Kathryn Morgan on Ballet Competitions & Pressure to Be Instafamous | Part 2

Ballet Help Desk

In this second part of the conversation, Katherine Morgan and the hosts discuss the distorting effects of social media on the ballet competi

Key takeaways

• Katherine Morgan warns that dancers are losing the 'plot' by focusing on high-impact tricks for Instagram rather than understanding the artistry of a variation.
• Many ballet company directors steer clear of hiring 'social media stars' because they fear these dancers lack the ability to work within a team or accept minor roles.
• The pressure to maintain a specific body image and the rise of 'skinny culture' on social media are major contributors to mental health struggles and burnout in young dancers.
• Training at prestigious institutions like School of American Ballet (SAB) provides more long-term career value than accumulating competition wins.
• The competition circuit can create a false sense of success, as the skills required for a two-minute viral solo do not translate to the stamina needed for a three-hour ballet.

Main topics

• Social media influence on ballet
• Ballet competition culture and YGP
• Body image and mental health in dance

Notable quotes

We're losing the plot.

Conclusion

The episode provides a sobering look at how modern digital culture can

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Amazon Great Indian Festival is here. Amazon Speaker 2 (0:06) Great Speaker 1 (0:27) Indian Festival is Speaker 6 (0:40) This is part two of our two-part conversation with Katherine Morgan about competitions. If you have not listened to part one, pause. Go back, listen to part one, and then join us back here for part two. Welcome back to the Ballet Help Desk podcast. My name is Jenny, and I am joined by my co-founder, Brett, and we have a timely conversation for y'all. We are speaking to Katherine Morgan all about competition. So let me introduce our guest. Katherine Morgan is an acclaimed ballerina, artist, educator. here. Speaker 6 (1:07) adjudicator, entrepreneur, and media personality, was forged a singular career both on stage and beyond the traditional boundaries of company life. Catherine began her professional career in 2006 as an apprentice in New York City Ballet and then joined the Corps de Ballet the following year. In 2009, she was promoted to soloist. During her time with New York City Ballet, she became known for her distinctive musicality, femininity, dramatic presence, and natural storytelling ability. Her notable roles include Aurora in Peter Martin's The Sleeping Beauty, Juliet in Martin's Romeo and Juliet, and the striptease girl in George Ballantyne's Slaughter on 10th Avenue. among many others. In 2012, Catherine stepped away from New York City Ballet while battling an autoimmune disease that dramatically altered the course of her career. After years away from full-time professional dancing, she made a remarkable return to stage, joining Miami City Ballet as a soloist in 2019. Her comeback resonated far beyond the ballet world and became an inspiring example of perseverance, reinvention, and the possibility of building a career on one's own terms. Since leaving the company life in 2020, Catherine has created a multifaceted career as a guest artist, teacher, coach, adjudicator, speaker, and creator. Throughout her widely followed digital platforms, she has introduced audiences around the world to ballet through classes, technique, artistry, career guidance, performance analysis, storytelling, and candid conversation around the realities of the profession. Her work has helped make ballet more accessible and establish her as one of the arts form's most recognizable contemporary voices. Catherine is the founder of Catherine Morgan and Friends, an initiative centered around creating healthier and more joyful experience for dancers, one in which artists are valued as people first rather than solely for their technical proficiency. Across her teaching, performing, and advocacy work, she has championed artistry, individuality, musicality, and a more compassionate approach to ballet training and professional life. Throughout her career, Catherine has performed, taught, coached, and adjudicated across the United States and internationally, working with dancers of all ages and levels, while continuing to appear as a guest artist herself. Her career has increasingly expanded beyond performance into mentorship, arts education, media, and cultural commentary, allowing her to serve as a bridge between the traditionally insular world of classical ballet and a much broader global audience. Catherine is the recipient of the 2006 Mayelle Ween Award. I think that's how you say it. the 2006 Movado Award, and the 2009 Janice Levin Award. Today, Catherine continues to redefine what a modern career in ballet can look like, combining performance, education, entrepreneurship, storytelling, and advocacy, while encouraging artists and audiences alike to see ballet not simply as a profession, but as an art form capable of evolving with the people who love it. So without further ado, the Help Desk is now open. Brett and I created Ballet Help Desk as the resource we wish we had when our kids were going through ballet training. Now we've got some exciting news. For a while, many of you have asked for an ad-free option, and we've been listening. We are thrilled to