Ballet Influencer and Educator Cynthia Dragoni

Social media is full of dance influencers, from your favorite ballerinas, nutrition and care pages, and workout inspiration, to the hilarious (and often enraging) Models Doing Ballet. Cynthia Dragoni stands out, sharing short and long-form videos on all platforms under the handle @thedancelens. The videos cover history, current events, details of the business of dance, such as contract and pay disputes, and numerous other subjects. She offers what many people don’t; the unvarnished truth about the dance industry and history, serving to educate and inspire every day. Ms. Dragoni recently relocated to Los Angeles and has made a splash, creating content for both PBS ALL ARTS and Marquee TV. She is a multi-disciplinary artist, working as a producer, curator, educator, and activist. We met as she was acclimating to Los Angeles, adding to her teaching schedule, and learning to navigate Los Angeles’ broad and diverse dance landscape. We sat down to discuss her training, mission, upcoming projects, essentially, what makes her tick. She is a fascinating and multifaceted human, who is deeply committed to and in love with dance.

Ms. Dragoni trained at The Rock School for Dance Education, Boston Ballet, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet. She then went to Europe, dancing and continuing to train in Ukraine and St. Petersburg, Russia. After a classical career in which she danced classical works including Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Giselle, La Bayadere, Spartacus, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty, she returned to the States, began to teach, then moved to New York where she continued her studies and danced with the contemporary companies Henning Rübsam’s Sensedance and Ballets with a Twist.

While Ms. Dragoni was on the performance path for a long time, her love of teaching was also ignited young. She was asked to sub for a class at the age of 13.

I did, and it was like everybody came in the next day and said they were sore. It was this moment of understanding that giving the art form away was really where I came alive. That act of taking this precious pearl and giving it away, it’s really what I was always meant to be doing. I love taking the art form where it wasn’t.

I’m interested in both the development and the dispersion of dance, in access, in bringing the art form where it wasn’t. If that’s on TikTok, in a refugee camp, to a theater in a desert. To hold the door to the temple open, so that people can see this art form is for them regardless of their knowledge, background or experience. In the same way the rising sun is for all.

It was organic that, while still performing, she began to teach open classes in New York. She founded Ballet Institute NY, where she created and ran international ballet summer programs in Bretagne and Paris, France, collaborating with the Conservatoire Mozart in Paris.

I started teaching again, the way one does, you know, you pick up a class in Westchester at nine o’clock in the morning where they’re teaching pointe before ballet class, just because it’s stable, and you know what’s going on. That [teaching] started to take on a life of its own, people started doing privates, and then it turned into a group. I opened the school in Brooklyn, and that was its own story.

She was ahead of the curve, creating an interdisciplinary program where artists studied more than ballet technique and history. Theatre and visual arts were studied alongside dance to nurture multi-faceted artists. Then, in 2020, like everything else in dance, the focus shifted.

I ran a school in Brooklyn for 10 years, and it was like a school and dance collective. It was cool, but then COVID interrupted our lives, and I started teaching online. And you know, you can’t just scream at kids online about their turnout and their straight knees, you know. So I was like, I gotta make this interesting. So we started doing these dance history classes, and I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t talk to you about Nureyev without talking to you about the Russian Revolution. It’s like, the connections just make themselves. And it was so cool. We had so much fun. There were kids from all over the world. They weren’t huge classes, but it was spread out, you know? It was like Florida, France, and Brooklyn, and it was kind of hilarious.

After an injury, always a time of self-reflection for dancers, she met with a high-powered journalist friend. She was doing additional production work; Co-curating the performance series for the international gallery Carvalho-Park in Brooklyn where visual and dance artists collaborate by creating new works in the gallery’s performance space and working with the Flying Carpet Festival, a multi-media children’s festival that brings performances and arts experiences and education to refugee and displaced children along the Turkish Syrian border.

She expected the friend to introduce her to a PR agent and instead, She looked at me and was like, honey, TikTok is the most powerful form of media right now, and if you’re not on it, I’m not even gonna have this conversation with you. (She was nicer about it.) It was a moment to figure out what to do. I was injured, sitting on the couch, and, you know, I’m not going to do “get ready with me [TikToks].”  I’m not that type of an influencer, right? Like, I love my lipstick, but you can wear whatever you want, you know?  (I will interject to say that Ms. Dragoni has perfected the red lip. She may be that kind of influencer after all….) I opened up the TikTok account, and I was like, I don’t really know what to talk about. I guess I’ll start with Gisele. So I started with the story, and people were responding. The educator and activist was activated!

