I have spent the last few years working with a wide range of artists. More specifically, dance companies, each with it’s own language of passion, art, and “community.” In most cases, I have been encouraged and invited to enter each space believing that art-making, especially in a field as intimate as dance, would mean care, clarity, and mutual respect. What I found instead were blurred boundaries, ego masquerading as mentorship, and an unsettling question that has stayed with me: how do I continue to participate in a system that so deeply unsettles and harms me, and still stand to benefit from it?
In one space I worked in, the language was always about equity. About dismantling hierarchy. About building something gentle and collective. That language was repeated often enough that it almost became insulation.
But what happens when a space insists it is non-hierarchical while authority quietly consolidates itself?
The personal and professional dissolved into each other in ways that felt less like trust and more like trespass. Rehearsals frequently drifted into uninvited reflection sessions. We would consume art together and then be told, quite definitively, what it meant and what we should take from it. Conviction replaced conversation. Influence was performed, sometimes even curated.
There was also a reverence for exhaustion. Overwork became both identity and virtue. Fatigue was narrated as dedication. And slowly, the room felt heavier, though it was still described as safe.
Time, most of all, lost its edges. Rehearsals stretched without warning or closure. The assumption seemed to be that availability equalled sincerity. At one point, the spill-over cost me something deeply personal, and what stayed with me was not just the loss, but the absence of acknowledgement.
It left me asking whether collectivity can exist when boundaries do not.
Another experience unfolded differently, but with its own quiet disorientation.
Clarity was elusive. We were asked to move, to understand, to respond. But rarely told to what. Questions felt like disruptions. Logistics often prioritised convenience for one person over sustainability for the group, though it was framed as practicality.
Early in the process, the room was opened to outside eyes. We were still forming, still uncertain. The commentary that followed was sharp. Instead of being buffered or contextualised, it was absorbed and redirected toward us. When discomfort surfaced, emotion filled the room in ways that shifted responsibility away from the perpetrator and on to me, the somewhat victim here.
Gradually, it became clear that participation meant orbiting someone else’s centre, their time, their needs, and their sensitivities.
The remuneration was generous. And that complicates the narrative. Compensation does not erase imbalance, but it can make you question your threshold for it. I am still unsure what that says about me.
Then there was a more formally structured environment, one that leaned heavily on tradition.
Our roles were peripheral, which in itself isn’t an issue. We were clear on what we were selected for. What unsettled me was the mediation resulting in access to the core artist filtered entirely through an intermediary whose authority felt unchecked.
Correction often came edged with judgement. Personal choices including food, clothing, and appearance were folded into professional commentary. Comparisons were drawn without transparency. Some were elevated; others were quietly diminished. Standards shifted depending on who stood before them.
The regulation extended to the body in ways that felt invasive. Aesthetic expectations were presented as non-negotiable, even when they crossed into deeply personal territory. The language used to enforce them was that of discipline and legacy.
When discomfort was voiced, it was reframed as oversensitivity. The harm dissolved, leaving only our supposed fragility in its place. Materially, the exchange was meagre. Recognition, even more so.
Across all these spaces, different aesthetics and structures, a pattern emerged: the unorganised nature of the dance sector often becomes an excuse. No HR. No boundaries. No working hours. No systems of accountability. Contracts are hardly ever signed, remunerations are hardly ever discussed. The language of “art” and “guru-shishya parampara” and “collective” fills the gaps where policies should be.
And here is where my anger complicates itself.
I am not outside this system. I benefit from it. My savarna identity, parts of which I cannot shed, grants me access and mobility that others, perhaps, don’t have. The same structures that silence and exhaust me also privilege me in ways I cannot ignore. So when I am asked why I am part of work that emerges from savarna narratives, I cannot offer a justification. I enter the work as a performer. And that act of entering is political. My body on stage is political. My voice or lack thereof in rehearsal is political. My decision to stay, to leave, to question, all political.
I am angry, yes and implicates, yes. But not at individuals alone. I am angry at a culture that confuses intensity with integrity. That equates hierarchy with tradition. That calls emotional volatility “passion.” That frames boundary-less labour as devotion.
And I am confused.
If I continue to participate, am I complicit? If I leave, do I lose the very space through which I attempt to negotiate power? If I stay and speak, will anything change in a field so deeply informal that accountability dissolves before it can be named?
Dance, for me, has always been personal. And the personal is political. Which means every rehearsal I walk into is not just a job. It is an alignment. A negotiation with power, identity, and survival.
I don’t have a resolution. Only this: we cannot keep romanticising hostility and calling it art. If the workplace itself becomes emotionally, structurally, socially violent, then what exactly are we seeking to preserve in the name of culture?
And who, ultimately, is it for?
Tejaswini Halthore 
