Choreographer Rosie Kay forced to resign from her own company

It says more about them. No one made them go.

I see less/no fuss made about gropey tutors and lecturers basically offering grades for sex than I do “ooooooo, she invited us into her home, fed and watered us, spoke to us 😱😱😱and has ideas that we don’t like 😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱”

Silly little things. God help them in the real world when they can’t dance anymore and have to get an office job (as soon many dancers, across and singers do).

But I've noticed more and more students saying that the mere fact a senior person takes them to their house is 'inappropriate' and dodgy because of a 'power imbalance'

It just shows how naive and inexperienced at adult life they are. When I was a post-graduate, being invited to a professor's home was a special event. It saddens me to think that this kind gesture is now being seen as some kind of power play.

And this was casting for… Romeo and Juliet.

But I've noticed more and more students saying that the mere fact a senior person takes them to their house is 'inappropriate' and dodgy because of a 'power imbalance'. I think this is a real pity. I saw it as a great honour when my academic supervisor invited me to his home for meals. Soon, people in senior positions just won't bother to invite the juniors round anymore in case they randomly decide they feel unsafe.

Yes. When I was a student my professors regularly would invite year groups for dinners, film showings or evening events at their (often very nice because they were early boomers!) houses. They were generous and hospitable. My PhD supervisor invited me often, and I was invited to events at lots of other academics’ houses, same when I studied in the US where they do even more personal entertaining of students, if anything. It was some of the first adult hospitality I experienced where I was treated more like a colleague than a student. In my early career, bosses and managers would often do this too. That used to be normal.

Not so much now. I think a lot of that has to do with economics (I don’t invite students to my house because I’d be embarrassed at how tiny it is compared to most of their parents’ houses, for example! Most of them are a lot more privileged than I am! 😂) But I also would not want to risk being attacked by them. I say very little to them socially these days and keep the interaction strictly professional because I feel vulnerable. It’s a shame really because it would be nicer for them to feel more socially informal with me but I just can’t take that risk 🤷‍♀️

My daughter is a 2021 graduate. Contracts for 2020 & 2021 grads are like rocking horse shit. In the last few months there have been a resurgence of panto & cruise ship contracts.

But you wouldn’t believe the entitled attitude of some of her peers. They honestly believe the world revolves around them. To be given the opportunity to work with such an amazing choreographer as Rosie and act like this is astounding.

Oh yes, I can completely see that she asked in a rhetorical way.

I can very much believe that Rosie might have asked what genitals they had but it won’t have been because Rosie actually wanted to know the answer or didn’t already know it. It will have been a rhetorical question in the context of debate, something like ‘look, you’re telling me it’s impossible for anyone to know what gender you are without you telling them. Have you got a penis or a vagina?’ In our world this is a reasonable thing to say. Among the New Victorians oooooh no, that’s harassment!

On the topic of how there can be such a basic difference in perception about what was said, I recently fell out with a friend who is never talking to me again because I'm a (quote) 'transphobic bigot.' I had a group conversation involving this friend where I said that I was concerned about self-ID because I was worried that unsavoury men would exploit it as a loophole to gain access to female spaces in order to predate on women. I emphasised that this was not a concern about trans people, but a concern about voyeurs who would take this opportunity with open arms. My so called friend reported to other people that what I had actually said was "trans women are fetishistic perverts who want to gain access to toilets to rape women." I'm not saying that is what happened here, but it is entirely possible that each side thinks the other said totally different things.

Do you think Rosie asked what genitalia they had?

I can believe that Ms Kay asked that as a means of challenging someone who claims to be "non-binary". The conversation could easily have gone something like this:

Dancer: I am non-binary.
Kay: Really? Humans are sexually bimodal. Do you have a penis or vagina? If you have a penis you are male; if you have a vagina you are female.

This is so wrong and my heart goes out to her. Ballet is tough work, mentally and physically demanding. Her statement about the recent grads makes me fear greatly for their future. For young people who are in the best shape of their peers, they seem to have none of the vigor or stamina of youth.

Then, last summer, as lockdown ended, Kay began to create Romeo + Juliet for the Birmingham Hippodrome. Auditioning a young cast, aged 22-27, she found them troubled. “Covid had lowered their spirits. No one hung out together. They were very disjointed.” They were also inexperienced: several hadn’t even been able to hold their graduate shows. Even so, she felt they didn’t take well to direction from her or appreciate that she was putting them on a big stage

The cast has three female and six male roles. One of the dancers in a male role and one in a female identified as non-binary, although they had auditioned for parts that accorded with their biological sex. Kay says she was happy to use “they” pronouns but “rehearsal is a quick, pressured environment — you need to be raw and instinctual

From that post on Medium:

Corrected Statement: Rosie interrogated two non-binary cast members about their Genitalia, pressuring them to confirm ‘what they had’. It was aggressive, objectifying and offensive.

