The Royal Ballet School has collaborated with the International Youth Dancer Health Alliance (IYDHA) to share its passion for dancer well-being globally and showcase its existing work on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport and Dance (RED-S) education.
With a well-established School Healthcare Programme already in place, The Royal Ballet School launched its own RED-S week last year. Head of Healthcare Wayne Kitchener shares that there has been a real “progressive pace of learning over the last eight years at the School,” helping to prepare young dancers for the industry and to build healthy careers.
March this year saw the perfect opportunity for The Royal Ballet School to join up with other leading dance training institutions, American Ballet Theatre, Australian Ballet School, Ballet Academy of the Vienna State Opera, Canada’s National Ballet School, Codarts University of the Arts, English National Ballet School, Palucca Hochschule Fűr Tanz Dresden, Royal Danish Ballet School, Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School, and Zurich University of the Arts at the inaugural Youth Dancer Health Awareness Week 2025: Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport and Dance.
RED-S is a syndrome that sees a decline in athletic performance and health in athletes due to insufficient fuel through food.
The week-long virtual event, March 3-7, brought together leading international dance schools, healthcare experts, and dance educators on a shared mission to foster a healthier and more sustainable future for young dancers, which focussed on RED-S, a significant and often overlooked health challenge affecting pre-professional dancers.
The event’s keynote address featured Karen Sheriff, former Head of Healthcare of The Royal Ballet School, a leading advocate for dancer health and Executive Director of Project RED-D; Dr Jo Larking, sports and exercise medicine consultant; and Steven McRae, Principal Dancer at The Royal Ballet. It also showcased three on-demand webinars designed for dancers, parents and artistic staff, and an interactive Q&A Session, and post event video response session from panellists is available on the IYDHA YouTube Channel.
“It was nice to be part of it,” Kitchener says. “We do a lot of work with the students on this subject throughout the year, and every academic year, there will be one week devoted to RED-S Awareness.”
Now taught in The Royal Ballet School’s syllabus in hopes of prolonging dancers’ careers and making dance training safe, sustainable, and fun, Kitchener said that the younger dancers at the school have been receptive to it.
“I actually think the younger generation of dancers now have a much greater interest in their health and well-being and overall health care,” says Kitchener. “They’re engaged and explorative about understanding more about what data can tell us. They have a much greater interest in that area now, which is great and will likely lead to career longevity.”
The theme of the International Youth Dancer Health Awareness Week changes each year, with this year’s focus on RED-S coming at a good time.
“On the whole, there probably is an increase [in RED-S],” Kitchener notes. But as with a lot of these things, if you’ve got a greater awareness through better education, a bigger understanding around prevention, and an increase in screening for it as well, i.e. looking for it more globally in different ways, that’s why the burden of it is higher than what it was previously.”
He continues, “Anyone can have a RED-S issue. It occurs across the spectrum because it starts with low energy availability. On a simple level, what you’re putting in does not match your physical output, as simple as that. That can happen in an older dancer just as much as it can a younger dancer. The issue with younger dancers is that they are physically growing and maturing; therefore, the impact could be greater. And, because they’re physically growing and maturing, their risk of bone injury is higher.”
The partnership also helps battle the ‘normalising’ of overworking that can be associated with the dance world.
“There’s a real normalised culture, of course, around high workload, training, hours, fatigue in ballet,” Kitchener says. “But what we’ve tried to do through education and through some initiatives is to dispel that. One thing we do at the school is to monitor fatigue. We’ve got a collection of kids who are monitored for their physical fatigue using a jump test. Now, that’s only a small, piloted group right now, but because that’s created loads of interest amongst the rest of the year group, they’ve actually come and asked more questions about it and wanted to be involved because there’s a level of interest.”
By partaking in the International Youth Dancer Health Alliance, The Royal Ballet School hopes to share its knowledge and work alongside other leading organisations from around the world to foster a healthier and more sustainable future for young dancers.
By Jamie Body of Dance Informa.
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