The Performances That Never Happened (And Other Failures)

I double-check my phone a few times, standing outside an old building in the sweltering summer heat. Having been around most of the bigger New York City rehearsal spaces for dance, I know the nearest one is a fifteen-minute walk away. I’m perplexed, and a little nervous, but artists tend to find hidden, cheap places to craft their work here in this expensive city, so I remain determined to find the door. 

It’s a gigantic building, and it looks like there used to be a TJ Maxx on the ground floor, but the windows are dusty and dark.

The financial district has a lot of buildings like this; after 9/11, this part of the city took many years to recover. By now, it’s 10 years past the tragedy, but there are plenty of ghostly vibes here. I give up and text the choreographer, who pops his head out of a dusty side door next to some water pipes a few minutes later. I only met him once before, at his audition, but I follow him down some dusty stairs with too much confidence. I cover my naivete with bravado. At no point do I think, “Is this safe?”

We pass a few rooms where men in orange hats hammer away at something and I follow him through a small entrance with a bank-like vault door swinging from it’s hinges.

“It’s a city grant,” he explains. “Unused spaces in limbo being used for art-making.” This goes a little over my head at the time. Looking back now I desperately google search to find evidence of this grant online, but come up empty. 

I haven’t been very successful in auditions since I graduated from my arts conservatory with a B.F.A. in Dance Performance, much to my frustration and confusion. I’m at a point where I am reassessing if I will need to pivot entirely away from dancing. However, this choreographer actually wanted to work with me, despite not having met him before. This is an exciting moment for me, and I politely ignore the voice in my head that points out that this is not a paid gig. 

This is the reality of the lives of many dancers in the city—project after half-funded project that won’t keep the lights on, as creators struggle to gain traction in the brutal machine that is New York City's performing arts. Honestly, I just want to add something to my resume. If I can just get one performance out of this in any reputable venue, it will be worth it for me. 

I was no stranger to dancing on dusty floors.

Down in the vault, there’s a projector set up, and a few dancers in sweats are stretching and chatting. A guy with bold glasses, a striped shirt, and fancy facial hair tinkers with his MacBook Pro. I kick off my Doc Martens and slump my dance bag by a cement support beam. The corners of the basement stretch into darkness, but we are anchored by a dimly lit stairwell and the lighted square of the projector. 

The floor isn’t meant for dance, and the other dancers aren’t especially friendly, but the hipster in the striped shirt has worked out a cool delay effect with a motion camera. We are asked to improvise in front of it. As I move, I see myself looped and repeated on the screen, like a hall of mirrors, only they’re reflecting the past. I swoop into a back arch, keeping my eyes on the screen, then continue on to a pirouette that descends to the floor. When I’m on the floor I roll to check my past self, she’s swooping into her back arch, and then another clone of her does it again, and again and again. I get a little lost, experimenting with layering movements that I try to connect to later on their echoed repeats. Time passes easily. 

I enjoy the rehearsals in the dim basement—until I get an email saying they’re canceled until further notice. The space is “in limbo” no longer, and we have nowhere to rehearse.

I never hear back from the choreographer. I’m disappointed. It’s not even the fact that I wasn’t paid for my labor. It’s the fact that I don’t even get to put it on my resume. Who cares about some half-completed city residency with an emerging choreographer that never resulted in a performance?

Many unpaid rehearsals

It’s a Sunday in summer, and the air feels good on my sticky face as I ride my sky-blue track bike out of my neighborhood toward my bartending job. I opt to take the Manhattan Bridge, which is farther but much more peaceful, and divert to ride along the East River past the old dudes fishing and the groups of ladies who get together to dance in big groups.

I arrive at a brick building nestled in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bride, a kitchy place with a country western ocean theme. It doesn’t make sense on paper but it’s the greatest restaurant in the entire city and I still go there every time I visit. Sometimes I don’t even drop off my things at a hotel, I ride the A train all the way to Fulton Street and drag my luggage across the battered cobblestones of the South Street Seaport to plop down at the old wooden bar. On the inside, the Christmas lights and cluttered decor send colorful beams of light across the dining room.

Later in the summer, I get really excited about another project with a different emerging choreographer. She’s completing her master’s degree and asks me to come to rehearsals to participate in some movement research. This time, we’re in a sunny upper-level studio in Brooklyn with warm wooden floors overlooking a dingy intersection where two streets converge into each other yet go nowhere; there’s an awkward triangular stretch of pavement that leads to a busier street beyond.

The choreographer instructs me and the other dancers to improvise and “play” with a specific type of prop. We experiment with twisting it, using it as clothing, putting it on our heads, and then we set specific movement patterns which come from our own improvisational movement. The choreographer explains that her professor for her remote graduate program wanted her to film our rehearsals to submit as homework. These rehearsals are paid ($12 an hour!), which has me feeling like a real professional. I wonder if they’ll eventually culminate in a show or a piece of work I can add to my paltry resume.

Unfortunately, the choreographer stops emailing me, tied up in her graduate thesis work. I fight off disappointment, trying to be understanding. A few months later, she pops up on my radar. She’s producing a show at a well-known venue. I buy tickets out of curiosity. When I enter the theater, I see the prop we worked with. I think about all those hours generating movement with it, all filmed by the choreographer. I get a weird feeling in my stomach, but stay for the show. It’s amazing, and I think she’s brilliant, but I step out of the theater in a bit of a daze.

