Dance is my life: keynote address from On The Move Toronto Conference 2009
Dance is my life: how to do what you love for a long time (without becoming an alcoholic or going broke.)
This is the written version of the keynote address I delivered at On The Move Conference in Toronto in February 2009. While my ideas have been formed through my experiences as a contemporary dance artist, I believe they are applicable across dance disciplines.
Motivation: What is it about dance that you love?
Do you need to dance no matter what?
If yes, then you can look for every kind of dance gig available, from working on cruise ships, to burlesque troupes, dance teams for professional sports teams, auditioning for the dance competition shows, to musical theatre. There are commercial dance groups in Toronto and other cities that perform at corporate events, or delivery dance-o-grams, there are circus groups that include dance and related skills. DanceOntario has a website with lots of listings for Ontario, use your internet skills to find other dance opportunities outside of Ontario.
Will you only dance in work that inspires you?
Many dancers as they move from just graduated to emerging find a few choreographers that they really like working with and work only with them. When they aren’t working with those artists they do other things. Some are massage therapists, work in a library, teach something, work in the service industry, or are physiotherapists, firefighters, lawyers or pharmacists.
Do you want to make your own dances?
Gather your peers together and work on something. At first it may be hard to pay dancers, so create a collective where those who want to choreograph can, and those who want to dance can. Share the responsibilities and make it a win/win situation for everyone.
Do you like teaching?
This might be your main expression of dance, or it might compliment the rest of your dance life. Many dance artists teach different forms of dance at studios to children and teens, and many also teach related practices like pilates, yoga, gyrotonic, conditioning through imagery, creative movement, or fitness classes.
Do you love dancing, hate teaching, like writing, selling, baking, or bartending?
Some people find that teaching drains their creative energy and would rather spend their non dancing time not dancing. Arts administration is a very big field and there is always work out there. The benefit of this is that you’ll learn a lot that will benefit your own career. Others make a part of their living in other creative fields like web design, or making clothes or bags and selling them at arts and craft stores and markets. Same with baking. Bartending and other service area jobs such as catering are good, but may get tiring after a while. As time goes on you may find that you’ve worked a lot of part time jobs and decide that a complimentary career is better. Or that you love working at the local café.
Figure these things out. Once you’ve figured them out, you’ll know how to make choices in your working life.
A note on logistics: If you are a dancer, it is important that you continue to train, you need to stay in shape and practice dancing. That means you need to be in class. Open professional morning classes are the most common way to do that, and keep you connected to your community. You will want to figure out a way that you don’t have to work every morning. And depending on how much sleep you need it might not be the best choice to work at a bar that closes at 2 a.m. if you are trying to make class the next morning. There are evening classes too, but since the majority of dancers take morning class, it’s a better way to keep connected to your community.
Expertise
According to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. By the time you’ve graduated from your dance training program, you are probably an expert in dancing. However, you are not necessarily an expert at performing or creating. You need to practice these skills. Take workshops, and form a collective where you can take turns practicing.
There are a number of professional development workshops offered in your own city throughout the year. A plug for my own organization: Hub 14 offers a series of classes and workshops to compliment, augment and diversify a dancers training. www.hub14.org. Service organizations will have lists, so will publications like the Dance Current. There are a number of workshops across Canada, in the United States, in Europe and everywhere else too. If you aren’t sure what you need, ask another dance artist whose work you admire where they would recommend. There are professional development grants available that you can apply for to go abroad and train.
You might have to ‘play to play’ for a while. This also goes for whatever else you are working on building (a regular following in a class you are teaching independently for instance). Workshops are good grounds for practicing these skills, as are self-initiated projects and opportunities to dance for free in other independent projects. Many established dance artists still occasionally participate in certain dance projects for free. It depends on what it is. You can set and change your own boundaries on this as you proceed.
Make dance upon graduating. Most dance programs in Canada train dancers, choreography is another skill that requires a lot of practice too. In the same way that you might put your very first drawing on the fridge, but wouldn’t necessarily charge money for, you will show your first dances to friends and colleagues but not the broader public. My suggestion is to make your dance and invite one or two trusted, more experienced artists to come in and give you feedback. Don’t make a whole piece and invite someone in to give you feedback on your last rehearsal before it goes before an audience. Have your outside eye come in several times over the course of your process so that you have time to work with the suggestions and insights and incorporate them into the piece.
You can team up and produce a show yourself, or you can apply to put your piece in a festival or mixed program. Producing is a whole other skill set that is valuable and challenging. I would advise forming that collective and some of the members produce the show, some choreograph, some dance. One of my favourite examples of this is the Young Lungs Collective in Winnipeg. They are sometimes as many as twelve strong and they produce one or two shows a year. Two or three of them produce the show and do not perform or choreograph for that one. Then next show three others produce and so on. Another benefit of a collective is that even if one or two members are away or too busy for a specific project, there are still enough members to proceed.