It was really interesting. I have always thought that dance has not been maximized as to its potential; artistically, spiritually, commercially. How do you access potential if you don’t have enough people in the room? We’re still on the fringe in a lot of ways. Sometimes you’ll see arts programs in schools and they don’t even list dance. Why is that? Because a lot of us really don’t know what it is. Ballet is the most known, but it’s still on the fringe, and it’s a loaded word. People think of it as being boring, elitist, right? They think of it as being for little girls, which makes it even lower, unconsciously, right? The actual form is none of those things. It’s gender neutral. It’s like painting. I think that dance as a medium has not reached any of its pinnacles.

She launched @dancelens and the social media accounts took off.

I noticed that a lot of the people in the room, I could tell by the way they asked questions, were not dancers, and they were so into it. And I was like, You know what? This is so cool, you know? If you can just pull back the curtain without dumbing any of it down, the whole thing can explode.

Explode it has! Ms. Dragoni has over 90,000 followers on TikTok and another 43,000 on Instagram. She is currently working with Marquee TV and PBS on long form videos released via YouTube, where her channel has 33,000 followers.

One aspect of Ms. Dragoni’s trajectory that inspires me is the evolution of her childhood dream. She has traveled far from her initial goals yet remained true to who she is. In retrospect, all of the skills that she employs now were there at the start.

As a little girl, I always knew that my dream [of being a dancer in the corps de ballet]  was not what I thought it was. I had this just a level of awareness around that, like I could see myself as an adult, and I knew that it wasn’t any of the things that I thought it was going to be, and at the same time, I deeply wanted those things. The wanting of it WAS the path. I didn’t think about anything else for decades and I read every book. Had YouTube been a thing when I was a little kid, I don’t think I would have ever left the house. There are so many parts of myself that I’ve gotten to utilize with this new media project.

It started with her school and the consistent exploration of the various skills needed as a performing artist; choreography, marketing, producing and the overall necessity of good communication skills as well as the exploration of how the skills could be nurtured.

Marketing is all communications. How do you succinctly communicate with a group, and what are they going to get out of it? In [traditional] ballet school, you’re not nurtured to be creative, like they don’t let you. You’re not making up your own dances.

Even as a young teacher, Ms. Dragoni differentiated her approach from the “follow and be quiet” model that many of us trained under.

I used to do a fun exercise with my students. I would give them a budget and tell them how many seats were in the theater. We called it ballet math, and included how much you had to pay the dancers, add in all of the costs. They would have to do the math. It always started with, “we’re going to do 100 shows and sell a million tickets!” Then you get into, well, the math of all that. I would let them make up their own dances. It was all of these things that I had wanted [as a student]. So it’s like my childhood dream at this point feels as relevant as my childhood clothes did, like I don’t need it anymore, but I needed to wear them to be here now.

Here and now is exactly where the dance world needs Ms. Dragoni. Her vast eclectic dance experience is equally appealing to young bunheads, dance educators looking to engage students, and the general public who may not understand the intricacies of contract negotiations or how revolutions affect what we see on stage. What leads to conversations about dance revolutions, sexual abuse in competition, schools, and different colored tights (or no tights at all) in classical ballet? Conversations are where progress and changes are made. The @dancelens platforms are brilliant spaces to discover which questions to ask and what stories to follow about dance in all its permutations.

I encourage you to check out Ms. Dragoni’s work. I promise you will leave inspired and more knowledgeable than when you started. Start by clicking on the links below!

Links:
TikTok
Instagram
YouTube

Some examples of current work:
A Short History of Contemporary Dance | Marquee TV 
How ‘Firebird’ revolutionized ballet and music (PBS ALL ARTS)

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Written by Nancy Dobbs Owen for LA Dance Chronicle.

Featured image: Show shot: Flying Carpet Children’s Festival in Turkey – Photo: Sarah Dawson McLean