Below is a photo of one of the non binary cast members. Do you think Rosie asked what genitalia they had?

Really?

Because I can tell just by looking at her that's she's female.

I think it very much is lost, to be honest.

Irony is not lost on this lot is there?

So now the plaintiffs are complaining because Ms Kay made the dispute public she "has caused "potential detriment to [their] careers". They didn't think her apology was enough and, in effect, hounded her from her own dance company and now they want to cry victimhood, again?

I hope that any prospective employers think twice about hiring them.

I am so weary of the "x does not exist" trope

I realised the other day that "denying I exist" is simply the projection of their own way of thinking by an ideology that is entirely predicated on denying that female people exist as a meaningful social class.

Six people signed the letters. There are 9 cast members according to the times, 6 male, 3 female. I wonder if the other 3 weren't at the party, or were but didn't sign.

It's worth reading the whole blog. I also don't believe that she said some of the things listed, at least in the way that they state. She will have said one thing (we can probably work out what for each) and they heard sonething else much blunter.

She said to the times that she denied the allegations she had seen so I think there is complete disagreement about the basic facts.

It's like a real version of how conversations with tra's on twitter go. If someone says "male ppl as a group pose a greater risk of sexual assault, and lots if women have suffered from male violence and need female only spaces,", they hear "all trans women want to sexually assault women in female spaces". It's bizarre but they do seem to hear this.

At one point they say the men were trying to explain to her that gender is a construct. But she will know this. She will disagree that gender is a part of each individual, rather than an aspect of society. And she will disagree that the construct is so significant that it should supercede sex. So they haven't begun to see where she was coming from have assumed motives based on that.

And how about this for "We don't really know what we want, but what Rosie apologised for was not enough "

That she accepted she had been wrong was appreciated, but several of us felt that her apology was inadequate as it was a copy and paste apology. Everyone received the same apology irrespective of what had been personally addressed to them.

What is wrong with saying young people are inexperienced? I fully understood that, when I graduated,I was inexperienced. Training from childhood doesn't mean you are an experienced adult dancer or have experience as a paid employee who has to perform for paying audiences.

It annoys me that young people demand the same respect as people who have earned through years of work. Earn your stripes.

In terms of the rest of the letter... it cones across that they hate her. They hate her beliefs and they are determined to correct her and anything she has said.

I don't know if I would repeatedly question someone about their genitals. It isn't appropriate at all.

Their letter reads like she sat them down and rambled at them. She sounds like it was a drunken group conversation where exception and offense was taken. The reality is most likely somewhere in the middle.

But oh, they don't have respect for her and want her head.

If they think that letter paints them in a better light...

"We insisted on an apology, she gave us an apology, it wasn't a good enough apology but now we can bully her further because, look, she apologised! Obviously we don't accept her apology, because it wasn't written exactly the way we dictated, but we can further browbeat her, because by giving the apology we demanded, and didn't accept, we have proof that she should have apologised. And she should have apologised, and she did, but it wasn't quite right."

FFS

showing them her child’s room!

I mean, how terrible of her to show them her house when they'd asked her for a house tour. SO oppressive I can't even -

Hmm they certainly don’t come across any better in their own words than in the version Rosie told Janice.
I particularly like the bit where they say ‘we’re not young people! One of us is 40!’
It’s like your child going ‘I’m not little! I’m six!’

Yes, but who would say all these things at once to a group of people they were trying to get to be a coherent whole rather than a disorganised bunch who were not working together? Really?

Her object was to get these people working with her and working together. Why would she go to all the effort of eg finding out what they could all eat and so on, then deliberately say a lot of things she would have known would raise their hackles and make them detest her?

She was trying to pour oil on troubled water, and one or more of the group lit a match. I doubt that she was the arsonist.

I once said "I'm really glad I collected charity money in envelopes so that I couldn't have seen how much anyone gave even if I had wanted to" and was immediately accused of wanting to pry into people's charitable giving. I am not joking. Given that experience, I take the sort of accusations shown above with a shovel of salt rather than just a pinch.

I have to look at the probabilities, and I think it improbable that she actually said those things as they are given, because on the whole, real people don't. Anyone informed enough to say such things would be informed enough to know that they were not accurate. Only the figments of the paranoid are so baldly unpleasant in such a generalised way as a rule.

And what, in the name of whatever deity you feel like, would be the motive of the leader of a dance company (or whatever it is properly called) to sabotage her own dance company in such an extraordinary way?

Yeah, I think most people with experience can translate that drama/ shock jock language into what the original statement may actually have been.