, she was dancing with the Dutch National Ballet when she suffered a stress fracture. The injury wasn’t an uncommon one for a ballet dancer but did need time to heal. Just four weeks into performing again, she was trying to close a heavy door at the top of a steep flight of stairs. She began tugging and tugging and tugging, and when the door wouldn’t shut, she was, in her words, “so damn stubborn.” She suddenly found herself plummeting to the bottom of the stairs, door handle in hand, with a shattered wrist and a paused career waiting for her at the bottom.
“People said to me, ‘What’s wrong with you? You don’t dance on your arms,’” she says. “But you need to be able to partner and gesture, and you cannot have an arm that’s completely frozen.” Then came a lot of surgery and a string of infections. The recovery back to 90 per cent wrist mobility would take five years.
When Staines was telling me this story, we were nearing the end of our second conversation, and I wondered if I should have asked her about her career-changing injury earlier, so as not to end on such an unpleasant memory. My newborn was strapped to my chest, and I was feeling a bit rusty after some time away from reporting. I apologized and quickly tried to come up with a more lighthearted final talk point, but Staines interrupted me, something I sense she doesn’t do often. “I just have to say again, as dark as it was at the time, had I not fallen down the stairs, I would not have taken the teacher training program here to get myself back into learning. I thought I was going to go back to university.” But when that door at the top of the steep flight of stairs wouldn’t co-operate, the door to her 35-year career as artistic director of Canada’s National Ballet School (NBS), coming to an end this June, flew wide open.
Throughout the years, Staines, 70, has accumulated an impressive list of awards including the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and the 2019 Governor General’s Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award. She was also named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010. Within her role as artistic director and CEO, she’s known for more fully integrating contemporary dance into the Professional Ballet-Academic Program; introducing life skills classes into the curriculum; centring education on supporting students as they learn responsibility and balance within the pursuit of development; and expanding the school’s mandate to include classes for non-professional folks of all abilities, including those with Parkinson’s disease. But her tangible accomplishments are not what stick with those she has influenced; it’s how she values and champions the people around her.
There are various words to describe Staines, and the ones that weigh the most come from some of those people. Rachel Bar, the director of research and health and a former student of NBS, said, “monumental.” Hannah Galway, also a former student and now a second soloist with The National Ballet of Canada, said, “thoughtful.” John Dalrymple, the executive director of the school, said, “she’s a legend.”
“The school, I feel, has sort of the best institutional culture that I’ve ever experienced in a workplace,” says Dalrymple. “The values, the respect, the sense of calling that we all have is something that she models from the top down, and she does it every day,” He points to an email as a simple example. Some people write an email message in the subject line, or just send along two-word answers, but that’s not Staines. “Mavis will write, ‘My dearest John, I hope you’re having a wonderful Monday. When you have a moment, could you share that report we talked about yesterday? Wishing you a great rest of the day.’ Mavis takes an extra seven seconds to treat you like a human she values. If Mavis has time to do it, we all have time to do it,” Dalrymple says.
Staines’ colleagues and former students speak so highly of her that I have to know the secret behind her leadership. There seems to be such a strong ideology when it comes to lifting people up, but really, she hasn’t put that much thought into it. “I don’t usually think like that, in terms of having a philosophy,” she says. “I just get very excited about drawing people into ideas, and I discover, as I do that, how smart so many people are and how much they have to contribute.”
Staines’ mother always wanted to take ballet classes, but living her girlhood during the Depression and then her adulthood as a British war bride meant that studying the art form wasn’t an option. She told herself that if she ever had daughters, they would take ballet lessons. Jump several years and she had three, but money was still an issue.
She soon discovered that food stamps could buy a pair of children’s ballet slippers and that their community centre in Ottawa offered free classes. Staines’ older sister was enrolled, but after five lessons, she absolutely hated it. “So my mother thought, ‘OK, if each of my daughters wears the shoes five times, then it’s not a complete waste,” says Staines. She was up next. “I totally fell in love with the ballet class right from the word go.” At six years old, just one year after NBS was founded in 1959 by Celia Franca and Betty Oliphant, she declared to her parents she would be a ballet dancer. “Don’t be ridiculous,” they said.
Two years later, the family moved to Vancouver, and Staines’ parents told her they couldn’t find a ballet school, a fib to discourage her sugar plum wishes. But when a school nurse recommended ballet lessons for her younger sister, Staines got to go too. Back where she belonged, she began to dream of auditioning for NBS one day.
Unbeknown to the little ballerina, her teachers were contacting Oliphant to tell her about Staines. “Every time Betty came out to Vancouver, she’d phone my parents and say, ‘Can Mavis audition?’” says Staines. The answer was always no, until she was in Grade 8 and Oliphant said that she was probably too old. Staines calls those the “magic words”; she was finally allowed to audition, her parents thinking that if she were too old, there was no risk of her getting in. Luckily, they were wrong. After school staff spent two hours convincing her parents, she attended the summer school and then, finally, the full-time program. “How extraordinary that my parents ultimately let me do this, with the promise that I would always, always, always keep my grades up in academic school,” she says. “Over time, they became very proud of me.”
