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What is your relationship with dance (or whichever art form you practice)? Are you married to it? Divorced from it? Do you live with it? How often do you visit? What do you do for fun? When did you know this was the one?
I've come to the place in my dancing life where I've had to define my relationship to dance. From the tender age of five, I loved dancing to music in the studio in front of mirrors but I also thought it odd and questioned why I was doing it. What's going on? Why do I have to wear these tight clothes? When can we go to the beach?
That questioning of dance has been with me my whole life. It doesn't stem from a resentment or bitterness towards what I haven't been able to achieve, the audition I never got, the show that never happened. In fact, it's because of those moments that I have more definition now, and for that I'm incredibly thankful.
It does stem from a moment when I lost my faith due to injury and physical collapse. My interpretation of my teachings as a young dancer was that if I worshiped at the altar of dance long enough, it would always grace me, always feed me, if only in the form of more dancing. If I devoted all of myself to the form, the form would devote itself to me in return. When I pushed myself too hard in a creative process and ended up bankrupt on the other end, I realized I needed to be in a better relationship with dance and, more importantly, myself as an artist.
Some signs you are in a relationship with dance:
| You and your friends watch videos of your favorite dances over and over again. You cherish these pieces. They become your talisman.
| You get irritable if you haven't danced in a few days, either taken a class or just noodled around the studio for a while. You know the only thing that will alleviate the agitation is dancing.
| At parties, people seem to slip into dancing so easily but you pause. You wait for the right song, the right moment, to get up and share your soul.
| You go to all lengths to make a dance happen. This includes: driving in an snowstorm for 8 hours to get to rehearsal in another state {this I have done}; leaving a job to invest in a project or creative process for months on end; living in a place that stresses you out but there is so much dance happening you just can't live without having it in your daily life; volunteering or working for free on a project {after you've worked for free for a good portion of your career} because you love the work and the people involved; and going to graduate school. Yes, graduate school for dance.
|You're at a dinner party with other dancers and choreographers and one lone artist who isn't in on dance, a musician or photographer perhaps. All of the dance artists and projects you talk about are completely unknown to the lone artist. Completely.
| You secretly watch "So You Think You Can Dance" but you tell people you don't.
| You tend to stretch at airports or in public spaces while you're waiting.
| You eat uber healthy foods until the day of your performance and then you have to, just have to, have a burger {perhaps veggie} and fries.
| You prize comfortability over fashion in your dress. So you tend to find yourself wearing comfy pants and big shirts in which you can, at a moments notice, roll around on the floor and start dancing.
| A contact improvisation jam on a Friday night in a cold studio after a busy week seems like a good idea.
| You don't have any work but you are working a lot on making dances or dancing, and you feel 100% fulfilled by this.
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These are some. There are more.
It's quite fun to think of all of the ways you've demonstrated your devotion to your work. And this devotion is a good thing. But let's also be honest here. There are only so many full-time jobs as a dancer or choreographer. There is only so much money for dance in this country. Find, invent, cultivate other ways.
Studying dance has shaped me into someone who has a keen sense of collaboration, an understanding of relational thinking, an obsession with detail, a deep creative practice and a rigor and focus - a discipline, really - both physical and mental that allows me to work hard at anything I take on. These are highly prized attributes in the work force but, more importantly, these are the things that make me a better artist. These cultivated skills you have as a dancer or choreographer can be put to good use in other ways outside of dance as a way to further stabilize and strengthen your devotion to dance, a.ka. the longevity of your career. I think putting these good, hard-won skills to use in other ways creates more fluidity between the form and our current culture, helps the form breathe a little more and helps retain more dance artists and their engagement with the form. And perhaps this is where I'm headed with this question - that we look at fostering a dance artist into being when someone signs up for dance classes. An artist.
What is my relationship with dance these days? We spend the fall and spring performing together. We share our work once or twice a year. We take the winter and summer off for generative work periods. We like to share our work in small batches over time. We choose our intake of other dance performances thoughtfully. {Art is like food. When I decide to take it in I better know why I want it in my system and how it's going to nourish me in return.} We make sure when we engage in a project that we're paying those involved at a fair rate and we make sure we meet our budget at the end, not just in terms of money but in terms of quality of time. We focus on the people we like to work with, people who challenge us and demonstrate love towards us. And I make sure my relationship with dance never forces me to forfeit a relationship with a loved one, a family member or friend. Sometimes this is hard, but I try.
All of it is because of a desire to build a body of work over time authentically rooted in how I want to live my life as an artist. I offer this not to tell you how to live yours but to offer the question to create space for you to think about what you want your relationship with dance to be, right now.
You have a choice. There is a sentiment in dance that you don't. That if you don't fit the model of being a dancer or choreographer you are bad, wrong, there isn't a place for you in the system. I like to say there are as many ways into the body as there are bodies. So there are as many ways into dance and making dances as there are dancers and choreographers. What is your way in and out?
Get into a relationship with dance.
The author Laraine Herring writes in Writing Begins with the Breath:
"I really encourage you to think about your writing practice as a relationship. Cultivate a respect for each other. Just as in any of your human relationships, maintain healthy boundaries. Don't let yourself become so enmeshed in your writing that you measure your life by its rhythms. There's a whole world out there. You should probably experience some of it so that when you return to your desk you'll have something to write about."
Replace the word writing with the word dance and you have:
"I really encourage you to think about your dance practice as a relationship. Cultivate a respect for each other. Just as in any of your human relationships, maintain healthy boundaries. Don't let yourself become so enmeshed in your dancing that you measure your life by its rhythms. There's a whole world out there. You should probably experience some of it so that when you return to your dance you'll have something to dance about."
Exactly.
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{Photos of an greeting card by Petite Sauvage with an illustration by © Thais Beltrame 2011}
