Final Feature Piece

Ten years ago Tesha Buss was a cat in “CATS.”  She performed in the show for nearly two years, and every night anticipated the top of the second act, when the stage was dark, and the cast would sit still around Old Deuteronomy (an important CAT) as he sang a song called “Moments of Happiness.”             

For Tesha, this mid-performance ritual represented a reprieve from her otherwise hectic life.             

“It forced you to sit down and be quiet, just after you’d danced so crazily before,” she says.  “I’d have this moment of, oh right—everything is okay—I’m on Broadway.”           

Tesha is a 33-year-old retiree.  She is one of a vast number of dancers termed “transitioned” within the dance community.  To transition is to quit performance and pursue a second career.   Dancers, unlike other artists, employ a time-sensitive instrument: at a certain age, the body can no longer perform the way the form demands.  For an overwhelming majority of dancers transition is inevitable.             

For Tesha, too, it was unavoidable, but not entirely unfortunate.  She quit performance at 28 years old— a relatively old age for a full-time dancer— when good parts grew scarce.  She now works as a bookkeeper for a Manhattan-based jeweler.  Working in bookkeeping is good training, she says, for when she opens her own business.  Tesha is currently renovating a 4700 square foot farm house in Plymouth, Vermont; in January, if she keeps to her schedule, she will officially open the house as a healing center and retreat.  She’s named the house Good Commons.  In its basement is a large dance and yoga studio, feet upon feet of hardwood floor.           

“Sometimes I worry what I’ll do with myself in that house,” says Tesha.  “I mean with a dance studio in my own home.  I wonder if that will make me want to dance again.           

“I still wonder,” she says— a full five years after formally quitting dance— “if I’m really ready to leave completely.”                             

The term transition as it applies to former dancers is curious, in part because the people who use it most are seemingly unsure why they do.  Ann Barry, the founder and founding director of the non-profit organization Career Transition for Dancers (CTFD), asserts that the terminology long preceded the organization’s existence.  Barry is herself a transitioned dancer.             

“I had a dance career that lasted for seventeen years, and having gone through several transitions of my own, the problem of transition resonated with me,” says Barry of her initial interest in the issue.  “It was easy to understand that some dancers would need assistance.  Some would not; they would know right away what they wanted to do next.  But there were other dancers that only identified themselves as dancers, and said that they were not able to do anything else.”             

In 1983, Barry attended a conference in London which addressed “the dancer’s situation,” England’s apparent euphemism for transition.  A government-funded assistance program had already been founded in England, and Barry decided then that a similar organization should exist in the states.  She founded CTFD in 1985.  The organization first existed under the official banner of The Actors’ Fund, but eventually obtained independent non-profit status; its present-day counselors provide personal and professional advice to dancers in the process of leaving performance and beginning second careers.            

Though the organization’s very name suggests that the transition in question is external— it is a career transition, which makes it a tangible transition, a straightforward job switch— in conversation the term is more often applied to the person making the switch.  Dancers wander into the CTFD offices in any one of four stages: they are resistant to or accepting of transition; they are transitioning; or, they have transitioned.  On the letterhead transition is a noun.  But in practice it is a transitive verb.  It suggests conversion on the part of its subject, and a change in something as elemental as identity.             

When Tesha first saw “CATS” she was eight years old, and she had been dancing tap, jazz and ballet for four years.  That the show would run long enough for Tesha to join its ensemble 15 years later she deems “really lucky.”  That she was hired on Broadway at all, and after only two years of dancing professionally, was “really amazing.”  Tesha doesn’t know if her performance career was serendipitous or merely a series of happy coincidences.  She considers her performance in “CATS”— as Rumpleteazer— to be the peak of that career.           

Tesha grew up in Augusta, Illinois, where her parents were farmers.  Dance lessons were a luxury.  The studio was 45 minutes away, one-way, a trek from home and back six nights a week.  When she was in high school Tesha’s parents lost their farm (not an uncommon fate among small farmers, according to her) and she stepped away from dance then, suddenly frightened by its certain instability.  She took a semester off from her senior year to intern at the Illinois Department of Insurance.  The legal experience scared her right back into performance; she changed her college applications and in the following fall set to studying ballet at Illinois Wesleyan University.             

Two years after Tesha earned her BFA, after a round of Chicagoan dinner theater and a run as an understudy in “Gypsy” at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Milburn, New Jersey, she auditioned for “CATS.”  “Gypsy” closed on a Sunday, she remembers, and she went to a “CATS” call-back the next day.  By Friday she had a job on Broadway.           

“It happened so quickly,” remembers Tesha.  “When you’re a young dancer you have so much anger, sadness, agitation that you’re always working through.  “CATS” was important for me because I got to dance so hard— you can’t dance that hard and hold on to your frustrations at the same time.  It all goes away.  You just work it out.”  

Tesha is tiny.  Her nose defies you not to think of buttons, and her small bright eyes are aggressively blue.  Over a cup of tea in a café near Rockefeller Center where she works, Tesha recounts her dance career in a steady, matter-of-fact voice.  But her tone is foiled by an apparent proclivity for dreaminess and a fondness for concepts like fate and karma and purpose.  Tesha says things happen for ungraspable reasons.  This doesn’t frustrate her.  It seems to keep her calm and happy.            