Little did everyone involved in getting young Mavis Staines to Canada’s National Ballet School know that their efforts were going into training the school’s second artistic director. “I loved my studies, but even as a kid, I was aware that there were ballet practices that were really on track and resonated and other practices that were either traditions that had passed their expiry date or were counterproductive, and then some that were destructive,” she says. “I dreamed about having an opportunity one day to have a role where I could galvanize the community and make systemic changes.”
That opportunity emerged in 1983 when, after dancing as a first soloist with The National Ballet of Canada and the Dutch National Ballet, then breaking her wrist, Staines joined the faculty at NBS. Shortly after, Oliphant asked if she would train to succeed her as artistic director. “I immediately said yes,” says Staines. “[Oliphant] said, ‘Don’t you want to go home and think about it?’ and I said, ‘No, something has just spoken to me internally.’ ” In 1989, after apprenticing under Oliphant, Staines became artistic director.
One of Staines’ first and top priorities was to help dancers find their voices, which included advocating for better mental and physical conditions. Throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, dancers were expected to be excessively lean. Staines notes that it was common across the globe for teachers to weigh their students and publicly shame their bodies, a practice she links with an earlier (and now defunct) belief that humiliation would motivate discipline. The quest to advance dancer health and well-being proved to be a career-long effort. “I’ve been fortunate enough to do this for a long time now and have lived the fact that life goes in cycles,” she says. Unfortunately, according to Staines, the definition of the perfect ballet body has cycled back in time, particularly post-Pandemic, due to political shifts to the right and society often finding comfort in predictability and uniformity. She is excited to see that dancers are using their voices to push back.
Noting that companies like the Paris Opera Ballet and The Royal Ballet continue to resist the idea of the perfect ballet body, Staines anticipates another positive shift in the next 10 years, particularly in the corps. “The ensemble doesn’t have to all look the same physically in order for there to be the power of group work. That power is in the shared movement, and the shared movement is more interesting if individuals are united by the movement, not united because they look like clones,” she says. This prediction reminds me of Arise, a contemporary ballet piece choreographed by Jera Wolfe for NBS, featuring a whopping 146 students who remain onstage through the entire length of the work. The piece, which Staines invited Wolfe to choreograph, proves her point: the power in Arise doesn’t come from its dancers looking the same (which would be impossible), but rather the epic size and artful co-ordination of the cast.
Throughout her career, Staines has shepherded, she estimates, about 1,000 students towards careers as ballet dancers, choreographers, administrators and executives; she shares that she finds the bravery of youth in dance inspiring. Within the global tidal wave of racial reckoning that will forever mark the final years of Staines’ time as artistic director, her current students held her accountable as a leader of a major institution within an industry steeped in racism. “I just felt so lucky that it was the emerging, to stick with that word, the emerging generation of adults who were calling me out on being…” she pauses to think of the right word. “Stuck, in not only some counterproductive patterning but also in destructive patterning related to racist practices in how ballet is practised.” She describes the process as intensely uncomfortable but also as a gift, the subsequent learning made all the richer because of the bravery among her students.
An outcome of this learning was Assemblée Internationale 2023 (AI23), a six-day conference held by the school in 2023. Launched in 2009, the conference typically happens every four years and brings together schools from several countries. When it was cancelled in 2021, Staines scrapped the original plan, recognizing an opportunity to re-envision the event. This time, the conference focused on addressing anti-Black racism in the ballet context and, most importantly, included the students’ voices in the planning process. “Right from the very start of when I began this role, it was clear to me that I learned that evolving practices [were] best done with intergenerational discussion and [that] the insight that young people of all ages brings is something that must always be factored in,” she says.
It could be easy to see Staines’ retirement as the end of her teaching career, but it doesn’t seem that way. “I think that the beautiful thing about this kind of intense transition is that I feel everything, but more than anything else, I feel this extraordinary sense of joy and privilege that my life is allowing me the choice of deciding when it feels like it’s time to step into the next chapter of my life,” she says. While she talks about how retiring feels like emerging into a new phase, I can’t help but look down at my daughter, still strapped to my chest, who is starting to stir. “My life over the past couple of years, and certainly right now, is getting ever more vibrant as part of the realities of the transition,” she says.
As for what’s next, she cryptically tells me she’s accepted a few projects. While she doesn’t seem ready to divulge all the details, it’s clear to me that whatever she does next won’t read like the final chapter, but rather the start of the next book.
The production of the feature profile was made possible through the generous support of feature profile sponsor L’École de Danse de Québec.
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