Relocation

MY BLOG IS MOVING!

http://dustinisadancer.blogspot.com

The new blog will be focusing more on my preparations for my new job as a principal dancer with St. Louis Dance Theater!  Go read and enjoy!

In honor of laying it all out there.

Today was not one of my best. At all. First, shit hits the fan about how ridiculously broke I am. I will be the first to admit that I saw this coming, and somehow thought that I could just kind of float through a few days of a negative bank account balance. Or can I? Anyway, we are about to find out. There is some food in the fridge, and I cannot spend any money until a week from tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Next, I get nearly attacked by a crazy customer upon entering work. For the sake of my customers that may happen to read this, I am not going into details. That is just not what this blog is about. It is about the journey to get me dancing again. The preparations, the triumphs, and the failures. Speaking of failures, I also receive this from Compagnie Flak today:

Dear Dustin,

Thank you very much for taking the time to audition for the company a few weeks ago but unfortunately we do not have a position for you at this time.  We will keep your information on file and contact you should an opportunity arise in the future.

Thank you for your interest in the company and best of luck in your upcoming endeavors.

Sincerely,
The Company

In all honesty, I was tempted to write them a rejection letter back. However, I have realized that there is no point in wasting energy on words that will only fall on deaf ears. I have to accept this rejection, and I choose to lay it out there because it is a very large part of what I am going through. I want to read this letter, realize what it is I am working for, and gain that much more inspiration from it. While running this evening, as I became tired and kind of hungry and kind of had to pee, I kept repeating my new mantra, that I pulled from “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.

“It’s what you do.”

So what I am going to do is move forward. The purpose of rejection letters are to help me gain momentum.

A difficult, demanding kind of joy.

I have been back in Chicago for a week now. Exactly, in one hour, actually. I have to admit, it has taken me a few (several) days to get back into something that resembles the life I was living prior to landing in Canada. I miss Montreal greatly. I feel that I mourned a little bit. In the process of that mourning, I realized that I needed to carry on a certain feeling that was brewing deep inside me during those hours of class and rehearsal. I am not sure exactly how to describe it, but it certainly can be said that it is an extreme need to constantly push forward. It is not to ask for more, but to demand it. This is what I owe myself.

In the meantime, let it be known that I am currently too broke to get back into class. While this is a setback of sorts, I am currently more concerned with making the rent and digging myself out of the financial hole that I put myself in during the years past. This by no means is a regret for going on the adventure that I had in Montreal. In the days following my return, the necessity of that trip has made itself more and more apparent to me. Considering this, the purpose of this blog and the journey of my life have taken a slightly higher velocity towards gainful dance employment. I plan to document everything that happens to me as I open up to a wider range of experiences that will hopefully put me on a stage and allow me to expand in artistry.

What is currently helping me quite a bit is the continued presence of Audrey in my life. She is currently attending the summer intensive at Hubbard Street Dance Center, and is sleeping on my couch on the meantime. You should remember her from a particular earlier post regarding being locked out of our MTL apartment, and from a particularly compromising photo that took place in our restroom there. Which reminds me…

She might kill me for this.

With that out of the way, the time has come for me to do a few things. First, I have to not only maintain the strength and technique I gained in Canada, I have to improve upon it. Maintain stamina, increase strength and flexibility, eat as little as possible (JOKE), you get it. Second, I must plan and save up for auditions. At this time, most companies are not holding many open auditions. I must send them my materials (C.V., letter, photos, videos) and convince them that I am worth a private audition. What stands in my way at the moment is putting together a decent video. I have had terrible luck with this in the past, but I must achieve the feat, somehow. I must find a friend who has a decently functioning camera that I may borrow temporarily for my purposes. At this moment I am texting a coworker of mine, Stephanie, to see if she still has hers. Hopefully her husband (who is performing Shakespeare somewhere in Michigan) did not take it with him. As soon as this video is shot, it will be sent to Ballet Nouveau Colorado and Trey McIntyre Project.

These are my plans as of now. I figure if I force myself to publicly admit every step I take here, then I will be encouraged to be more proactive than before. I shall also admit that I failed to properly wake up as I had planned to do my morning yoga series. Hopefully, every admission of failure on my part will be an appropriate kick in my ass to keep the ball rolling. Nothing but honesty here. That being said, I am off to my apartment’s gym, provided it has cooled down to an acceptable temperature. Here goes!

