– can be found in the Final Work category section.

 Thanks!

Jackie

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.”                                       

–is unfortunately a Soundslides slideshow, so can’t post up.  So in lieu of having the audio/visual combination here, I’ve collected some of my favorite photos from the slideshow.  These photos are all  video stills; they’re from Karin’s “Swan Song” performance that I wrote about below, in which she “handed down” an old favorite rotine to her young protege Kathy Callahan.  Because they are taken from video the quality isn’t stellar– there’s quite a bit of intricate movement, hands and arms and feet, in tap dancing, and that means blurriness when you try to freeze the frame.  But I actually like it in these pictures.  There’s so much energy in the stills, and Karin and Kathy look so happy.  It was nice to use these images to illustrate the audio of Karin talking about passing down choreography, and tradition in dance.  Below, images of Karin and Kathy performing together an Ernest Carlos routine that Karin says “changed her life” when she first learned it, at age 10.

GNews final video embedded below:

Thanks!

On another note regarding Dunning’s piece “Twisting and Chatting the Alvin Ailey Way,” Dunning is completely right when she writes that dances are handed down from older to younger performers.  I was really drawn to this idea when I first heard it– I like its traditional element, the concept of the hours logged in passing along an exact choreography, and the sort of old-world apprentice-sense of it.  One of my subjects Karin Baker, an older-generation tapper and a strong-minded traditionalist, has so far handed down some of her earliest tap routines– Ernest Carlos routines– to a young protege named Kathy Callahan.  

In fact, Karin’s last performance (which she refers to as her “Swan Song”) is a dance interpretation of this hand-me-down tradition.  In this performance, Karin dances with Kathy.  Karin performs a set of steps and Kathy imitates her.  The sets get more and more complicated, and overlap each other more and more, until Kathy and Karin are doing the routine together, their taps completely in unison.  The choroegraphy is great, and so is the sound of it. 

Karin was kind enough to loan me a DVD of this performance, and I’m working on ways to get it up on this blog.  So, hopefully, accompanying video to come.

An interesting article in the Sunday Times Arts section, “Twisting and Chatting the Ailey Way” by Jennifer Dunning, raises a few questions about storytelling, reporting, and the ways we employ different media forms.

In the article, Jennifer Dunning “covers” a sit-down conversation/interview between Matthew Rushing, a performer with the modern dance troupe Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater since 1992, and Judith Jamison, the troupe’s director. 

Dunning begins:

DANCES have traditionally been handed down from performer to performer, even since the invention of dance notation. But how do dancers learn about the mysterious culture of performing? Some of that can be soaked up in the daily work, but there is nothing quite like a lazily extended, spontaneous conversation with a veteran choreographer, dancer or company director.   

That last clause seems true enough.  But in that case, why are we reading a news feature about it?  What of the elements of conversation, in this instance: of a certain inflection, pauses for thought, laughter, sighing, all the rest?  Dunning attempts to recreate the scene of the talk for us, but ultimately falls short.  The article, in turn, is strange– it is merely all he-said-then-she-said, and the effect is distancing, almost uncomfortable.  We don’t know why Dunning was there.  And if the conversation was spontaneous, well, we don’t quite believe it from Dunning’s transcript.  How nice it would have been to hear actual voices.  To have an audio option!

I believe completely in the power and effect of carefully-wrought writing, and especially in narrative.   And I prefer good writing to good versions of all other media forms (audio, video, etc., whatever).  Had Dunning been interested in voice, had she made an attempt to convey through writing what couldn’t be conveyed through audio alone– something visually important, some small moment or almost imperceptible gesture (maybe too easily overlooked on video), than the writing might have been worth it.  But without, why not just have an audio bar?  Why not a video of these two people interacting? 

I think this example draws upon what I consider the major lesson of our course: that different stories call for different storytelling media, distinct forms.  And it’s the author/videographer/editor’s job to use the chosen form to its maximum capacity.  I’m not sure if this is something I’ve been able to accomplish in every exercise this semester, but it’s something I’m certainly more aware of than I have been before.     

Made in iMovie and uploaded to YouTube.  Embedded below:

Thanks!

Put together, mostly for practice, a silent (video) slideshow composed of photos of Karin Baker in movement. I’d like to play around a bit more with pacing– I wanted the movement to speed up to the end, but I couldn’t get the clips to play for less than one second each. Also in compressing the movie file for YouTube, the picture quality degraded quite a bit, which is unfortunate– though I don’t see any way to remedy that problem without money.

And of course once I have an audio complement, it will be easier to convey a clear narrative. See slideshow below …

In composing my photo slideshow, have landed on an audio problem: sound quality.  Sound quality is a big, big issue.  I didn’t fully accept that concept when we were working with video, in which medium there are moving images to focus on and (in theory) a greater theme at play.  But when sound is isolated with only still image, poor quality is even more evident, and, in the case of my recorded interviews with Karin Baker, pretty unbearable.  I had clumsily tried to transfer audio from a digital recorder to a mini-DV by rigging a connection between recorder and camera, and that only aggravated the lousy sound and created an additional constant buzz in the foreground.  So next week’s interview– remiked and reworked– will be especially important for contextualizing Karin’s images; I really want to do them justice.

 In the meantime, two of my favorite images are below: the first, Karin (left) and her sister in the studio Karin created in the family’s basement when she was ten years old (she gave dance lessons there into her teenaged years); the second, a later news clipping of Karin (left again) with a few of her younger pupils.

Recently met again with Karin Baker, former dancer and one subject of my in-progress feature piece.  Unlike many of the dancers I’ve been in touch with over the course of the semester, Karin has a vast and beautiful collection of photos to document her dance career, thanks to her fastidious and attentive mother.  Which is lucky, because her career was pretty amazing.  There are pictures of Karin in her teenage years, giving ballet lessons to students her own age in the basement of her childhood home in Cinncinnati (Karin turned the basement into a dance studio when she was 10).  There are pictures of Karin on stage performing in a USO tour, her hands and legs blurred by movement and her face over-the-top animate.  There are even pictures of her performing on The Carol Burnett show; her mom snapped close-shots of the TV screen to get those.  (The quality isn’t so bad, considering.)  And above is a picture of Karin in a Capezio ad which ran, she says, for nearly a year.  She doesn’t remember how, or when exactly, she landed that job.  It’s a cool addition to her albums nonetheless.

I’m interested in the idea of portraying dance through still image.  If a photo slideshow were well-done it could call attention to intricacy of movement, to the lines of the body, those things more difficult to notice when a dancer is in motion.  I worry a bit about minimalizing the true extent of story, though; in Karin’s case, for example, it would be easy to show Cute Dancing-Karin Age 10 next to Beautiful Dancing-Karin Age 25 next to Wise Teaching-Karin Age 40.  But that doesn’t really reveal anything significant about Karin’s career or self.  In arranging photos I’m working with transcripts from my original interviews with Karin as the accompanying audio, but I wonder whether it might be better to follow up with a photo-based interview– if that doesn’t push any ethical lines– and ask Karin to talk specifically about each image’s context, her mindset within that context.  On its own the images are pretty and interesting and generally nice to look at, but I’d very much like if I could compose the slideshow so that it says and means something more.