TRANSCRIPCIÓN 🔗
WEBVTT
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I'm coming at it from the much more visual point of view.
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How does this sweep across the stage?
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How does it connect to the next scene?
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What is the image that the audience might see at the beginning that they're then seeing at the end in their movement?
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And so I go through and I make visual patterns throughout the script.
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Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make?
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I'm Ravuzeri.
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Now, what does it take to turn a movement into a living?
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My guest, Mendy Raposa, is a New York-based choreographer and director whose credit includes Broadway shows and many other theatre productions.
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And campaigns for the NFL and Samsung with Jaden Smith.
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We talked about what does it take to build a career as a dancer and as a choreographer and how much can you actually make.
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So let's turn to Matt.
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Thanks a lot for willing to do it.
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I think it's very interesting.
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Never had a dancer or choreographer on the show, so it's fantastic.
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I'm so happy to be here.
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Thank you.
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So let's start by telling us what is it that you do in the dance world?
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In the dance world, I originate new choreography for plays, musicals, either new plays and musicals or already existing plays and musicals.
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And I also spend a lot of time choreographically as an associate choreographer.
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And that is someone who takes something that is pre-existing that has been made up by another choreographer, and I maintain the integrity of their work in a show.
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I also read that you are a movement director.
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Yes.
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What is a movement director?
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So a movement director, it really depends on the nature of the project I'm working on.
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For example, at the moment I'm doing a Christmas Carol by the Old Vic Theatre, and it's the New York production of that.
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We are called a movement team because that's the nature of the movement that already exists in the show.
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It's not really classed as choreographic, it's more an extension of the actors.
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So it's general movement of the actors on the stage, but not dance.
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Not dance, yeah.
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Not five, six, seven, eight, go.
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So you direct that, go here to the right, go here to the left, and that kind of stuff?
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Yeah, so in this show I'm on the movement team, and the everything that the actors do in the world of movement to music is already made up, and what we do is we restage what is already been made up by the choreographer, by the movement director.
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I thought they left a lot of it to the dancers themselves.
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There are some choreographers who work like that, but my experience is that's more towards company dancers, and they've worked with a dancer for 20 years and they have that kind of a dialogue with them.
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Okay.
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Yeah.
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So let's back up for a second.
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How were you introduced to dance?
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I actually don't know what my very first experience of dance was, but what always comes to mind for me is so I grew up in England, and every summer we would drive to Spain for our two-week camping vacation, and on that trip I had a Walkman and I would listen to songs.
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And I know that as I was listening to the songs, I was always seeing dances in my head.
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Wow.
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And I just thought that was normal because it was normal for me.
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But in hindsight, I'm like, I think that was my first experiences of choreographing.
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But you were a dancer before you became a choreographer.
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Yes.
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Tech it it depends.
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I was six years old embossing children around in the playground making up dances.
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Really?
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Yes.
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But after that, when I was working professionally, I was initially performing and then I moved into choreography, but I'd always known in the back of my mind that performing was something I just had to get out of my system.
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But choreography and storytelling was where I wanted to spend my days.
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Wow.
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So you moved from England to New York.
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Did you come for a specific job?
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How did you break into the business in New York?
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Yeah, so I had been working in London and England and had some amazing opportunities there.
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But as a performer, the work that I was finding and that I was getting funneled into was very much music videos and fashion shows.
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And I'd always wanted to do theatre, so I thought I'm going to train in New York for three months.
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Train in theatre?
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Musical theatre, yeah.
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Load full transcript
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Come to the Mecca of musical theatre.
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The home, the birthplace of musical theatre, and get really on my game and then go back to London.
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But wait a minute, do you knew you were gonna get a job in musical theatre here?
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No, I came, there's a studio called Broadway Dance Centre.
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If you've ever seen the movie Centre Stage, you've seen a little slice of Broadway Dance Centre, but it's I wouldn't remember.
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It's one of the top studios in the country.
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Oh.
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And you can come and you can do a summer program there, which is what I signed up to do.
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Oh, okay.
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So I spent three months training there, and I'm very fortunate in that I have dual citizenship with US and UK.
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So I thought, oh maybe I'll just audition for a regional production of it was White Christmas.
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So I auditioned, didn't think anything of it, flew back to England, and I was going to be dancing in Maleficent, the Disney film, as a dancer on that.