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It’s a wrap.

So the show is done. The project is done. My roommates have all left, and it is just me by myself in this apartment. With some Mac and Cheese keeping me company.

I have been giving a lot of thought to how I was going to explain how everything has ended up so far.  Needless to say, it did not go as I expected. However, I should not have had any expectations going into it, and this does mean that I had a bad experience. I learned how to have the courage to speak my mind, though, and in light of that I feel that I should be completely honest in everything that happened.

I was extremely disappointed in my time working with Jose Navas. Extremely. Look back a couple entries at when I mentioned being upset. Basically, I was trying to dance for a man who was only inclined to latch onto a handful of favorite dancers and only feature them in his piece, shoving the rest off to the side and barely allowing them to dance. In any other situation, this might not be such a big deal. In the event of Springboard, however, it is important for dancers to have a fair amount of exposure performing onstage for the fact that most of the audience was supposedly made up of directors, choreographers, talent scouts, and other members of the Canadian dance scene.

For me this ended up being a bit of a roller coaster.  First day, he loved me.  Second, I came in poorly prepared and did not remember parts of the choreography that we had learned the day before.  Dancers, be warned: WHEN THIS HAPPENS TO YOU IT SUCKS. So I was pulled from a lot of (read: most of) awesome-favorite-dancer parts.  Over the next few days, I had to continuously bust my balls to win his good graces back, and become featured again. It was none too fun, but a serious learning experience.

Jose Navas creates his work with a method that he calls “The Machine.” The dancers are given a phrase of his that mostly consists of come chaine turns, rond de jambs,and some tombe-coupe action (think basic modern vocab). Then, he arranges the dancers in a small, tightly-spaced groups, and designates one or two of them as the “anchor.” The Anchor’s job is to execute the phrase as given. All of the other dancers around are to create movement that compliments or vaguely resembles the anchors’ choreography while partnering or remaining in physical contact as much as possible.  What results is a very confusing jumble of dancer’s who are all executing their own choreography. The resulting clusterfuck is then inserted into the work with no further development. Basically, he leaves it up to the dancers to do all of the work. How this is considered a creative or collaborative process is beyond me.

In the beginning of this adventure, Jose asked us how many of us (be they male or female) had experience on pointe.  Of course, I raised my hand, as did most of the girls and all but one of the guys.  The other guys are the kinds of dancers that are nice enough, but they have those super sick legs and feet that I have no other choice than to kind of hate them deep down.  Those who know me well, know that I do have much to brag about from the thighs down.  I knew what I was capable of, and decided to go for it.  I was also the only guy who already had a good pair of pointe shoes (Yes, that is a shout-out to RP).

The other guys decided that they would get fitted, but waited a week to do so.  In the meantime, I was doing the work to figure out the movement on pointe (a lot of turning, and up until recently turning on pointe was NOT my thing).  I had this feeling that the other boys had no clue what they were getting into.  Sure enough, when they got their shoes they were falling all over the place and for the most part were barely able to get en pointe in proper alignment and lift themselves up properly. After a few minutes of that embarrassment, Jose told them to take the shoes off and not worry about doing the piece en pointe.  I realized this only after I had asked one of them about his shoes when I noticed he had not been rehearsing in them. After he explained what Jose said, he capped it off with, “Well, at least I got a free pair of shoes out of it.” WHAT?! Jose BOUGHT those shoes for them!! They got free shoes for lying about what they were capable of?! And they still got featured, and rewarded, and treated well, and job offers?? I was officially over the edge. I was taking this to Alexandra, the director of Springboard. Of course, when my shoes were dead as well as a lot of the girls, there was NO offer of compensation or shoes.  Not for the dancers who actually DO the work.

I was also pissed that he started making job offers to some of the boys really soon after starting the work.  He even told one of them to not bother coming to his audition because he was guaranteed a job.  During rehearsal one day he brought in his company manager, and they had to go outside of the studio one at a time to talk to her. I found this to be terribly inappropriate to do while we were trying to work on our choreography and take notes from his assistant. I just wanted to say, “Dude, I get it, you’re looking for guys. But can we do this later? Really?”

