DDP Talks To Minnie Lane (Artistic Director)
Renversons
DDP: Your inaugural season is starting in 2026. Did you choose to follow traditional financial strategies, or were there other avenues you explored to be financially prepared for your season?
Minnie Lane, Artistic Director: “As a choreographer, it’s always been important to me to pay dancers fair wages. I’m very fortunate to be able to invest personal funds in start-up costs, including paying dancers and collaborators for their time from the company’s inception. Through both research and personal connections, we have been able to get generous discounts for things like studio rates, physical therapy services, and photography. We have also received in-kind donations from music publishers who resonated with our mission and understand our budget limitations. My team and I are building a donor base and applying for grants for this and future seasons. We’re also taking creative approaches to marketing and development, like creating a zine [a magazine produced non-professionally for a relatively small audience] to distribute in community spaces to capture the attention of potential new audiences to ballet. As we are currently structuring our company, it is also very important to us that Board of Directors seats are representative of working artists and professionals committed to social justice. As we are strategically planning, the vision we have for our leadership structure is one in which the Board of Directors, who are entrusted with holding our organization to its mission, are working artists in the field.”
DDP: What lessons have you learned about entrepreneurship that the dance world doesn’t often discuss?
Minnie Lane: “A scarcity mindset hurts the field as a whole. My team and I have encountered so much generosity simply by building genuine relationships and asking what’s possible. We also do our best to extend that generosity—we share resources with other choreographers, invite dancers to our free company classes, share grants we’ve found with others we think could apply, and try to help in any other ways we can. I’ve learned that competition doesn’t actually help anyone, whereas sharing resources actually does—especially among underrepresented artists. Doing what you can to help peers who may have encountered more barriers than you does benefit the entire field. Diversity and more perspectives in the dance world only help us move forward and bring more people in.
I’ve also learned the benefits of building communication into the infrastructure of your company. My Associate Director, Rosie Elliott, and I worked hard making a “Working with Me” form for Renverson’s collaborators to fill out that allows them to delineate their communication style, accommodation needs, and personal boundaries.”
DDP: You share that “dancers’ financial, physical, emotional, and artistic well-being are essential to the creative process.” How are you following through with this statement as you build Renversons?
Minnie Lane: “We’ve integrated systems into our company structure to support dancers in each of these areas, and we do our best to introduce structural opportunities for dancers to share their needs as new issues arise and create a culture where dancers feel comfortable doing so. We are committed to paying our dancers a living wage, which we determine by researching reports on the living wage in our region. We also reimburse for pointe shoes to make sure that dancers who perform en pointe are not implicitly paid less than dancers who only perform in flat shoes.”
DDP: What do you think is the most significant barrier to female leadership in the dance world?
Minnie Lane: “I think the biggest barrier to female leadership in dance is how rigid gender roles have been built into ballet’s structure. Women are often paid less, expected to do extra physical labor like preparing pointe shoes and maintaining pointe technique, and held to higher technical standards while being treated as more replaceable. Men, meanwhile, are encouraged to choreograph or lead from early on. Trans and non-binary people are given few avenues for success. Those patterns don’t just hold women back—they narrow everyone’s possibilities for what leadership can look like. Because I had an untraditional path as a ballet dancer, I was lucky to gain leadership experience outside of dance, and I try to bring that perspective into my role as a director. Until we remove our gendered expectations of ballet dancers, the system will keep recreating the same imbalances.”
DDP: Renversons is founded “on the belief that ballet is not a relic, but an evolving medium open to interrogation, disruption, and reinvention.” How do you achieve this artistically as well as throughout your business?
Minnie Lane: “So much of ballet culture and programming focuses on preserving ballet’s history, and very specific histories at that. While I believe in honoring the roots of classical ballet and see a lot of beauty in the history of the art form, ballet’s history is also full of injustice, marginalization, and erasure of the contributions of Black, POC, disabled, and queer artists. My longest piece to date, Bury Your Gaze, reimagines the narratives of the Biblical creation myth and the Greek Muses through a feminist lens and explores the rich interiority we lose when we take the patriarchal perspectives of these stories at face value. Structurally, this led me to attempt breaks from tradition in ballet as a medium itself, and the piece gives all of its dancers opportunities to partner, be partnered, and exchange roles regardless of who is wearing pointe shoes. Through this process, I observed a lot about how our attention has been trained to watch ballet. I noticed that when a dancer wears pointe shoes, even when they are the supporting partner, the positions of their feet and their transition steps are very obvious, whereas when the supporting partner wears flat shoes, their feet don’t draw the eye as much: I needed to choreograph precise footwork, and the dancers needed to be very intentional while also sharing weight and keeping each other safe. I’m impressed with how the dancers I’ve worked with rise to these challenges with enthusiasm, patience, and teamwork.
The more Renversons has taken into consideration dancers’ and other creators’ artistic goals—the ways they want to grow, be challenged, and hone their skills—the more we’ve reached creative heights that we wouldn’t have reached otherwise, and that I certainly wouldn’t have reached on my own. Within that, it has been necessary to also consider artists’ physical and emotional needs, which include financial support, equitable practices, and open lines of communication. When people’s nervous systems are overly activated, innovation, creativity, and safe risk-taking become impossible—especially for dancers, who are creating with their physical bodies.”