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But while I was in England, I got a call from the US Theatre Company of White Christmas, and they said, Can you come back for a final audition?
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So I was like, oh god, do I stay in England and do this movie, or do I just go with the wind and see what happens?
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And I knew I booked a one-way ticket and I knew I had to be okay with the idea that I could fly back to the US, give up dancing in this movie, and still be okay if I didn't get the job.
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So I flew back, I didn't get the job.
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Oh no.
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I was okay.
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Because I felt like otherwise I always would have wondered.
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And then I eventually did start booking work as a performer, but that very that first one did not go to plan.
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What a story, my god.
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Yeah.
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Okay, so what was the trajectory of your career here in America like?
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I was really lucky in that I got an opportunity.
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There's an organization called the SDC Foundation, and that's the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundations.
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And what they do is they offer observership opportunities to early career director choreographers, or directors or choreographers.
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But I was lucky enough to work under the mentorship of Casey Nicklaw on one of these observerships.
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So what that means is he was staging the Broadway production of Tuck Everlasting.
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And as the observer, I was with him throughout the entire process.
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From day one of rehearsal until opening night, wherever he was, I was.
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So what is amazing about this opportunity is that you're in the room without an agenda.
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You don't have anything to get done.
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So what feels daunting at the beginning is that you're just watching and you're like, surely I should be helping.
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But actually, it gave me space to see how the best in the business were running a room, how the best in the business were making a musical.
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And as the years went on, every time I found myself in a rehearsal room or in a tech or in a put-in rehearsal, I was like, oh, I learned how to do that observing Casey Nicolaw.
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So how long were you just an observer?
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I believe it was about three months.
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And they didn't pay you for that, right?
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They do pay you because it's a foundation.
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So my particular one was the Traub Fellowship.
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So a lady called Victoria Traub who provides that fellowship.
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How much do they pay something like that?
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This is what's great.
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So when I did it, I earned, I think it was$2,000.
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For the three months.
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For the three months.
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That's not bad.
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Not bad.
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But now I actually think that they offer something closer to$6,000.
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Wow.
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Because there's really there has to be an investment in giving early career people these opportunities.
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Otherwise, the talent is not getting nurtured.
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And it's really hard when you're in a room as a director, you're not with other directors.
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So how else could you learn?
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Wow.
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So what was the first paying gig that you had?
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My first paid job as a performer.
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It was a midsummer night's dream when I was eight years old.
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Oh, and they paid you?
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They did.
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There was a fantastic professional company called Shakespeare for Kids, and they toured the country, and they needed some children to be fairies in a Midsummer Night's Dream.
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Do you remember what they paid you then?
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I actually can tell you.
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It was£10 per show.
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And I was so proud.
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I was so proud of that paycheck.
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I always wanted to, I wanted to work like a grown-up.
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And this felt like that opportunity.
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But as a once I was moving over to the other side of the table, I wanted to.
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You mean as a choreographer?
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Yes.
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I was an associate on the tour of Emojilan the musical, which ironically never ended up going on tour.
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It was a post-COVID, very wild experience as so many different theatre productions experienced after COVID, but technically that was my first one on the other side of the table.
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A tour that never happened.
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I want to stay on the performance side for a second because I want to know, and also maybe as a choreographer, how much do you have to work out every week?
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How do you keep in shape?
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That's a very physically demanding job.
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There's a really wise saying that you have to be stronger than the show that you're in.
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So when I'm performing, I'm training six days a week.
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That might be pilates, that might be ballet class, that might be strength training in the gym.
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How many hours each day?
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Anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and 15.
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If you're on some sort of physio journey at the moment and you've got injuries that you're working on, that can really add the time on as well.
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But it's actually, I find as a choreographer, it's just as important to be keeping on my fitness because when you're choreographing, you might sit down for an hour and a half in the room and then you're jumping up and trying to demonstrate something or trying to create something.
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And it's actually the going from sitting to standing and moving that has been more challenging for me choreographically.
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It's the unpredictability.
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Wow.
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You mentioned injuries, it's also very injury-prone profession.
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Yeah.
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So what happens?
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You twist your ankle.
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You can work.
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You can't, yeah.
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You could work as choreographer, but you can perform.
