23 October 2019

The Cost of Dance

Life update: I have moved back home -- as in, to the little town where I grew up. My focus right now is on theatre and it's killing me because what I really want to do is dance. The city I was in this summer has WAY more dance opportunities and even training options than my home city. But I have literally zero savings to fall back on and it's cheaper to do theatre than dance. Yes, really.

First -- auditions.
I have never in my life paid for a theatre audition. I've auditioned for the biggest theatre company in Regina (twice), as well as the one in Edmonton. This past September alone I auditioned for thirteen small volunteer-based organizations. Not one of them -- not even the one that's several thousand dollars in the hole -- charged me an audition fee.
Conversely, every single dance audition I have ever done has come with an audition fee. I've paid as little as $25 and as much as $80 for a single dance audition. That's a lot of money to throw into the abyss on the tiniest off-chance that you might actually outshine the 300 other dancers who are no doubt also sending in video auditions.

Second -- training.
I had the opportunity this fall to train with one of western Canada's only tap ensembles but I had to pass it up because I was barely able to scrape together the last few dollars of my savings account for the audition fee (see above), let alone the $400+ required for registration for the actual training.
Dance training -- just to keep up your technique FOR auditions -- costs about a thousand dollars a year, per hour/week. (It does depend on the region a bit, but that's about average in western Canada.) Ideally, dancers at a professional level should be taking at LEAST twenty hours of class per week. That's $20,000 a year. That is fully half the average annual salary (in US dollars) for a professional dancer. That doesn't count transportation, pointe shoes ($120/pair, new pair every two weeks at that level of training), dancewear (one bodysuit averages $100), physiotherapy (every two weeks at least), and things like medication, counselling, food, rent -- you know, regular living expenses that everyone has to pay for.

On the other hand, I have never, ever had to pay for acting training (my degree doesn't count because I got exactly two acting classes out of a $100,000 degree and the director straight-up, to my face, refused to give me more even though my degree program actually required me to have more acting credits than that). All of my acting training has come on-site -- actually on the stage, in the rehearsal room, doing shows. I'm basically self-taught because nobody thought I was good enough for them to bother actually trying to teach me.

Third -- costumes.
In dance, there is always a costume fee. Always. From the time you're a three-year-old in a costume-shop tutu sickling your feet to the time you're a college student taking professional-level classes, you always, always, pay for every single costume you wear -- whether or not you are actually allowed to keep it.
In theatre, I have only paid a costume fee once. I've had to supply parts of my own costume -- slips, blouses -- but even the pieces that come out of the company costume room are free for me to use as long as I am in that particular production.

Fourth -- mentally.
Theatre is (usually) quite good at meeting their actors where they're at mentally and emotionally (my college and their 'you MUST be happy all the time whether or not the script even actually portrays this character as happy' attitude notwithstanding). They require a lot, but they also give a lot of empathy. If your depression is acting up, they'll accept whatever you can do with gentle encouragement. If you've twisted an ankle, they are happy to let you sit to the side with an ice pack as long as you're paying attention to what your blocking will be. If you haven't eaten in three days because you haven't had time, they will cobble together all their collective snacks and feed you, and they'll probably all remember your allergies and texture issues too.

Regarding dance, Sydney Magruder Washington has actually described it much better than I could in her excellent post on ballet and mental illness. Dancers are constantly told to shut up and smile. Grin and bear it. The show must go on. No negativity allowed. Ever. At all. Not even a hint of a breath of anything less than sunshine and rainbows and unicorn poop. And if you can't do it, there is NO END to the emotional and verbal abuse you will get if you can't fit the artistic director's mould of perfection and happiness, even during barre when you're still trying to get your exhausted eyelids to stay open. In dance, if you're having a rough depression day, you get fired on the spot. And then the director blacklists you to anybody who will listen for the rest of your life.
Also, for reference -- one (1) counselling appointment can be over $200. Each. When I was in my most intense period of counselling (which lasted for about eight months), I was going once a week, but probably should have been doing twice a week.

