Ballet Mental Health

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Recommended: Eating disorders among ballerinas

Dancers are suffering: How the clothing that is worn in class psychologically effects dancers
The current expectation of a dancer is set at a high bar with a foundation of standards established years ago. Of these demanding requirements, the ballet world has a significant involvement of rules when partaking in this art form that can be detrimental to the mental health of a dancer. This is a problem that is overlooked by most ballet studios because of the usefulness of traditional ballet attire and that needs to be corrected because, if left uncorrected, dancers will continue to fall into an unhealthy mental state.
In Ballet, there is a specific requirement of tights and form fitted shirts and leotards, all of which varies between genders. …show more content…

Starting with the attire being worn, a breakdown of the different standards involved in ballet will help analyze specific problems to do with the clothing being worn. When enforcing the required clothing for a ballet class, students will be able to see where they need to improve and what specifically needs to be corrected to achieve the desired output for their training. The only downfall with this is that evaluation of themselves is a constant thought in their mind. In this case, they are over analyzing themselves to the point of building eating disorders because they think they’re too fat, thinking they have an ugly body because of the corrections that constantly get brought up in their mind, and other negative comments to do with the clothing being …show more content…

That can be examined in a study made by Jon Archelus, Gemma L Witcomb, and Alex Mitchell, called, “Prevalence of eating disorders amongst dancers,” that provides data about the number of dancers who train in many different styles of dance that have eating disorders comparatively to ballet dancers. (2014, p. 7) When looking at the data compiled by them, ballet dancers seem to have a higher percentage of affected students. For example, 16.4% of the group of ballet dancers were said to have eating disorders, while the group of varying dances had a 12%. For bulimia, ballet was at 10.12%, while varying had .82%. Lastly, for body dissatisfaction, ballet was at 17%, while varying was

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