introduce the Ballet Helped Us Backstage Pass on Patreon. With your subscription, you'll get every episode ad-free. The full back catalog, remastered. with higher quality audio and early access to the episodes before they are released publicly. As our Patreon community grows, we'll be adding new ways for you to connect more deeply with the podcast and the Ballet Help Desk community. Subscribe today. See you backstage. Speaker 1 (4:25) Before Speaker 3 (4:26) I ask you to support Ace Scholarships with a generous donation, I want to make sure you understand that your donation won't cost you a penny. Thanks to the Education Freedom Tax Credit, you can now donate up to $1,700 to the best K-12 scholarship program in the country and take every dollar off your tax bill. This is not a deduction off your gross income. This is a 100 % dollar-for-dollar reduction of whatever you owe the federal government at the end of the year. Now, why ACE scholarships? Because ACE scholarships were designed to rescue young kids from failing school systems all over the country by empowering parents with real school choice. So far, over 121,000 scholarships have been awarded over the last 26 years. I know these guys personally. I support them directly. And I've spoken at several of their annual fundraisers. Most recently, earlier this year in Denver, it was extraordinary. The event gave me a chance to meet a few of the kids who have benefited, some of whom have gone on to apply for a scholarship from my foundation and then entered the skilled trades. ACE operates with total transparency. absolute integrity, and a fierce dedication to reinvigorate the American workforce. And now you can help them reach a lot more kids, and it won't cost you a penny, thanks to the Education Freedom Tax Credit. Learn more at educationfreedom.org. That's educationfreedom.org. Speaker 6 (6:04) Okay, so who would make a dancer or a teacher serve as a judge or a master teacher at these competitions? Like, for you. Like, what was the motivator for you and then for your friends and colleagues? Speaker 4 (6:16) To be a part of it, I reached out to them. And, you know, obviously they like to have people with a professional background in some way, shape or form. I just wanted to be involved because they are a big organization and you're able to meet a lot of these people and to meet a lot of kids and students. Also during regionals, you do the master classes. So for me, that was a chance to like connect with them. personally, rather than just on stage. But I think we need a lot of people who are forward thinking in this business. And if you are a professional who is forward thinking, I think we need more people like that to be in judges positions, not just YGP, but at all competitions. There are so many benefits to doing it and you get to see a lot. of students all at once. I will say it is really nice to be able and, and for me too, having done certain regionals so many years in a row, you see these kids grow. I remember some of them were nine and now they're 17, you know, so you see the progression. And especially if you're a school that has scholarships to offer or spots to offer, you can see the path over certain years. And that's very helpful to a lot of the judges. So it's just a chance to, to. see a lot of students at once. Speaker 5 (7:31) Building on that, you mentioned something that they see the kids from the time they're nine until they're 17. For these kids that are doing competitions every year and, you know, all the way through, to what end? I mean, I know like when my son did it, he did it once and he had a great time. And it was just to get him some stage experience because he hadn't been doing ballet for very long. And you talk to families who are like, I live somewhere where there's not a lot of great ballet training. This gives my dancer a lot of exposure and they're 14 and they're ready to start thinking about full-time training. But this whole notion of like the competition circuit, what Speaker 4 (8:06) is the point of that? It used to be that this, that is just what you said. It was stage experience. is to be seen by schools and it still is and I think if you go into it like that like I am viewing this as the experience portion the master class portion the chance to be on stage because a lot of these kids don't get a chance to perform so it's a chance for them to get some stage experience and to meet these judges if you go into it being I want to be a star on social media you are going to be extremely disappointed and unfortunately due to social media that is what this has become. And that's what these students are saying. Well, if I do these competitions and I do well, I'll be a social media star. And if that's your motivation and that's what you want, okay. I mean, who am I to tell you not to, but that's not in my head. That's not why to do it. You're playing a dangerous game. You're playing a dangerous game mentally. You know, a lot of these kids do like four or five cities and they go to Europe and they do this and that. And yeah, the judges all know them, but. And that's not, that is the absolute 0.1 % of all the kids that do YGP. And you have to go into it with the right mindset. And yeah, a lot of kids after a couple of years are like, I don't want to do this anymore. And then they go the traditional route and they audition and they go to ballet