Money
Don’t go broke. Nothing is worse than having to pass up the amazing artistic experience you’ve been working towards because you can’t afford it. Create a fund reserved for professional development. Create another one for when you need a vacation or when you are injured. 10% of everything you make in each. Do it.
There are lots of money workshops available through the dance service organizations. Take some of them. I recently took a big three day workshop on wealth and money management. One of the most obvious things they pointed out was that we are not taught about money management in school unless we take a degree geared to it. I remember in high school learning how to write a cheque in family studies class, and having to do a budget for groceries. This isn’t really useful because a grocery budget is contingent on the actual price of groceries. It is not a transferable concept related to the rest of your income. A better thing to find out is how much you should be spending on rent – I think it’s supposed to be no more than one third of your income.
If you figure out that you have to save 20% of your income (as outlined above), and you know how much your rent is, and you have a rough idea of how much the rest of your expenses are, you’ll know if you are making enough or if you need to figure out another shift, class, or gig every week or month. Remember to budget for dance class too. Join the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists for training reimbursement and ticket discounts.
I am defiantly not an expert on money. There are lots of people who are. Go and talk to one or two and figure out a system that you can follow and start saving.
Support & Balance
A dance life can be challenging, and exhilarating when you can see forward motion and are engaged in satisfying work. It is vital to have a support network. Families don’t always understand because what we do doesn’t look like traditional success. Make sure you have people around you who value what you do and can point out all the good in what you are doing. Some of these people need to be other dancers because you will want to talk about the improvement in your plié at some point. Those dance service organizations are good for that too.
For all the dedicated to dance stuff you will be doing, do some other stuff too. If you are in a relationship you probably do some stuff that your partner is into that isn’t dance related, and you hang out, and snuggle. If you aren’t, make sure you hang out and snuggle with friends!
Dance dance dance! It has to be related to the rest of the world, so interact with it. Find inspiration in other art forms, get to know the world of contemporary art. Geek out on all that you are into. One thing feeds another.
Get Started
When I first graduated, I teamed up with another dancer who worked at a hip and beautiful bar in Ottawa to create Momentum: a series for emerging choreographers performing their own solos in intimate environments. There were five or six of us and over the course of two years we produced monthly performances at the bar. We attached ourselves to bigger festivals happening in the city and gained some attention from presenters. We took turns producing and eventually toured in Ontario, all without funding. This was a great way to get experience performing and creating and to learn about producing.
Get started right away. Do something towards your career right now and every day or every week. Keep training. Go see shows and meet people. Ask questions. People love answering. Make sure you love it.
Some information about me:
MEAGAN O’SHEA
“Off the wall, impossible to categorize, fun” Montreal Gazette
Nationally acclaimed performer Meagan O’Shea’s is known for her solo work, interactive installations, and collaborative creations. The first graduate from The School of Dance’s (Ottawa) Professional Training Program in 1996, she now lives in Toronto where she divides her time between research, play, creating, performing, training and teaching. Her own work includes movement, improvisation, choreography, clown, comedy, theatre, storytelling, interviews, and tactile association to create innovative performance experiences for audiences in Canada, the United States, Europe and the U.K.
O’Shea recently founded Stand Up Dance, a company to support her work that she defines as humourous performance work that examines important ideas from a lateral perspective, and engages an audience in an untraditional way.
She is currently working on a new solo based on actual unrelated events that seeks to explore and discover the relationship between: Home/less/ness in the body; the evolution and translation of different languages and how that relates to movement or How Many German Words I Know; the superfluous and erroneous nature of the prolific global corn crop and what’s happening to the honeybees?
Other solo work includes: Coffee for One (2007), an undisciplined performance created through a series of tasks in order to discover the meaning of life; something blue (2006), which examines the physical manifestation of emotional trauma through the lens of ended marriage, and questions the lack of ritual for love lost, accompanied by an interactive wedding dress; As I unravel small maps of my spirit (2005); Night Stills (2003). She is also incubating a new group project How to Save the World (as demonstrated) through Movement through a series of residencies. Meagan created dance like no one is watching – contemporary dance meets mobile clubbing, a street dance project with online component featured at Toronto’s 2008 SummerWorks Festival.
Her group work has been commissioned by IDAC, Loose Confederacy of Newfoundland, Dusk Dances, Dance Ontario, Whetstone Productions, YMI Dancing, and restorative justice organization CCJC. She has been guest artist in residence at fabrik Potsdam in Germany, Earthdance in Massachusetts, Le Groupe Dance Lab in Ottawa, Sunshine Coast Dance Society in Sechelt BC, The Banff Centre, Dance Base in Edinburgh Scotland, and The Theatre Centre in Toronto.
Meagan also works as a choreographer, director, teacher, performance coach, and outside eye. She is co-founder and director of HUB 14, a collectively run dance and performance studio which is offering a series of classes and workshops called Public Works: trainings for performer with bodies. Upcoming workshops: The Falling Body with Dana Gingras, March 21 & 22, Choreography: Contemporary Problem, Strategies and Delights with Keith Hennessy, May 8 – 10. www.hub14.org
www.standupdance.com