Don't tell me this huge financial disparity is because nobody goes to the ballet anymore -- nobody goes to the theatre anymore either, and yet the theatres somehow manage to run without soaking their usually-not-well-off performers for money. And when can these performers work? All the job openings insist on evenings and weekends. When do performing arts companies rehearse? Evenings and weekends. We can work OR we can perform, not both. And if we choose the latter, we can't even afford to get proper dance shoes, let alone get our properly-clad foot in the door with an audition.

All I want to do is dance, and I HATE that I'm too poor to afford it.

19 October 2019

The Bottom (?) (Part II)

29 August 2019, 9.52pm.

I think I've hit bottom. Or at least I hope I have.

On the surface it doesn't look like I have. I'm not wearing rags and sleeping under a bridge. I'm not in a padded room in a hospital eating with plastic forks for my own protection. I'm still living in a decently nice place in a mostly nice city and have food in my cupboard and nice clothes in my closet.

The best way to say it is I have been spiraling since I moved here. The behaviour I described in this post was not limited to that week or even that month. It has characterised my entire time here. If it wasn't for one person (a friend of mine from my most recent show), I would literally have starved to death in the lap of luxury -- starved by my own volition. I had no reason to live and as such I had no reason to eat, so I didn't. I lived literally on Mini-Wheats, and that only because this friend insisted I eat something and that was the only thing I had the energy to make.

My last year at college (this past year) was easy academically (I only had three or four classes over two semesters), but it almost (and may still) broke me mentally. The professors and directors started giving me the cold shoulder and a couple of them started outright telling me I wasn't trying hard enough and that I would never be good enough to be an artist. Even though the school focused primarily on vocal development and had basically zero dance program to speak of, the director (who spent a total of five years in dance and has never taught it) appeared to make it his personal mission to remind me that my body is just not built to be flexible and to tell me constantly that because of that one fact and that one fact alone that I would never, ever be a decent performing artist and nobody would want anything to do with me -- full stop.

You can only hear that for so long before you start to believe it. Especially when this person is a mentor to you, and especially when the second-in-command in the program wholeheartedly agrees with him, and especially when there are no other influences telling you otherwise because 'your director knows best.'

Eventually he stopped having to say it (though he didn't actually stop saying it) -- the voice recorder in my brain had his voice on permanent file, playing back and rewinding and repeating the recording 24/7. By the time I graduated in April, I was already well into the self-starvation pattern. If I couldn't be a performing artist -- and he told me, clearly and repeatedly, that I couldn't -- then I didn't want to live. I had three other shows lined up, so a quick, violent suicide was not an option, but a slow degenerative spiral would be perfect. I could fade out shortly after the last show. It would be a fitting, sad, poetic, ending to a sad, moderately poetic life.

It got to the point where I couldn't even practice dance -- even for fun, even for my own choreography that nobody would ever see -- without hearing his voice in my head, telling me I would never be good enough. It was deafening, and it was infinitely heavier than my increasingly-fragile body could bear. I could hardly stand up, let alone lift the weight of his words off my heart long enough to lace up my tap shoes. There was no way I could practice on my own, and there was no way I could afford classes to push me to actually try.

So I accepted my fate -- I stopped dancing. I started telling people I 'used to' dance. I stopped listening to music, stopped seeing the dances, stopped singing, stopped dreaming.

At the same time, it seemed that my dire financial situation was about to turn a corner. I actually managed to land a job -- delivering the morning paper six days a week. However, about a month into the job, I had already been sexually harassed by a superior, taken three sick days (unrelated to the harassment), called a mental health help line because I felt so trapped, had to start a stronger asthma medication because my asthma worsened so much with the disturbed sleep schedule, and figured out I was only making $10.50 a night for my trouble. Minimum wage in Alberta is $15 an hour, and I was only making $10.50 for three hours of work, plus I was putting in $20 of gas in my vehicle every night. I was paying more than I was making.

