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Common Ground - Dancing Behind the Scenes
By Lea Marshall
 Performing not in your blood? Check out career options that
will keep you in dance and offstage
“The course
of true love never did run smooth.” Shakespeare’s famous line
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream applies easily to those
of us whose true love is dance. Though you may begin your
study of dance at age 5 with visions of the Sugar Plum Fairy
dancing in your head, you may discover, at 20, that ballet is
no longer your thing and you’ve fallen in love with lighting
design. Many paths wind through the dance world that do not
involve choreographing or performing dance. Weighing in on
these “alternative” dance careers are several experts who tell
us how they got started, what they like most and least, and
what to keep in mind if your own path points in one of these
directions.
Lighting
design: Sculpting with light and color
Mark Stanley,
the resident lighting designer at New York City Ballet, was an
undergraduate theater studies major at the College of William
and Mary in Virginia in the late 1970s when Nikolais Dance
Theater performed there. Stanley had already jumped in as a
lighting designer for the College’s student dance company,
Orchesis, during his first year. But his experience with the
Nikolais company opened his eyes to a larger world. “I’d never
seen anything like it, and I was immediately hooked.”
Stanley completed his MFA in lighting design at the University
of Wisconsin–Madison, and then worked for the New York City
Opera for six years. Though he had no dance background, he had
always loved dance and its “ability to tell stories or convey
emotion without words,” he says. When the job at NYCB came up,
he jumped at it. “I was doing small dance companies in and
around New York at the time, so I found a great home at New
York City Ballet, and it’s been 20 years.”
Lighting design has its challenges. “There’s no time,” Stanley
says. “[With] most dance companies, regional or touring, you
load in on a Monday and open on a Wednesday. That’s
frustrating, because I like to explore and make choices and
throw them out and see something different. There’s also the
fact that you’re creating your work in the space, right in
front of everybody. There’s a side of this business that has
to do with dealing with people, and having tough skin when
there’s a row of people behind you commenting on your work
while you’re doing it.”
But Stanley delights in contributing to the creation of new
work. He enjoys the close collaboration with choreographers
and the prominent role that lighting design plays in dance.
“In theater and opera, lighting takes somewhat of a back seat
to the other design elements. And in dance it’s all about the
light that creates the environment. That’s very exciting for
me.”
His advice for young designers? “See as much dance as you
possibly can.” Take classes. Many universities across the
country offer classes or degree programs in design. Observe
other designers at work. “Lighting designers are for the most
part very generous with their time and allowing people who are
interested to observe,” he says. “If nothing else, it inspires
you to go out and do it yourself.”
Costume and
set design: Building a world
“I said when
I was young that if all I had to do all day long was make
beautiful dresses, that would be my dream job,” says Tamara
Cobus, who runs the costume shop at Richmond Ballet in
Virginia.
Cobus danced and choreographed in high school, but an interest
in architecture shaped her undergraduate beginnings at the
University of Utah. A work–study job in the university’s
costume shop, however, threw her right back into the dance
world. “I wasn’t choreographing or dancing, I was making
dancers look beautiful,” she says. Gradually that work
eclipsed her pursuit of architecture, although, she says, “it
was the same as architecture for me, in a way—it was building
things. But it was on a much smaller scale, and it was
instantly gratifying.”
In 1991 Cobus left school and opened a storefront in downtown
Salt Lake City, where she worked on projects in fashion,
performance, bridal, and photo styling. In 2003 a phone call
came out of the blue from Richmond Ballet, offering her a job
running the costume shop. “They basically said, ‘It’s a broken
shop; it’s not functioning, and it’s your baby if you want it.
You can turn it into the shop that you want it to be,’ ” says
Cobus. “That was very appealing.” So she closed up her own
shop and moved to Virginia.
For Cobus, making a costume begins with her first conversation
with the choreographer and continues all the way to opening
night. “It’s hard to say what I like the best,” she says. “I
love taking an idea and making it happen in reality. I love
the process of fitting. I love to have a little secret in the
design, a low back that you wouldn’t expect. Or making people
wonder, ‘How does that stay on?’ ”
Her challenges involve coordinating the costuming needs of all
parts of the Richmond Ballet organization—company, school, and
outreach programs. And, she says, “I have a bigger staff than
I’ve ever had, so sometimes it’s a little difficult for me to
stay those steps ahead of them.” She’s had to learn to
delegate and, she says, “that’s hard, because I had my own
business for 15 years. But it’s becoming easier and easier for
me to give it up, and share the art, share the creativity.”
