Guest Blog
Nina Davies - Dancer/Artist
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| Nina Davies - May 2009 - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
I have recently been thinking about Arts Umbrella
and how it has shaped me as an artist and when Alex asked me to write about my
experiences as a student at Arts Umbrella I was excited to finally have an
opportunity to share these thoughts.
It is hard to know where to begin explaining
what a great program Arts Umbrella is as it is like trying to explain how your
parents made you into the person you are.
There are so many layers to Arts Umbrella’s practice and years after
leaving the program I am still trying to deconstruct the effects that their
method of teaching had on me. There has been a bit of press about the kind of
dancer they produce that can meet the high standards of the dance industry
today. But I feel as though there is a whole other side to this program, which
is equally as important and applies to both the students who pursue a career in
dance and those who do not.
“Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your
grandparents had a different word for burger flipping – they called it opportunity.”
- Bill Gates
During a lunchtime discussion with some of my
colleagues, we were talking about the value of humility and how it is an
essential part of being an easy person to work with. Due to social media my
generation has a false sense of self-importance and as a result makes us
unbearable to work with. Plenty of students think there is the perfect job
waiting for them after they graduate from high school or university, and for
most this is just not the case.
I thank Arts Umbrella for teaching me from
a young age to do anything that gets thrown at me to the best of my abilities
and that no job is negligible. When we were preparing for a school show or
coffee concert (both fairly small shows in comparison to the season finale at
the Vancouver Playhouse) rehearsal director Emily Molnar was disappointed with
our run-through in the morning. She told us that it did not make any difference
as to the size of the audience or who was in it, because if one person in the
audience enjoyed your performance then it was worth doing. We were probably 12
years old and no one had taught us these principles before. Those words still
resonate with me and I apply this theory to almost everything I do.
I started studying at the Arts Umbrella Dance
program in 2002 and left it in 2008 before I would have carried on into the
graduate program. In my first year in the professional training program and Arts
Umbrella Dance Company there was one thing that was made clear from the
beginning, and that was to never let your parents fight your battles for you. Director
Artemis Gordon told us that having our parents ask her why we were not given a
specific part would not help our chances of getting the desired part in a
performance. For the first time in my life I had to be reasonable for my own
failures and learn from them in a professional way. This taught me about
independence from an early age. For most, this kind independence is achieved in
their early twenties and I was lucky and I’m sure I speak on behalf of all my
peers that we were able to enter adulthood with a strong work ethic.
As well as attaining a professional work
ethic from my dance training I left with certain knowledge of dance and the
human body. My interest in dance has influenced the work I have been making on
a broad spectrum.
After I left Arts Umbrella I moved to
London to pursue a “career” in cabaret. I met a woman called Marisa Carnesky and
got a job in a few of her shows as a contortionist. I then began work as a
freelance performer, doing my acts around Europe. Fulfilling all my
desires to be a showgirl, I decided that my interests lay within the realm of
art after interning for artist Gavin Turk. With some encouragement from my colleagues
I submitted an application to study fine art at Central Saint Martins. To my
amazement I was accepted into the program without any fine art experience. The
program at Arts Umbrella was so vigorous; there was no time in our day to take extra
curricular classes like art in high school.
At the beginning of the course I felt
pressure to make politically charged work. As a result of this the work I made
was terribly cliché and I was not engaged with it on any level. One of my
tutors told me to have a think about what I was interested in and I would find criticality
within that. In a guest artist talk at the university the speaker mentioned
that there was no way of writing dance. This comment intrigued me and this
eventually formed the basis of my practice.
I have just graduated from my degree with
an assortment of work that questions how we think of human motion in spoken,
written, and notated language. Arts Umbrella (like many dance schools) did not
teach existing forms of movement notation so I am not very familiar with how
they work. Most schools do not teach these systems, as they are not widely used
by dancers and choreographers. I really wanted (and still do) to understand why
dance has difficulty existing in the written form. My first query was; how is
it that music is notated and explained on paper when it is so hard to put a
sound into words, while a series of body movements cannot? After making work
surrounding this query I started playing around with movement in everyday
language (written and spoken) and to my amazement people find the task of
explaining movements like walking and running very difficult.
Enabling people to understand dance, as an
art form is one of the many attributes of Arts Umbrella. My farther, knowing
very little about dance before I started studying dance now attends almost
every Ballet BC performance at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. This power that
Arts Umbrella possesses is a quality I would like my work to have some day.
Nina Davies - a performance
Nina Davies - a performance