When Royal Academy of Dance CEO Elizabeth Honer speaks about her first year in the role, one word keeps resurfacing. She hesitates before using it, wary of cliché, and then lands on it anyway.
“I don’t really like the word passion. I think it’s overused,” she admits. “But it really is the essence of the global RAD community everywhere I’ve been and it’s the same here.”
Honer has just completed an extensive tour of Australia and New Zealand, visiting Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington, before travelling through Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. It is a significant moment for the RAD’s Australasian membership. Australia celebrated 90 years in 2025; New Zealand marks its 90th this year.
What she encountered, she says, was a community both deeply rooted and distinctly energised.
“It feels very vibrant,” Honer says. “You feel it in the experience and professionalism of the staff here in Australia and in New Zealand, and in the depth of knowledge across the teams.”
She was struck by the professional depth of the region’s leadership, many of whom have performing careers behind them, but it was the teachers and examiners who left the strongest impression.
“They are the tentacles of the RAD. They are the RAD out into the communities. And they all go so above and beyond for their students.”
In both Australia and New Zealand, she sensed growth.
“It's so energised,” she says, describing a sector that is expanding rather than contracting. “All that I’ve been hearing, particularly about some of the awards and bursary events, is that their numbers are growing, which is just fabulous.”
Immersed in studios for weeks, Honer jokes that she has come away with the impression that “everybody dances” in Australasia. It may be a slightly skewed view of the population, she concedes, but it speaks to the visibility and accessibility of dance here, a country town staple as much as a metropolitan pursuit.
She stepped into the CEO role with a commitment to building what she calls “One RAD”, a genuinely integrated global organisation rather than a London-centric institution radiating outward.
“On one level it could be just a phrase,” she says. “But I really, really mean it.”
While syllabus and education development remains largely based in London, she is determined that national directors are embedded in those processes. Australian National Director Shelley Yacopetti, for example, sits on key project boards and on the strategy group reviewing teacher education.
“That’s what I mean by One RAD, where actually we genuinely work as a global team.”
Honer describes an approach she calls “tight and loose”, identifying the elements of the RAD that are non-negotiable, its core standards and identity, and distinguishing them from areas where national directors can exercise autonomy.
“Which aspects of the RAD cannot be changed because they are the essence of the RAD? And where can national directors have more latitude, more autonomy, to adjust and adapt in a way that best suits their environment?”
In practice, she explains, this means that while the global vision is shared, its expression in Australia may look different from its expression elsewhere. During our conversation, I suggested that it feels less like London broadcasting outward and more like the organisation inviting the world into the conversation.
Honer agrees. “It is genuine collaboration.”
One of the most closely watched aspects of Honer’s leadership is the evolution of the RAD’s strategic framing. Previously articulated as “more than ballet”, the wording has shifted under her tenure.
“It was ‘more than ballet’ before. I really wanted that emphasis to be on ‘expand ballet and go beyond’.”
For Honer, the distinction matters. Ballet remains the foundation.
“Ballet, as you will know, is the foundation of many other dance forms. And if anything, I want to see more people take up ballet to the high standards that we have.”
But she is pragmatic about the contemporary landscape. Companies are no longer purely classical. Young dancers are exposed to multiple styles, and teachers report demand for broader training.
“This is not about doing multiple genre,” she says. “But where it makes sense, and where the teachers themselves are saying, ‘Actually, I’m being asked for additional styles and broader training’ — and we want it to the high standards that the RAD is known for.”
Honer’s background is in large-scale organisational transformation, and she is candid about the RAD’s need to strengthen its technological foundations.
“One of the enablers to everything we do is technology,” she says. “But it takes investment.”
Teachers and members will be encouraged to hear that the 2025–26 financial year will see the development of a comprehensive technology strategy. At present, she acknowledges, the organisation operates across multiple systems that do not always communicate efficiently.
“We’ve got lots of different systems, some of which don’t talk to each other, which means it’s not as efficient as it could be.”
She is also exploring the application of artificial intelligence to streamline processes.
“I’m really interested in the application of AI to help improve some of those processes.”
The aim is to simplify exam administration, improve access to results, and expand digital resources, including video on demand for technique demonstrations and continuing professional development.
“You can actually go into our website and see videos of demonstrations of technique, or have Continued Professional Development that’s pre-recorded and you can watch it at a time that suits you.”
For studio owners navigating rising costs and administrative pressure, these improvements, she hopes, will be tangible.
In Australia, where competition culture runs deep, from local eisteddfods through RAD State and National Awards and on to The Fonteyn, the relationship between global standardisation and high-performance ambition is nuanced. Honer does not see tension.
“What I’ve been really struck by, and impressed by, is the way the team here have integrated the RAD and the competition culture.”
Entry into major RAD awards in Australia requires engagement with the syllabus, creating what she calls “a really lovely marriage” between global standards and local aspiration.
The word she has heard most frequently in her first year is “excellence”. But she is careful to define it.
“The challenge I’m sometimes given is, ‘Doesn’t that mean the RAD is elitist?’ Absolutely not.”
For Honer, excellence refers to the quality of teaching, not exclusivity of access.
“Excellence, for me, is about the excellence of the dance teaching. And that, to me, is absolutely congruent with being inclusive. Because if you have a great teacher, they are really able to be inclusive.”
Whether a pre-primary student or a professional-track candidate, whether a child or a Silver Swan, the standard of pedagogy should be equally strong.
Honer remains an active dancer, taking two Silver Swans classes a week in London.
“I am therefore experiencing the teacher that the RAD has trained,” she says. “And I’m experiencing what they do in a studio.”
She speaks warmly of live pianists, of the unspoken exchange between teacher and accompanist, of the physicality of being at the barre. It is not a single anecdote that shapes her leadership, she explains, but a sustained context.
“It gives me a taste of what our teachers are doing day to day in the studio. And that does influence my thoughts.”
Looking ahead, Honer outlines four strategic pillars: refreshed teacher education; strengthened member value; greater impact in the dance sector and society; and robust organisational foundations.
Teacher education, in particular, feels urgent.
“I’m hearing quite a lot around the world about a shortage of dance teachers,” she says. “How do we fill that gap?”
Diversity and inclusion are also firmly on her agenda.
“If you think that many of the people who do end up on our stages have come through our studios when they were little, the RAD has a huge responsibility to increase inclusion and diversity from those young ages so that that flows through to change what we see on our stages.”
In terms of leadership style, her ambitions are simple.
“I cannot do this job sitting in an office in London.”
She wants members in Australia and New Zealand to feel personally connected, listened to, not directed.
“This is not some distant leader dictating from afar.”
As she boards yet another long-haul flight, this time back to the UK after weeks on the road, she carries, she says, copious notes. The conversations have been generous, candid and invested.
There is one final image she returns to: time zones turning across the globe, RAD classes beginning one after another.
“There’s something of an RAD nature happening every minute of every day somewhere in the world,” she says. “Who’s in the first plié of the day?”
– Olivia Weeks