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And if you need to actually demonstrate to the dancers what to do, you cannot do it.
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What do you do?
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Choreographically, a skill that I've had to really work on is my vocabulary when I'm finding movement that I want to create in a room.
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And frankly, there could be times, even if I'm not injured, I have a handful of incredible dances that I try to bring onto any project I can.
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It's not always possible, but I have a handful of dances, and some of them do what I'm ideating in my head better than I can show it in my body.
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So it cut becomes about saying, okay, now can you contract your abdominals and scoop your back a bit more?
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Now can you get lower into your plie?
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Now can you just raise your eyeline by one centimeter and you find the shapes together?
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And I have had to get better at using my language.
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And of course, if I'm injured, that becomes even more critical.
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You said you love to do theatre.
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Who hires you?
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The producers?
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It depends.
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The order of sort of hiring would be producer to director, and then the director is the person who reaches out to the choreographer.
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Okay, so why I'm asking because they come to you with a concept, right?
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They don't really know anything about the dance.
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Yeah.
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Then you go home and so take me from there.
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How long does it take you?
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You draw it on paper?
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Do you draw just dance movement?
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How does it work?
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What do you do?
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You know, obviously read the story.
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Yes, read the script.
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I find myself to be very dramaturgically driven when I'm creating movement.
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I'm thinking of one specific play that I'm working on at the moment.
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So the director approaches me with the script, I read through the script, and then we would have a conversation about both the director's larger concept for the piece and what my immediate feelings are about movement.
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And what I like to do is go through a script and just write down any visual ideas that come to me.
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Because a lot of the time, my experience of directors or the directors I tend to work with, they live in this really beautiful, psychologically driven place that's about what does the character want?
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Why are they doing this?
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Who are they?
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And it and the cat the relationship between the characters is what is driving them.
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I'm coming at it from the much more visual point of view.
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How does this sweep across the stage?
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How does it connect to the next scene?
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What is the image that the audience might see at the beginning that they're then seeing at the end in their movement?
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And so I go through and I make visual patterns throughout the script.
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From there, it really has to be about what is motivating a character that helps me go into the more specific.
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So usually how long does it take you to design a dance?
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Okay, so as long as they give me.
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So for example, I worked with this incredible company this year called Woman in Motion.
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They're a dance company, and they approached me very early that I had months before I was in a room with any dancers.
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And I took months to think about what story do I want to tell?
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What is the friction in this?
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What is the breath in this?
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What are the moments, what do I want the audience to leave asking or feeling?
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And I went through so many iterations of what it might be before I was even in the room with the dancers.
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Then once I was in the room with the dancers, it was actually quite limited.
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I think I had about eight to ten hours.
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But on the contrary, there could also be a time when, and I've had this happen, you're in a tech rehearsal, there's a moment that is not working on stage, and the director says, I think we need something there, and you walk up to actors and you don't know what you're gonna do, and the dancers are looking at you and you're looking at them, and you don't know what's gonna happen.
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Then you say, I have an idea, and then you just do something and you make it, and that's how long it took.
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So being a dancer versus a choreographer versus a movement director, what pays the best?
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For my experience, choreographing pays better than performing.
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What a beginner in an established one, and what uh what is the top?
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Yeah, so for beginning salary for a choreographer, and what my beginning salary was is zero because you gotta start making your own work somewhere.
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You gotta have something to show.
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So zero.
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Day rates-wise, in developing work, you could be looking at anything from 200 to$600 associate work on Broadway.
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Around starting salary could be around$2,000 a week, but then moving up to anything to$3,000,$3,000.
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Project-wise, it's different because regionally it tends to be more project-based.
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If you're choreographing a regional musical, it really depends on the size of the house, but anywhere from$4,000 to$11,000 in my experience, but it all varies and it can also be dependent on if it is a union contract or not a union contract.
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Are you part of a union?
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I am, yes.
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You are not allowed to take jobs that are not union, right?
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That's correct, yeah.
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So that really dumps your situation here because a lot of jobs I bet you are not union.
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I actually haven't stumbled across that yet.
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Good.
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The union seems to be really good at finding a way to have a contract for most things.
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The place that they don't have contracts is in assistant work.
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So you have your choreographer at the top, then you have an associate.