So, when I had the opportunity I sought out Ms Wells and gave her my problems. I was a little worried, because some of the girls went to her about being not featured in the piece we were working on, and apparently the conversation did not go as well as they had wanted it to. However, when I brought up the pointe shoe purchase and the job offer thing, she actually agreed with me. She gave a possible perspective about the shoes, but she said that he was breaking a rule that the companies have to agree to before participating in Springboard: that no job offers are to be made until the Sunday AFTER the program ends. Technically, that is today as I write this.

So my task throughout this mess was to redefine what my true goals were, and redefine what being successful at it meant to me.  Seeing people get a job who are not true artists, but simply because they happen to be valued by someone else does not equal success to me.  I still learned an AMAZING amount from my teachers here and the other choreographer I worked with, a genius by the name of Julian Barnett. With experiences I have gained here, I have learned a new way to push myself, to accept what happens in my life, and to have the courage to make myself heard when necessary.

I took the longest walk around the city today, and it really tired me out. I am also a bit sunburned. Jean-Pierre comes again tomorrow, and I plan on seeing more of the city with him. There is also a party next door, and I am debating whether or not to attend. In all honest, it seems unlikely. After all, it is almost two in the morning, I will still have more laundry and packing to do, and I am le tired. Good night.

I went for a walk.

And I tried to take some pictures of things that I see regularly in MTL.  Here goes….

We crowd around this tiny table for our meals, or use to coffee table in the next room. It’s cozy, and thank god we are all comfortable being up in each others grills all the time.

I walk through this park everyday on the way to class, and pass by the fountain that is so nice to sit by and relax in the evening.  It is know as Square St. Louis.

This is some kind of government building…it reminds me of a lovely palace, and sticks out greatly in my mind.  It’s a hallmark of the look of Montreal to me.

Apartments here are very quaint, and in my opinion, ubes cute.

And here, people put bumper stickers on their cars that support causes I can really get behind, yet not downwind of.

Picture post!!

This is gonna be fun guys, because that means I don’t have to type a lot.  Last night, Rachelle and I went to wander around at

While at the festival, we heard several singers/bands that I had never heard before.

While we were there, Rachelle saw her first Colorguard performance!  She had never seen this before, being from France and all, so when we got to go home I schooled her on winterguard via Youtube.  Michael, you would be proud, I showed her Northern Lights and James Logan.  She got the good stuff!

This city is just too cool.  With festivals like this happening throughout the summer, and so many people out to enjoy it!  Where else does this happen, FOR FREE???

For some reason it seems more organized in my mind to put the other pics in another post, because they are not so related.

Wondering how my shoes have been?

In honor of my newfound skill at posting pictures, and on request of Ali Aguilar (Hi, Ali!!!) I am posting some pics of the Bravas that I had purchased and danced for a little bit in before leaving for Springboard.  If any recent customers of mine are reading, they may or may not have seen them as my demo of my first darning job (which helped immensely, by the way).  I have spent 3 hours a day rehearsing vigorously in them, in addition to a great deal class time in them as well.  For the record, even with great shoes pointe work hurts like hell. Friday was the first day that I did not want to jump out of the window by the second hour.  Also, I have fairly beaten the shit out of these shoes.  I’m proud of myself.

They look (and smell) way dingier in real life.  The boxes are still pretty alive, but there is not much left for the shank or the tips.  However, I am much more comfortable turning in them now, and like I said pointe work is just a bit more bearable than previously this week.  I wish I had a video of the piece to post…maybe one day we can work that out.

Diversion

At the moment I am a little upset and frustrated and I don’t really want to talk about any of it.  Apparently, it is difficult to get a headshot printed in Canada on a holiday weekend.  So in the meantime, I just found out how to get pictures from my phone to my coomputer via Bluetooth, so in order to cheer myself up I am going to leave you with a very flattering photo I took of one of my roommates who spilled milk on herself before class.

Catch up!