Cobus has honest advice for aspiring costume designers:
“Expect long, hard hours. It is not a glamorous profession. I
think at every opening I’ve ever gone to here at the Ballet,
my hands have been dyed in whatever color they’re wearing
onstage. You just have to be tough. You’re hunched over sewing
machines; you’re figuring out problems; you have unreasonable
deadlines. You have to be committed to creating something from
nothing every day.” But, she adds, “if it’s your passion,
absolutely do it. You owe it to the world to share that part
of yourself.”
Freelance designer Sandra Woodall creates both costume and set
designs for companies across the country. She studied fine
arts and had wanted to become a painter, but a job she took
after graduating from college altered her course. Her sewing
skills gave her the chance to work in the wardrobe at the San
Francisco Opera House. Her work there followed an organic
progression, she says. “Initially I got into the business in a
very technical way, working on costumes, then building
costumes, then eventually sort of shyly exposing the fact that
I would be interested in designing costumes.”
An established freelancer whose work is in high demand—when we
spoke she was running between a new production of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream for Oregon Ballet Theatre and
Othello for Alberta Ballet—Woodall says, “I love
collaborating with the choreographer and developing a whole
visual concept, which includes the costumes and the scenery.”
She unites her approach to costume and scenic design through
her early training as a visual artist. “All these fields, in
terms of the arts, are just shades of aesthetic thinking. I
don’t feel like someone should think, ‘I can’t be a costume
designer because I wasn’t trained; I don’t have the theater
background.’ I think you develop a point of view that
translates.”
Stage
managing: Wear a watch
Josh Morales
comes from a family of musicians and singers and has a
background in event management. After running his own event
management and booking agency, Morales answered an
advertisement on CraigsList.com for a stage manager for the
dance competition company StarQuest.
“I had no idea what it really was,” Morales says. “I knew it
was stage managing a show, but I wasn’t really sure what a
dance competition was.” He got the job and, he says, “it all
worked out. I stage managed last year, the whole season, and
now I’m on the staff here permanently.” During the competition
season (roughly January through July), he stage manages
competition performances. Off-season, he works as booking
manager for StarQuest, hunting up competition venues around
the country.
“My passion is putting something together and seeing it come
to fruition,” says Morales. During competition performances,
he says, “I love working with the dancers backstage, making
sure that they’re on time, that they’re in their places, that
the lighting is correct for them, that they can hear the music
well. And that the audience gets a smooth show.”
As a booking manager, he says, “you’re on the phone talking to
people across the country about their facility, their stage
size, their lighting, where we’re going to bring our equipment
through, where we’re going to find dressing room space. It’s a
challenge. But again, when I’m on the site and I see it come
to fruition, then it’s worth it.”
Producing:
Learn to juggle
My own love
of dance blossomed late, when I was taking ballet class as an
English major at the University of Virginia. Three years
later, having landed a role as a Kit Kat Girl in a local
production of Cabaret, I fell in love with the
choreographer, Rob Petres, and ran off to Richmond with him in
2000 to help start Ground Zero Dance Company. Five years after
that, the skills I had developed producing dance concerts in
the wild landed me a job in academia as producer for the
Department of Dance & Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth
University.
For both Ground Zero and VCU, producing encompasses a broad
range of tasks. For a small modern dance company with limited
resources and personnel, it can include everything it takes to
get a concert onto the stage with an audience there to see it:
writing grants proposals, developing and implementing a
budget, recruiting technical expertise, doing marketing and
publicity, setting schedules, arranging travel, creating a
program, recruiting volunteer help. If the volunteers can’t be
found, sometimes it can mean changing gels, baking brownies,
or mopping the stage. At the university the responsibilities
are similar, but it’s easier to find help in the form of
students whose grades depend on working backstage,
distributing posters, or creating programs.
Prerequisites for producing are willingness, versatility,
commitment, patience, and excellent communication
skills—written and oral. During a performance week, your phone
will ring much more often and your email inbox will fill up
quickly. You must be able to see the big picture and hold the
entire time line in your head. You must deal gracefully with
wildly different personalities. Ultimately, you find ways to
provide artists with what they need to make their work.
The rewards
of these careers can be as rich and satisfying as the most
triumphant moment in the spotlight. After all, it’s only in
the combination of on- and offstage artists that dance reaches
its full potential as a performing art. As Morales says, “I
love being able to see it all come together at the end.”
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