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Those are both SDC union jobs, then assistants, they really haven't found a way to get them covered on the union yet.
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I read that you worked on some commercial campaign for NFL and for Samsung.
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How is it first of all, it must be completely different kind of work, right?
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Very different.
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Different kind of dance.
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So you have to be versed in hip-hop dance and modern dance and ballet and all of this, right?
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Yes.
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What did you study?
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What kind of dance did you study?
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I went to a college just outside of London called Performers College, and they were mostly actually known for training commercial dancers and musical theatre performers.
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Okay.
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So within that three-year training program, I had commercial hip-hop, I had tap, I had a little bit of contemporary, I had modern dance, I had ballet, and I had musical theatre.
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So they really did verse you in all styles.
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Which we used to talk about as being a little bit of a blessing and a curse.
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Is it best to be a jack of all trades, or is it best to really excel at one thing?
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But so what is the difference?
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First of all, I bet you that commercial pays a lot more than theatre, right?
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It does.
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Yeah, it's funny that, isn't it?
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TV.
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Brands.
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How did you get gigs like that?
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I was very lucky, lucky and hardworking, right?
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It's when those two things meet.
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I worked on the Broadway production of Merrily, we roll along, the production company that filmed the movie, one of the producers a few months later got in touch and said, Hey, we're doing this Samsung commercial.
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Can you come and be movement director?
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I said yes.
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And the pay was like three times the amount then of theatre?
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Yeah, so I've done a f quite a few commercials now, and from my experience, the starting rate could be around 900 a day, anything up to 2500 a day.
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Wow, that's great.
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Yeah.
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Do they give you a concept of what they want?
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Well, what's the set of the dance?
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What do they give you for you to go home and start thinking about the dance?
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Yeah, you get a really incredible look book.
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I think that's the word.
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It breaks down image by image exactly what every second of the commercial is gonna be and exactly how they want the movement to feel and what they want it to look like.
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What you don't know is how prepared the star is gonna come in, so you really have to prepare for all eventualities.
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And I've been very lucky with all the stars that I've worked with, they've just been amazing.
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Like who, for example?
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The Samsung commercial was Jaden Smith, and he was just fantastic.
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And then in theatre, a few others.
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Yeah, big names.
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Yeah.
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Theatre names, yeah.
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Hardworking people, very hardworking people, the theatre people.
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Yes.
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I know.
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And what was the NFL like?
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That was very fun.
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That was the opposite of the Samsung because they had taken real fans of many different football teams, and they were the people that were featured in the commercials.
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So instead of working with one star, I was working with probably over a hundred people in a short space of time and getting them to do movements that they were comfortable with.
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They might never have been in front of a camera before, and just guiding them.
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I did a lot of actually theatre warm-ups with them.
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But that wasn't just the movement director, they didn't have to dance, right?
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They did have to groove.
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Okay.
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They had to groove, they had specific movements they had to do.
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It was showing off very specific pieces of clothing.
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So they had to dance with the clothing.
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Interesting.
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At the end of the day, do you own the dance?
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Can somebody copy that dance in another performance?
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Or who owns the dance and who owns the Who owns the rights?
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The rights to it, yeah.
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It's really project by project.
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If if I'm working for a producer, generally they're gonna give me a contract.
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If it's not my own piece that I'm originating, they're gonna give me a contract that says they own all the rights, and I'm signing that away.
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What I do now put into all of my contracts that are of that nature is an AI clause, which says you can have the work, but you cannot feed it into any AI engines to generate more work or more ideas.
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Those are my ideas.
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That brings me to the question that I have.
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Do you use AI in designing the dance?
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No, I don't.
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No, I just don't believe that anything that AI tells me is going to be better at my work than me that has been living and breathing and experiencing life for as many years as I have.
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But I'm sure there are some choreographers that are using it.
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I'm sure, and you know what?
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Some of them are probably doing it really well, but it's just not for me.
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I still write with pen and paper.
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So, what is the biggest challenge in your profession?
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The biggest challenge in my profession.
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I went into it because I love working with people and I love creating moments with human beings in a room.
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And what I know.
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Never understood was that actually a lot of what I do is work alone and spend so much time creating stuff by myself so that I can be prepared for the moment when I am in the room with them.