So it is time to elaborate on a few things that I have not been able to blog about…

So earlier this week, I had dinner at Edgar Zendejas’s house.  He was throwing a little get-together for his dancers and for Kidd Pivot, because he had several friends in that company who he was not going to see while he was rehearsing his company and then leaving to Domain Forget for residency.  He invited me and two other guys he knew from Springboard, as well as some old BJM dancers he was friends with.  As I had stated before, Crystal Pite was to be there as well.  For those who don’t know, I very briefly met Crystal during a reception for Netherlands Dance Theater at Russian Pointe while they were on a US tour.  It was my first time to see her work live, and see her in person, and I have practically worshipped her since.  I was one of the first people to arrive, so by the time she came I was situated with some food and had met everyone there.  It was such a perfect opportunity to make some new friends in Montreal who were not a part of Springboard.  When Crystal came in, she said hi to everybody, but there was absolutely no hint of her recognizing me or looking familiar in the least.  I thought about going over later and asking her if she remembered how we met, but then a girl who knew her from BJM (Danielle) sat down next to her and dominated her attention for a few minutes.  Naturally, I listened in on their conversation while they filled each other in on what they had been up to since the last time they worked together in a studio.  Then Danielle asked “the questions”…

“So are you having any auditions soon?  Are you looking for anyone?”

I realized something very important in this moment: I am sure that by now Crystal has been driven crazy with these questions from dancers.  Even the ones she knows. Everyone wants to work with her, and it is pretty obvious as to why. However, in this moment, Crystal just wants to be a person, hang out with her friends, and now talk about having a company or making dance or all that other stuff.  She just wants to see her old friends and tell funny stories and make jokes (all of which she is also very good at, by the way). She answered Danielle directly an honestly, that she probably was not going to be looking for anyone for a few years. So, I decided that if I was going to talk to her, it was going to be as casual of conversation as possible. And occasionally I did get a word in with her.  She was relaxed, and super comfortable to be around. She’s just a cool chick who really likes to hang out with people.  I did, however, tell her that I really liked Plot Point, her most recent work for NDT.  She was really surprised that I saw it, and didn’t know that they had put a video on it. Anyway, her response was, “It was stupidly ambitious for the time frame I had to create it, but thanks.” I thought it was pretty funny.  Then the other two Springboard guys sat down next to her to talk about how much they loved the DANCE.  I rolled my eyes. However, I could not help but notice how remarkable well she navigates social situations.  But enough about Crystal, I was having fun with other people, too.  I talked to Edgar about the chances of me getting to work with him if I came to Montreal.  He liked the idea that I was working with Jose Navas, because the two of them often share dancers.  However, Jose would be the one to have enough money to pay for my papers to work in Canada for a bit.  For now, this is the situation I am hoping for.  However, Emily Molnar is in watching classes to invite dancers to her audition.  Let’s hope I get to go to that one tomorrow!

In the meantime, I am fighting with a clogged kitchen drain, and losing pretty miserably.  I might have to get breakfast at the coffee shop, after all.

I am becoming less and less of an early riser…

Finally, a new post!!!

It has been getting hard to wake up early enough in the morning to write, but now we have internet in the apartment so I don’t have to walk all the way to the coffee shop to do this!

Today is a national holiday in Canada, known as “St. John the Baptist Day”.  I do not know why this is celebrated, but apparently the banks and grocery stores and whatever are supposed to be close.  This also shifts around where we have our classes, for for the the changes are very minor. I have class in a studio MUCH closer to our apartment, so I don’t have to rush around like a crazy person this morning.

Normally, I have taken classes this week in the studios of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, which is quite a walk from my place.  But the walk is down a very nice street, and it’s a great warm up for class. I think about what I read from Deborah Vogel, about how the best way to warm up for class is to do something cardio-related that gets your body temperature up, then lightly stretch and roll out muscular tension.  I guess it’s worked well, because I have had decent classes lately.  That reminds me, I need to do more of the Active Isolated Stretching techniques, and talk about how they work for me.

In my rehearsals I am dancing en pointe.  Like, real crazy turning and fast movement and everything en pointe.  Being a pointe shoe fitter for a few years, you would think that I would have had a better grasp on what to expect.  I realize that no matter how great and supportive your shoes may feel, pointe still hurts REALLY BAD during a 3-hour rehearsal.  But as I do it more and more, I just kind of get used to it.  I wonder how I will feel about it by this weekend.

Emily Molnar of Ballet BC will be watching ballet classes today and the next day.  Then a list of dancers will be posted who will be invited to the audition.  I really hope that I at least get invited.

My evening with Crystal Pite was pretty awesome, but I did not talk to her a whole lot.  I will come back later and elaborate on this more.  For now, I gotta get in line for the shower and throw some breakfast together. Off we go pray for my toes!

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