Continued from Part 1. Not real advice, just the best conclusions I can come up with so far.
I need to see more performances.
In a city with tons of incredible performances of all sorts, enough of them inexpensive and convenient, why am I not seeing them? Because I’m tired, dammit.
But I would really like to prioritize getting myself in the audience this year. Because I’m a hypocrite asking people to watch me without watching them. Because I need to learn and be inspired. Because I’m sick regretfully reading reviews of things I missed.
Maybe none of us were really prepared for this.
Having attended a liberal arts dance program that exposed us to some amazing faculty and guest choreographers, but did not emphasize producing professional dancers, I expected to be behind conservatory-grads in terms of training and career preparation.
However, it sounds like most conservatories are still preparing their students to enter full-time modern repertory companies, which is rare right now. So we’re all kind of floundering as we figure out how to keep dancing and hustling and navigating the freelance scene.
Given that this is the case, part of me still wishes I had the opportunity to really hone my skills in a distraction-free dance-bubble, before real life kicked in. On the other hand, my college experience offered practice in creating my own training schedule, fitting dance into my life around responsibilities, and creating and marketing my own work, all skills that have made it easier to build dance into my life post-grad.
Professionalism is about being able to work in non-ideal circumstances.
You didn’t have time to warm up. You’re tired from working a morning shift job before. The studio is small. The performance space is smaller than the studio you rehearsed in. The performance space is a concrete staircase and your knee hurts. etc. These are all real problems and bad excuses if you are being paid to perform. I’m finding that the most consistently-working artists have found ways to work safely, intelligently, and creatively around any physical or situational limitations.
And I’m challenging myself to use any given circumstance as an opportunity to practice creative problem-solving. Recently, little things like improv videos on my apartment staircase or coffee shop logbook poetry have helped maintain a thread of creativity in my life when I don’t have dedicated time and space to create.
The artist “lifestyle poverty” (which is to some extent a choice) is different from actual lifetime poverty (which is overwhelmingly not).
This is not exactly a new insight, but it does seem especially apparent and under-acknowledged among the “starving artist” class, as we gentrify working-class neighborhoods and dominate the better-payed service jobs. Expect a length post on this later.
I can’t take myself too seriously.
The world might be a an angry button-press away from annihilation, and I’m in a studio figuring out different ways to spin on my butt. And I would not be doing it if I didn’t deeply and wholeheartedly love finding different ways to spin on my butt. But how is that not hilariously absurd?
Besides, taking myself too seriously has never made me better at anything.
Nadia In Her Own World 