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But a lot of the time because of budgets, the amount of time that you have actually creating with the people in the room is half of what you want it to be.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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Another thing from the more business side of thing I would say is the negotiations.
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To know how to price yourself.
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It's that I have an incredible agent that I work with, but it's really difficult because sometimes you walk into a building and you're worth what you feel you're worth, and then the next day you walk into a building as the same person, but you're barely making a livable salary.
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And that difference is really it's really difficult to manage.
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I can imagine.
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And what would you say is the biggest reward?
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Connecting audiences with parts of themselves that they didn't know were there.
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Oh really?
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And you can see it in a performance so that you actually connected?
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You can feel it.
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From the audience point of view, when they're watching something you've created, everybody together finds stillness.
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Or everybody together breathes out.
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Those moments connecting humans to themselves and to each other mean everything to me.
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And it happens.
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I saw the dance Lazarus by Elvin Ailey.
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The whole audience, me included, when they finished the dance, we jumped on our feet.
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I think that is the best dance I've ever seen in my life, and I always look to see when they perform it.
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I want to see it again.
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It was so amazing.
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And do you know what it was about that movie?
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The energy of the dance, the variety of things that they did with that energy, but the energy, the sink that everybody was in, the music, it was everything all-encompassing that really moved every single person in the theatre.
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Wow, yeah, and it's that collective energy that is so rare to experience now because society is fractured.
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So there's fewer and fewer spaces to fill that collective togetherness.
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You're absolutely right.
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I didn't even think about it.
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Let me ask you, what is your favorite dance of all times that you saw maybe wished you were in it?
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I can definitely say my favourite dance, and maybe I would wish I could be a part of it, but I would never be a good enough dancer.
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Is there was a piece called Message in a Bottle that I saw at New York City Centre and it featured music by Sting.
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And similarly to what you're saying, the energy of the dancers as they
were moving across the stage just had me spellbound.
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It was mesmerizing.
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And is there a specific dance group you wish you were part of?
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I want to start my own company eventually.
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Oh, tell me about it.
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I what would it take?
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Money.
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Collaborating with the right producers would be a better way to put that.
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Finding the right team.
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How do you get your jobs now?
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A lot of the time now it's referrals.
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Referrals.
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Yeah.
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So when you say you're gonna have your own company, that actually will be you will be an established choreography company.
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And choreography, I am having a hard time saying this word.
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Oh, it's okay.
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My husband.
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So many people in my family still can't say the word, which I love because you can never take yourself too seriously if your job title is one that people struggle to say.
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I even have a friend who told me how to pronounce it.
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Choreography.
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Okay.
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You're nailing it.
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It's perfect.
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Okay, so what will your company be?
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Will it be a dance company?
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Will it be a theatre?
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A dance theater?
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What will it be?
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Theatre company.
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But it would definitely be heavily focused on dance as a means of storytelling.
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I'm really interested in dance theatre narratives.
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Something that I find myself doing as a means of accessing a project is interviewing people, taking inspiration from those interviews, and building dance around what I've heard from them.
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And that's how two of my major projects have started.
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Wow.
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Yeah.
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And they're in development now?
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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That's fantastic.
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So what happens?
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You don't get paid during development.
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How do you make a living?
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Side jobs are crucial to surviving in the industry.
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For many years I was personal training on the side, and now I've been fortunate in that the last two years I haven't needed to do that, but I will say up until then I would finish a contract and the next day I would be back personal training.
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I would not take breaks.
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So you stayed within the realm of physical training, dancing, and all of that?
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You have to have a side job that you can enjoy, I think, if you want to last in this business.
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There is a limit age limit on this profession.
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Anything physical has an age limit.
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Did you start ever thinking about what you're gonna do when you will be old and won't be able to do it?
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I think I went through a big transformation when I had my daughter, who is now nearly five.
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And I think what that taught me is that it's about continuing to transform with the body that you have at the time.
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So as you lose something, you gain something.
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As you shift one way, you find another part of yourself that still can access storytelling.
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Because really, I just love telling stories.
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Through dance, through dancing movement.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you.
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That's it for today.
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For more interviews with people with different careers in different jobs in many different industries.
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Go to how much can I make that info.
00:27:48.480 --> 00:27:50.640
You'll find lots of information there.
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And I will see you next week.