Dance Magazine: It's fall 2009, and I'm standing in Andy Blankenbuehler's midtown office where he, Lin-Manuel Miranda and others are working on their next show, Bring It On: The Musical. Already it's clear that Miranda/Blankenbuehler collaborations are just daring enough to be groundbreaking. Blankenbuehler hands me a note scribbled on a page from the script.
In that moment, I realize I've found my place in the dance world—as a writer, telling the stories of the artistic greats.
4 comments:
While none of these jobs, in particular, are jobs that really resonate with me, I have always loved working on dance shows. Every year, my middle school/high school does one major dance show, either called Dance Production or Dance Concert depending on what campus you're on. While budgets aren't huge, I always seem to get to do fun things with the show. My first few years were filled with fun rigging including truss and soft goods movement. When I got to the upper school campus, this show started becoming more and more "my show" in terms of tech. This led to getting to have all kinds of fun my senior year for Dance Concert 2018: Harry Potter. For this show, I managed everything technical as well as doing set construction, prop design and construction, and more. My favorite thing I did was create two magic wands that were able to shoot fire or sparks. While it is a lot of work, it is one of my favorite shows I ever worked on thanks to it being one of the best crews and some of the best and kindest dancers I have ever worked with.
This is a really interesting article because most of the people interviewed were originally performers who found their way into management and other positions further up the ladder sometime in college. I feel like a big misconception about most offstage jobs in theater is that we are all just failed performers, but for most of us that is not the case. Maybe that is more the case within the dance community. I have yet to work in dance or concert events, but it is something I am interested in and hope I will learn about through dance/light in the coming years. I like that this article covered everything from management big and small, to physical therapy, and even the director of dance for the National Endowment. I do not know much about how the dance world operates, and this article covers much of how it is funded and operated.
This article goes to show just how many people stand behind the performances an audience sees on stage. It is not only the dances that are ‘choreographed,’ but also the marketing, the show run itself, and every other process related to the show before it hits the stage. There are so many people whose culmination of work audiences see on stage, without even knowing that said person had a role in the production. Reading about all the different roles these women have in producing a dance show is a really wonderful thing to me, as it shows just how many options someone truly has when they enter the entertainment industry. More than one of the women said they changed their career trajectory. I think this kind of mobility is something that more people should be aware of, especially people who are interested in entertainment, but unsure of which part they are most interested in.
Reading this series of interviews, I was glad to see so many women in leadership positions, and I like that it works its way up through more individualized management positions up to large-scale directors. I don’t know if it was just me, but it seemed to have a small implication that most technicians start as performers and see tech as a backup plan or that technicians are failed performers. Many of us start as performers because it’s more widely publicized and recognized- if tech was more a part of public consciousness, we could see tech appearing as more of an option for younger people and reduce the stigma associated with it. It’s tricky because our job revolves around not being seen and working as support for the onstage performers, but I know we all appreciate recognition for our hard work to make performance appear seamless and magical. I do like that the article highlighted specific skills necessary to succeed in these positions, and it was interesting to see how the theatrical jobs that we all know translated to the world of dance.
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