school and they have careers. My fear with these YGP phenoms, and I said this recently on another podcast, they're incredible. They really are these phenomenal kids. But it's just, it's not. the other 99 % of them. And that's not the job. I worry about these phenoms wanting to be professional dancers and getting into a company and going, oh, I have to be in Swan Lake, like in the core of swans. I have to do 48 Nutcrackers. What? And the problem is that the glamorous, the glamorizing of all of this is not what being a professional dancer is. It's not. You are not going to be whisked away to do a solo in 14 different cities. It's not gala life. Most dancers work their whole lives to be soloists or principals or even members of the company because there are so few spots nowadays. If they get to go do a gala, it's hard for professionals to get into galas. So it's become this social media phenomenon. that is really skewing what the whole purpose of it was in the first place. And so it's just turned into this whole thing. And it's not just this competition, it's all the competitions. And I genuinely blame social media for that. That it is skewing what the actual career of a dancer is. And what an actual career. takes. So Speaker 5 (11:01) let me ask you this, you know, social media as a tool, we all know it's, it's pretty scary, but these organizations don't have to post on social media. Speaker 4 (11:09) Yes, but that's the way of the world now too. I know. If you don't post on social media, you're irrelevant. And that's the other issue. This is not a ballet issue. This is a society issue. And it's something I deal with because, you know, I... I go through many, many stages of I am sick of social media. I don't want to do this anymore. But then it's like you become irrelevant. And it's just like how do you stay relevant, particularly in an art form that's dying? I will say this in defense of competitions on social media. in a way, it's kind of making it cool to stay in ballet, even though it's not with a career. So it's like, it's a catch-22 because ballet, unless we change with the times here, we're becoming a bit archaic. And I love this art form and I would hate for that to happen, but it's also like, you got to change with the times and you have to, in order to stay relevant, you have to post on social media. I think it's just what is going viral are not the ballet company posts and not, you know, such and such ballet posting about their Nutcracker. It's a phenom doing 47 pirouettes with their tambourine. And so it's like, can we, how do we get the other stuff to go viral? If that makes sense. Can Speaker 5 (12:26) I ask you another question? This is a little off topic, but why do you think ballet is dying? I Speaker 4 (12:31) think because we're not. It's now people are speaking out about all the trauma everybody's gone through. And, you know, it used to be this kind of mystery of what it was. And now people know what it takes and what people have gone through to get to what it takes. And a lot of dancers are speaking out and a lot of people, self-included, have told their stories. and companies that refuse to change their practices and change actually how they operate. So you're losing your audience members, you're losing your donors, you're losing your future parents. Because if you're hearing all these stories and you've got a young kid, would you want to put your kid in ballet? No, I'm not putting my kid in ballet. You know what I mean? Like, so there's so many people like, oh, that's what's happening. I'm not going to subject my child to that. So it's like the curtain is being pulled back. We realize what's been happening all this time and systems take a long time to change. That's why I think it's going to be generational with the company structure and how dancers are supported. Also arts funding. That's a whole nother topic of conversation. We have very little arts funding. And so why so many parents are looking at it going, okay, well, they don't, they're not funded like sports teams at all. They are treated. horribly and it's messing up their mental health. It's messing up why, why in the world would I want to support that? You know, and it actually has nothing to do with the Nutcracker or Swan Lake or Romeo and Juliet. You know, a lot of these companies actually find that they're best sellers. The things that make the most money are the classics. Swan Lake, no crackers and beauty. So it's not about, oh, we have to do all this new work and make it cool and da, da, da, da, da. No, you have to treat your talent better. You have to treat your talent better. You have to fund your talent better so that then they can do new stuff in addition to Swan Lake. And so then more and more dancers are happy and then more and more dancers are happy to talk about how they're happy. And look, isn't this great? And we bring in more people and we put more people in the seats and we put more parents. If you have more parents who want to put their kids in ballet and so then it grows rather than dies. It's not about doing new work or the work isn't good. It's about you're not treating your talent right. Speaker 6 (14:46) Well, and a lot of communities don't see themselves reflected on stage. Speaker 4 (14:50) Exactly. That's the other whole part of this. You have to nowadays, especially it's kind of like what people want to watch, you