Rethinking How Children Consent in Arts Education Workshops

Belinda Mathieu

The notion of consent has become a hot-button issue in contemporary society, particularly when it comes to young people. Across France, where arts education workshops are a common part of public school education, choreographers and educators are rethinking their approaches to dance workshops for children. Though these workshops are not immune to complex power dynamics, they also show how, under the right conditions, dance can be a useful tool for helping people of all ages better understand consent.

Across France, the status of children in society has become a hot discussion topic, as incidents of abuse in families, schools, and extracurricular activities have been increasingly highlighted across traditional and social media. In this context, should pedagogy for children be reinvented? Can the conversations around consent, sparked by the #MeToo feminist movement, inform educational practices? Like many educators, choreographers who work with young people are reevaluating their practices and adapting the way they run arts education workshops for schoolchildren.

Choreographer Mélanie Perrier’s company ‘2 minimum’ has been organizing such workshops, for kids ranging from toddlers to middle-schoolers, across France for more than fifteen years. For Perrier, dance is the perfect way to talk about consent. “Whenever we do exercises in pairs, whenever children have to get into physical contact with one another, I ask them ‘are you ok with someone touching you?’,” she says. “It’s very important for children to be able to say these things.” Warm-up is also a good time for her to lay down some baseline elements, by helping children name the body parts that they are okay with having be touched by others. While Perrier claims her workshops are geared toward protecting participants, she acknowledges that “children often don’t choose to be here. If one of them doesn’t want to participate, they still have to because the workshops are done during school hours and attendance is mandatory.”

Juliana Palma, who has led arts education workshops in the Paris region for years, has noticed these power relations as well. “When the schoolteacher and the workshop leader are here, it’s hard for kids to say no,” she says. In order to make sure they don’t feel obligated to comply, we must “create the conditions for them to give consent without betting on them being docile,” she explains. In a graduate dissertation published in 2025, Palma analyzed the tensions at work in these spaces by exploring several strategies that would allow children to speak more freely and increase the workshop leaders’ and organizers’ capacity to listen to them. She explains that it is often a fine balance to obtain consent. “It’s important to tell kids from the get-go that they have a right to refuse to participate, without preventing them from experiencing new things, which they might be afraid to do at first.”

Edwige Phitoussi, a French literature teacher in a junior high school in Nice, has organized multiple arts education projects throughout her career, in collaboration with choreographers and dance institutions. When she explains the project to her students at the start of the school year, they seldom show immediate enthusiasm. “At the start, they almost systematically refuse,” she says. “But I think it’s more a case of them being afraid of what they don’t know, because once I’ve talked about it with them and shown excerpts from the piece, they change their minds. In the end, I’ve never had a student categorically refuse to join in.”

Palma also thinks opening a conversation is key. She pays particular attention to whatever happens before or after the workshops, or during breaks. “I try to create an individual rapport with the children so they feel comfortable coming to me with whatever they want. And I try to not be too ‘teachery’ – to not look like the only one who knows or and who can talk to the group.”

Making sure children fully consent requires a certain awareness as well as an ability to question the power dynamics that govern relationships between instructors and children, between adults and youngsters. In Latin, infans (the root of words like infant or infantile) refers to not being able to speak, reminding us that children were not originally considered as citizens. Perrier agrees: “I try not to use the word ‘transmission’ when I talk about arts education projects, because it implies I am the one passing on knowledge from above. I prefer saying that we are inventing something together.”

“I try to create an individual rapport with the children so they feel comfortable coming to me with whatever they want” Juliana Palma

Phitoussi also sees her workshops as a moment where she can establish a more egalitarian relationship with her students, by putting herself in a vulnerable position as well. “I’ve always tried to take students’ discomfort into account,” she says. “I often share with them moments when I myself have felt embarrassed during one of my first dance workshops.” While she doesn’t take part in the show in the end, the 60-something always does the warm-up and trains with her students, even if that means showing her physical limitations, which shakes the image of authority that goes with her position as their teacher. “Session after session, we are building collective trust,” she says. “We listen to each other, there is solidarity, and a sense of camaraderie between them, and between us all.”

Palma concurs that sharing moments of vulnerability has allowed her to create strong emotional bonds with younger participants. “Once I arrived to a workshop in tears. I chose to share how I was feeling with the kids instead of hiding it. They gave me hugs and asked if they could help me feel better,” she recalls. “I realized right then that asking for consent had become second nature to them.”

Belinda Mathieu is a journalist and dance critic who works for several publications, including Télérama, Trois Couleurs and Sceneweb. She holds degrees in French literature (Université Paris-Sorbonne), journalism (ISCPA) and a MA in dance from Université Paris VIII. She is also the editor of CN D Magazine.

Resources for Professionals
Consent in dance mediation and arts and cultural education practices
June 18, 2026 at Marché des douves in Bordeaux 
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Juliana Alves Palma De Souza 
Master’s thesis in Dance
Quelles places pour les perspectives des enfants sur leurs expériences en danse ?
UFR Arts, Philosophie, Esthétique directed by Isabelle Ginot, 2025
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Vivianne Rodrigues de Brito
Workshop
Rethinking touch in dance practices
June 27, 2026 at Tiers Lieu de l'Esvière, Angers
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Sébastien Charbonnier
La fabrique de l’enfance (Anthropologie de la comédie adulte)
Published on November 11, 2025
Editions lundimatin, 2025 
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Madonna Lenaert
To consent or not to consent: on informed consent in the arts
Published on October 7, 2024
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