“I left ‘CATS’ to do a show called ‘The Rhythm Club.’  It was cancelled before it made it to New York,” says Tesha.      

“I danced around a bit after that,” she adds, “but the parts weren’t any good.  I think I always knew that I would dance until I couldn’t any more, and then I would choreograph instead.           

“For me, dance was about expressing myself.  But that’s not really fair to the choreographer.  As a dancer you should express the choreographer’s vision, not your own.  So I thought, well, put up or shut up.  I started assisting a choreographer with ‘CATS,’ and I went from there.”               

Tesha had little luck in choreography.  Her shows always had some flaw that kept them from success.  She remembers these experiences as exasperating; problems with the storyline or show structure brought about bad reviews and closing after closing.   “The shows were never ready yet,” she says.           

When Tesha turned 30 she “realized her adulthood.”  She wanted to work smarter and have better control over her professional life.  She was choreographing a show in San Diego when she woke one morning with a preformed idea.            “Not just an idea.  It was a message,” says Tesha.  “The message was: ‘You will open a healing center.’”  She nods seriously, as if to underscore the import of the message, its strange specificity.  “I sat up and thought, ‘That doesn’t make any sense.  I’m a choreographer.’           

“But then I kept thinking about it, and it started to make more sense, I guess.  So I started pulling out of The Business more and more.  I wrote a financial plan.  I looked into real estate.”  Tesha shrugs with her palms up and smiles like Who Knew.  “So that’s what I’m doing now.  I’ll be opening the center in Vermont, this January.”                            

When Tesha made the decision to invest in healing she also made an appointment with CTFD career counselor Lauren Gordon.  Technically Tesha had already transitioned.  The move out of dance performance and into choreography or teaching is considered a transition at CTFD, though one of low intensity.  Tesha applied for a financial grant from the organization, which she was awarded, and which she set aside to build the official website of the healing retreat.  (The site, up in a preliminary stage at goodcommons.com, features a thumbnail image of a many-windowed white clapboard house and the text: Coming Soon! Welcome to Good Commons, our beautiful retreat center in Plymouth, Vermont. Please check back later for retreats in yoga, meditation, arts, nutrition and down right fun.”)  Tesha found her current bookkeeping job through CTFD, as well.           

“Everybody is at different points in their careers when they come through the door,” says Gordon.  “So it’s important that all of our counselors have had clinical counseling training as well as career development training.  They need to be able to understand that people are going to be in crisis sometimes. They are going to be anxious or nervous or confused or stuck or angry or sad.”           

Gordon doesn’t believe that dancers are dancers and that is it.  She relies on the Meyers-Briggs Assessment Test to help her disprove this old axiom.             

“I start by helping dancers identify their values, goals, interests, strengths, and personal traits,” says Gordon, “and that’s how I match them to career paths.  As far as I know, there are six different career paths in the world: realistic, artistic, investigative, social, conventional, and entrepreneurial.”           

Suzie Jary, a consultant to CTFD, takes a less structured approach to dealing with her clients.  She is a former dancer who transitioned in 1986; she now runs a monthly support group called Dancers Managing Change.  “Feel isolated and alone?” the flier for the support group asks of its passersby.           

“In the greater dance community, transition can still have the aura that you’re not serious about dance,” says Jary.  “People in the business think, to dance is to live!  And to live is to dance!  And that is that!’           

“I think transitioning can add to your identity,” she says.  “But not everybody sees it like that.”                                           

The Good Commons house in Vermont has seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and a sleeping loft.  It sleeps 22 people comfortably (in theory).  Killington Peak and Okemo Mountain sit just nine miles away to the west and east, respectively.  Adjacent towns offer a combined stretch of lake over four miles long.  Tesha once saw 77 bikers ride past Good Commons in a single day.           

And there is the dance studio, 695 square feet that Tesha hopes to fill with nature-loving yogites on retreat.           

When Tesha expands upon her interest in healing, she is able to make this sharp change in career path seem less impulsive.             

“For me, dance was always about healing.  It takes you out of your real life and it fills you with something: beauty, or a great sense of humanity,” she says, a classic dreamy gaze fixing her face.  “I’ve felt healed by dance.  And it’s who I am.  So when I started looking into opening the center, I thought, I just want to make people feel happier and more comfortable.  Because that’s what dance does for me.”           

Tesha is openly conflicted about what part of her identity still lies in dance.  Just a beat after saying she has done everything she ever wanted to do in the profession, she will admit that she feels plagued with regret, with thoughts of jobs turned down and choices poorly made.             

“I have a lot of dreams still,” she says.  “Three or four nights a week I dream that I’m still in it.  That I have to dance but I don’t know the choreography, or that I’m choreographing something and I don’t know what it is and I have to make it up in the moment.            

“Or sometimes in dreams I’m really having a ball.  I’m flying all over the theater.  Random things.           

“It’s not just about dance, not really.  It’s about the transition out of making my life as an artist full time,” she says.  “And it’s scary.”