We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Steffi Carter. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Steffi below.
Steffi, appreciate you joining us today. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?
It was June 2020, early days of global quarantines and heightened awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. The political landscape was changing. If we’re honest, many of our relationships were changing, too: Our relationship to our own beliefs and biases, our family and friends, and our work.
I was reckoning with my own privilege in ballet. While I am not white-presenting, I was perhaps “white-fashionable”. By this, I mean that the pre-professional support which was so readily given to me (excellent training, resources, scholarships, and opportunities which should be accessible to everyone) seemingly fell out of fashion the moment I became a professional. Ballet the art form was kind to me, raised me sweetly. Ballet the industry seemed to say, “This far, no further.”
I did carve out a meaningful international ballet career. This required the usual resilient self-advocacy, but also a great deal of self-censorship and settling for less than I am worth for fear of being replaced in a predominantly white industry. Worse, I am still among the privileged. I had to do something.
I started with the smallest ‘something’ possible by creating an Instagram profile dedicated to ballet diversity. My first instinct for a username and website domain was available, I made a simple logo. The hardest part was (and will always be) answering the question, “What can I do?” It quickly became clear.
I wanted to offer high-caliber virtual ballet classes led by world-class BIPOC professionals. At the time, I was a certified ballet teacher with 13yrs experience and a sprawling personal network of teaching artists, but I was so often the only person of color faculty member that I realized I’d have to expand my network. I began reaching out to artists I admired, distant heroes. I shared our mission, offered paid teaching opportunities, and promised to handle all organizing and marketing.
To my utter surprise and delight, my heroes wrote back! We hosted our first live virtual ballet class just five days after Renversé Ballet’s first Instagram post.
I took the smallest possible step toward facing classical ballet’s many problems. It takes a lot of work for each step, but it is rewarding. DEI work is never easy, but each step I take with Renversé Ballet has made more sense to me than every step I’ve ever taken in my performance career.
The heroes who’ve become mentors, the artists who’ve become friends, the overlooked who’ve found a second wind, and the new movement and music we’ve created all make me feel like I’ve found my life’s work: A tiny, but mighty and meaningful way to create opportunities for underrepresented artists for a more informed and inclusive ballet community.
However futile it may feel on the grand scale of things, take the next step.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Renversé Ballet (RB) started by offering one weekly live virtual ballet class in 2020. We have always prioritized accessibility and diversity, with a suggested donation of $10 for a class led by artists from Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballet Black, LINES Ballet, Boston Ballet, Royal Ballet, and more.
Three years later, RB continues to offer live virtual ballet classes, in addition to summer intensives, private coaching, international collaborations, and original screendance films by aspiring and established choreographers and composers. We continue to prioritize accessibility and diversity in all forms.
What sets Renversé Ballet apart is that we are a virtual ballet community by design, not as a placeholder. “How often do you get the chance to learn from titans in the field in a class size so favorable they call you by name?” This question was enough to fill RB’s classes in 2020, but the mainstream Western market has since lost interest here in 2023.
We have scholarship dancers in East Africa logging in on California time to take class from a Brazilian teacher logging in from London! We might’ve started during the pandemic, when everyone’s career was interrupted or cut short (students, teachers, professional dancers, and choreographers alike), but RB was never just about offering virtual classes during COVID-19. If this never occurred to us, we are part of the problem.
Too many of us forget that “going back to normal” after the world started opening up again was an outrageous privilege, not a right. Millions of dancers did not have artistic training or employment to return to, may never have high-quality training, resources, or audition and performance and leadership opportunities. “Going back to normal” is, in many ways, a return to the many inequities we ignored before. Renversé Ballet will not go back to normal.
RB remains a virtual community to maximize artistic and audience reach, engagement, impact, and development. Physical, brick-and-mortar ballet studios and companies face limitations. More and more, we must recognize that the traditional ballet company hierarchy no longer serves us, but in fact perpetuates the cycle of exclusion, abuse, and homogeneity which limits ourselves, and our beloved art form.
The virtual space is a difficult, uncharted frontier. But Renversé Ballet will remain in the virtual space because, here, we can do the most good. We will continue partnering with ballet studios across the country to coordinate diversity programs, and we will continue partnering with the least represented ballet companies around the world to level the field. The virtual space empowers us to connect to the global ballet community in every way possible.
Renversé Ballet’s vision is simple: We want more people to tell more stories, more often. Everyone belongs to ballet, and everyone deserves a chance. RB will always listen to you, and we will always share the platform.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
You do not have to suffer for your art. I think you have to serve your art to earn it,
but you do not have to suffer.
I attended the sort of prestigious university where peers defined your intelligence by your cynicism, your authenticity by your antagonism, your love by your conflict, and your talent by your suffering. This is not unique to the University of Chicago. Any place you spend those formative years (~18yoa-22yoa) will leave an impression on you.
By 22yoa, you are a product of both your childhood and an intense learning-unlearning period. After 22yoa, your task is to re-question and untangle your new definitions, desires, and goals. Between 22yoa-25yoa, I truly believed that artistic passion was willful suffering. That if I was not willing to undergo at least some abuse, I would not only never be a professional artist, but would never deserve a chance to be. You must know, you’re not done. You must keep finding yourself.
It took coming home and reconnecting with my family and community, but the epiphany came in the strangest moment. We were on Nutcracker tour, so I was holding back a colleague’s hair while they praised the porcelain altar after a riotous cast party. We did not hate each other, but we were not friends. They treated me well enough, but they constantly treated my good friend, a less-privileged-immigrant-artist, with disdain and disrespect. They were young, talented, and white.
“Remember,” they said, between cast-party-effect-heaves, “no one gets to define your career except you.”
This interaction helped me recognize my own agency in light of the abuses I was then allowing. This helped me leave that company to seek fairer employment abroad, find companies and individuals who recognized my value. This helped me separate and redefine suffering versus service.
Ultimately, this prolonged my performance career and further shaped what kind of teacher, choreographer, and leader I want to be.
I am still wrestling with this, but: You do not have to suffer for your art. And you cannot make others suffer just because you did.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Oh so many pivots! But I’ll give you the most recent one.
I was on a work visa in Dublin, working an office management job by day and rehearsing and performing full length ballets by night. It was the first time I was entrusted with heavy-hitting classical roles like Odette (Swan Lake), Myrtha (Giselle), and Gamzatti (La Bayadère). I was neck-deep into writing my Fulbright proposal at the time — first racism in ballet, then gender politics, then traditional ballet company hegemony — when my best friend and I snagged tickets to watch a prominent Russian ballet company perform Swan Lake.
All year I’d been wrestling with my performance and academic passions, and was finally settling into my research comfort when she leaned over to me during Act I.
“I felt it more when you performed it.”
And suddenly I was desperate again to perform, to train, to try. My best friend was terribly biased in my favor, but I also trusted her to never lie.
What I realized, in that moment, is that I’ll never get rid of either instinct: I will always carve out ways to perform (and I performed my first Black Swan the next year, my third Sugar Plum the year after that), and I will always itch to read, research, and experiment academically.
The pivot, here, was understanding the fact that I will never have one path. One dream will never suffice. And that is okay! Ballet and Academia ask us to sacrifice our whole lives to them, but. To be truest to myself means honoring all of myself. I will always dance, and I will always want to learn more.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.renverseballet.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/renverseballet
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/renverseballet
Image Credits
Amanda Monsavath, Alex Fine, David O’Brien