Once upon a time, I was in my final year at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. It was the first year of the On The Move festival, a conference for emerging dance artists. It was the first year of the conference and everything was so new and so exciting. Potential was enormous. I met the editor of The Dance Current magazine, who invited me to come by her “office” (then her living room!) to stuff magazines into envelopes for the monthly mailing. I got paid in pizza and I got to sit around with established dance artists. It was all sorts of inspiring.

Fast forward a few years to when I was working at The Dance Current magazine. I wasn’t dancing anymore though I was choreographing and teaching in the school system and writing about dance. I was writing up a storm, finishing up my undergrad, and then graduate degree at U of T.

There was a lot of writing…a lot of dance writing. That then led to a gig at So You Think You Can Dance Canada. And then a gig writing the text for Susan Kendal’s choreography, and Shannon Litzenberger’s HOMEbody (with a month-long residency in Saskatchewan!) and Sylvie Bouchard’s Histoire d’Amour.

And then this year, I was asked to speak at the On The Move conference.

Oh, full circles. Damn, I love them.

I’m on the “Beyond performance” panel and will be part of the networking artist lunch:

A dance education offers so much more than just performance skills. It provides you with a perspective on dance, and a vocabulary to communicate that perspective. These panellists have careers that go beyond performance, to encompass teaching dance (Tina Nicolaidis), writing about dance (Lindsay Zier-Vogel), and producing multidisciplinary work (Sky Fairchild-Waller). Find out how each of these panellists has used their dance training to help build a multi-faceted career.