NEW YORK, NY.- New projects from star choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker are always highly anticipated. But with her dance company touring Europe, a cloud has hung over her.

In June, more than 20 former dancers and staff members in her company, Rosas, said De Keersmaeker had bullied and body-shamed employees, and endangered their health by ignoring COVID-19 rules. Speaking anonymously to the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, they said that De Keersmaeker ruled the organization in an authoritarian way; that approach might have been commonplace in the dance world of the 1980s when De Keersmaeker came to prominence, they said, but it was no longer acceptable.

“She can really make you feel like you’re worthless,” a dancer said in De Standaard.

On Tuesday, during a lecture in Ghent, Belgium, she gave her first public comments about the complaints.

“I embrace the idea that the leadership style that people expect today involves more open dialogue, and more awareness of — and respect for — everyone’s limits,” said De Keersmaeker, 64, according to a transcript published Thursday on her company’s website.

“I want to offer my apologies to all the people I have disappointed and hurt,” she said.

A spokesperson for De Keersmaeker declined an interview request Friday and said the company would not comment on specific accusations. After De Standaard published its investigation in June, Rosas issued a statement that said: “Healing conversations, which we are always willing to have, must take place in a safe and confidential environment where there is room for nuance and empathy.” The company was introducing a “well-being working group,” the statement added.

In recent years, a series of scandals have rocked the dance world in Europe and America, with stars and company leaders increasingly being called out on charges ranging from bullying to ineptitude to sexual harassment. Filip Tielens, the culture editor at De Standaard, said that the accusations against De Keersmaeker were part of a “new wave of accountability.”

That wave has also crashed over another prominent Belgian artist with whom De Keersmaeker has collaborated, Ivo van Hove. Last month, the International Theater Amsterdam cut ties with him after an official report said that a “culture of fear” had developed under his leadership. Van Hove and De Keersmaeker worked together on the 2020 Broadway revival of “West Side Story.”

Since performing her first solo, “Violin Phase,” in 1981 in New York, De Keersmaeker has gone on to become one of the world’s major contemporary dance makers. Initially known for creating formally rigorous dances, filled with repetitive movements, she is now widely admired for her diverse work, including pieces set to music by John Coltrane and Joan Baez. Critics have described recent dances as “ecstatic” and “freewheeling,” noting that they entertain audiences as much as challenge them.

Tielens, of De Standaard, said De Keersmaeker was the “godmother of contemporary dance” in Belgium, where her influence is broad. In addition to Rosas, she founded P.A.R.T.S., one of the country’s leading dance schools; both are supported financially by regional governments.

De Keersmaeker had long had a reputation for strictness, Tielens said, but rumors of something more serious at her company began only last year, after Hans Galle, a former Rosas publicist, posted on social media that he had left the company because he was unhappy with the leadership.

Galle said in an email exchange that, during his 10 years at Rosas, De Keersmaeker was “very controlling and unpredictable,” which intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic.

De Keersmaeker was a “COVID skeptic,” Galle said, adding that she refused to get vaccinated, making it “logistically complicated to organize tours and performances.” De Keersmaeker refused to wear a mask properly when government regulations required it and expressed annoyance with the company’s mandatory safety protocols, Galle added.

De Keersmaeker “did not take into account that it was a very stressful, scary period for everyone and made no effort to make it feel safer,” Galle said.

The Rosas spokesperson declined to comment Friday on Galle’s accusations but said the company had “acted in compliance with local COVID rules.”

In her speech in Ghent on Tuesday, De Keersmaeker said that her company was “working hard to build a new, safer and more inspiring working environment.” That was an ongoing process, she added.

The lecture ended with a with a riff on Samuel Beckett: “Let’s try, let’s fail, let’s try again better.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.