The idea had been to deliver papers until I got another job, and I had been looking, but the paper-delivery job had drained so much out of me that I was spending fourteen hours a day in bed and still literally falling asleep on the job every single night. I hadn't found a better job, but I put in my two weeks' notice. I was going to end up in the hospital if I didn't.

03 October 2019

Numbness and Rebuilding (Part I)

28 July 2019, 2.01am.

I've just begun the process of rebuilding... rebuilding everything.

In June I completely uprooted and moved to a city I'd only seen three or four times in my entire life. I had $200, no job, and only one show lined up. As alluded to on this blog, I was already not in a great place mentally or physically (college had sapped the last of my strength), and the anonymity of the unfamiliar big city gave me the chance to do what I'd always wanted -- to spiral.

I deliberately put on a brave face at rehearsal. I did more acting backstage than I ever did onstage for that show. Because I knew if anybody knew I was about to give up, they would try to fix me for about two weeks (a month at best) and then turn their backs on me, most likely with a cutting tirade about how I was 'too much' and 'not trying hard enough.' I already knew all that, I didn't need to hear it again. I've had this happen so many times I have the script memorised, even though the other person always thinks it's improv. Better to not even start the show.

By the last weekend of the show, I had almost completely stopped eating. The cooler I brought to the campground was mostly just a prop for the show of 'I'm fine.' I did a three-hour performance on a pizza pop and a container of yogurt -- as in, that was all I had eaten all day. At the cast party after the final performance one of my castmates literally had to carry me to the food line because I was so depleted I couldn't stand on my own. I wanted to tell someone but I knew no-one would believe me because I've struggled with this so publicly and I knew I was beyond help because of the sheer severity and stubbornness of my condition. It was my last show anyway, with no plans or hopes of any others on the horizon... this was the best way to go out. Just fade away into obscurity, like so many artists before me. Literally, physically, fade out. It was better than burning alive. And it was better than suffocating.

The only person I had even sort-of opened up to on that cast was that castmate who carried me to the front of the food line. Even he didn't know the whole story, but he knew I had a history of depression and he had figured out that I hadn't been eating. For two weeks -- probably longer -- he texted me every day, multiple times a day, insisting that I eat something. I literally only ate one bowl of cereal each day for at least a week, even in the face of his insistence. I was so depleted that I couldn't have made anything more substantial even if I had wanted to.

At some point, for some reason, I decided to rebuild my tap repertoire... it had deteriorated significantly since I had essentially stopped practicing in February. I made up a schedule, holding myself to only half an hour each day, just slowly and calmly learning a piece I had choreographed about a month and a half before. I gave myself two weeks to learn it. Just that, nothing else. No rush. No pressure. Just learning the dance.

The first (spoilers: only) day wasn't hard on my body so much as it was hard on my mind. The last time I had practiced dance consistently was at a time when I was trying desperately to prove myself, as my program director and I were clashing with greater frequency over my lack of ability and whether or not I was actually trying, as my carefully-laid plans to move to Regina and pursue my career there crumbled around me. I had largely forgotten all that -- not 'gotten over' or 'worked through,' forgotten... numbed by the ache in my hollow stomach and the fog clouding my undernourished brain. Dancing again brought all those old feelings back, all that barely-cold criticism, all that still-smouldering self-hatred.

But the numbness didn't completely go away. And I was able to hold onto that numbness through that practice session. The venom of the words that so many have spoken to me didn't bite anymore. The sharp sting wasn't gone, but it was dulled. I had accepted my fate of literally physically fading into nothing and as such I had nothing to prove anymore.

'You'll never be good enough. You don't try hard enough.'
Yeah, I know. So what does it matter to you that I'm stretching today?

The overwhelming numbness drowned out the answer.