I caught myself doing it again yesterday: standing in front of the buses, waiting for the last few students to load, waiting for the buses to be ready to leave. It’s always when I’m waiting. My feet start to move almost of their own accord. Coupé, rond de jambe, tombé, soutenu, and on and on. It’s a bit like doodling in a meeting but with my feet instead of my hands and I’m not completely aware that I’m doing it until a child approaches me on the way to her bus and says: “Madame, did you used to dance?”
In the moment, as I swing out of the way of the yellow behemoths and send them on their way, I say: “yes sweetie, have a great weekend” but the question lingers in my brain. Yes, I used to dance… a lot.
I danced seriously, intensely, multiple times daily for all of my teens and much of my twenties. I completed two university degrees that were focused on dance. I trained all over North America with some of the best teachers of ballet and modern dance in the world. It was my passion and I was good at it.
But dance is hard. My friends who are still dancing professionally (yes, people do that well into their 40s now) are experts in weaving financial threads together, layering teaching onto performing onto choreographing onto body work onto administration onto grant writing and off into the sunset. It is not an easy life. I know what day I can retire. I know how much money I’m going to make this year. I know that my benefits plan is going to pay for the massage I need to cope with a life of making my joints work too hard. From a certain perspective, perhaps from the perspective of those same friends, I have traded dance for a life of security.
But I still dance. I still teach dance. I still write grant proposals. Once in a while I even perform. One of the least forgiving parts about a career in dance is that there are very few pathways for people who want to continue dancing, without making it their entire lives. Almost every music teacher I know continues performing. Some of them play with our local symphony, some of them have bands, some of them even record. It’s considered completely normal that they would continue to perform in public while making teaching the primary focus of their professional lives. There are lots of opportunities for them to remain part-time performers and there are audiences who want to watch them do that. Most of them will continue to perform well past their retirement from teaching
For middle-aged, part-time dancers, there are precious few performing opportunities and audiences are very thin on the ground. In our culture, we consider dance a pursuit of the young. Parents delightedly enroll their small daughters in dance but many, like my own parents, are aghast that those same daughters, now grown, might want to pursue dance as a career pathway. We’re not quite sure how to interpret dance that isn’t virtuosic, that is subtle, that asks us to think. We’re unaccustomed to thinking of the body as a site for interpretation, political ideas, self-expression, memory and story-telling, beyond perhaps Sleeping Beauty and the Nutcracker. Brains think, bodies just follow… right? The idea that bodies are a site of intelligence is very foreign to most people, until, of course, they take an adult dance class and discover how hard it is.
It’s a dilemma I’ve been pondering since I made the decision to make teaching my primary job. How can I keep dance in the mix? Where do I fit it in? How can I remain part of this community, to be taken seriously as an artist, without making it my full-time job? I can’t say that I’ve found an answer to those questions but they continue to niggle at me, sometimes in the middle of the night and sometimes as I wait for the buses to leave, dancing in the slush, for an audience of none.
Emily Caruso Parnell
As a student and dancer, Emily trained and performed in ballet and modern dance across North America. Her students have gone on to complete professional and post-secondary programs in dance at many major institutions including Canada’s National Ballet School, York University, l’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal, Simon Fraser University, Ryerson University, The School of the Toronto Dance Theatre and The Rock School for Dance Education.
Emily holds degrees in Dance and Education from York University, the University of New Brunswick and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and is a candidate in the Doctorate in Education program at Athabasca University. Emily is a registered teacher of the Royal Academy of Dance and is a content advisor for Canada’s National Ballet School Sharing Dance program.
Emily also manages the ballet program at Dance Evolution, teaches sessionally in the School of Education at Laurentian University and is a vice principal in the Rainbow District School Board.