The movement, the prop, the echoes of all those rehearsals I was part of—now transformed into something polished, something complete. My name isn’t in the program. There’s no record that I was ever there.

I take the subway to the cowboy-ocean bar, craving a glass of wine and a familiar space to shake off the uneasy feeling. By the time I get there, I’ve almost convinced myself it doesn’t matter. It’s a gray area; Movement creation, improvisation, and the arrangement of ideas, in the current era of contemporary dance, is like the bottom of a murky pond when it comes to ownership. In processes

like these, ideas mix and settle like silt—once they’re in the water, no one can claim them entirely.

Halloween at the restaurant

But as I set up the bar for my shift the next day, pulling out a giant bowl of lemons and limes from the walk-in, my mind keeps circling back. Not just to this project, but to all the others that never made it onto my resume. The performances that disappeared before they even happened.

The struggling-artist-to-service-industry pipeline is real. I don’t mind my restaurant job, the people are dysfunctional but funny, and it’s busy enough to distract me from my disappointments. Importantly, it’s flexible, and the manager understands, as most New York City restaurant managers do, that the job is not my main priority.

After setting up my bar, I start juicing citrus. In the lazy midday hours, the restaurant is quiet, so I can dissociate in peace as I stare out the window at the grimy, inaccessible underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s scaffolding up on the side of it, yet I’ve never seen anyone working on the old bridge.

A prominent dance company is hiring, offering a week-long series of open classes to kick of their audition process. I go to the classes, feeling good because I've freshly cut my hair and I enjoy whipping it around while I spin.

At the end of the week, a company member, approaches me. "You look like one of our other dancers, who just retired. You should come to the audition, I think you might be a good fit."

I was planning to go anyway, but this stands out to me because this is the most encouragement I have received. Hope seeps into my heart.

The next day, I attend a different audition at a building in the meatpacking district which has been converted into a multi-level immersive venue. I get a callback, but as I'm whipping my head into a backward arch, something feels wrong. I know immediately that I've thrown my neck out completely.

In excruciating pain, I ride the rattly C train all the way home, tears pricking at the corners of my mind. Each shift of the train sends screaming pain down my neck, back and shoulders.

I can't move my head properly for three days, and I don't go to the most promising audition of my recent life. I beat myself up, thinking that I should have been more careful, warmed up better, crosstrained more, or at least used a foam roller on my neck beforehand.

I finish hand-juicing and move on to cutting limes. The bar is known for its frosty frozen margaritas, made with tart key lime juice, so we always need more limes for garnish. I wear gloves to protect my fingers, already split open from being dunked in sanitizer every night, and keep daydreaming.

During this time, I’m also part of a dance project my friend is producing. People always say to dance for your choreographer friends because it’s a good way to get your start, but I do it because I believe in her work. She develops a beautiful quartet, an evening-length show based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing, full of structural repetition, gorgeous, devastating movement, and sparse brutality. I feel incredibly invested in the process. A couple of weeks before the one-night-only performance, she breaks the news that not only has she met someone, but she is getting married and is moving to London. At least I can put it on my resume—and at least my friend found love.

We danced anywhere we could.

Another choreographer I started working with in college scores a residency at Baryshnikov’s Arts Center—which is huge. When the performance happens (and this is true), one of my colleagues goes into cardiac arrest on stage. He survives, thanks to the intervention of my former professor’s husband, an emergency surgeon, who performs CPR until the paramedics arrive. There’s even a Daily News article about it.

After that, the poor choreographer—probably traumatized—stops making dances for a while. She never uses me as a dancer again. Later, when I reach out to her for a reference letter, she doesn’t respond. Despite all that, you’ll still see that performance on my resume.

After cutting limes, I have some extra time before the dinner rush, so I sketch ideas for the outdoor chalkboard. It’s the 2010s, and chalkboard art is all the rage. I like the restaurant and have fun coming up with cute designs for the quirky nautical-cowboy theme. As I sketch a mermaid promoting two-dollar shots, I continue to mull over the failures of my young professional life. 

The thought I always come back to during these frustrating times is potential.

In my youth, I spent hour after hour doing tendus and pliés, honing my body for dance. I missed class trips, sleepovers, and a social life outside of dance. My parents put miles on their cars, bringing me to and from ballet, and gave me unrelenting encouragement to pursue what I loved.

High school

I try to avoid the lurking criticism always in my brain: You’re a failure. You are a wasted investment. You just don’t have what it takes.

I stare out the window, thinking, I could wake up in five years and be staring out of this same window, behind this same bar, my litany of incomplete projects piled up like these juiced limes.

By my teenage self’s expectations, I am a failure. I wanted to join a dance company and have a full-time, paid position.

My little 20-year-old self didn’t stop to process the intense privilege I had to even have the option to pursue something I loved to do, something I was good at. My parents sent me to high school and private college for dance, and footed the bill. When I lived in New York, they even helped me with my rent, for a time. Of course, this enhanced my extreme frustration and obsession with being a failure. I was young.

Now, at 36, I want to take my past self in my arms and pinch her cheeks, and maybe give her a little slap–a gentle one. I thought I knew everything. Now, the older I get, I realize how little I know.

Eventually, I pack up my things and leave New York City. I leave the job at the restaurant and move to Denver. I stop trying to perform professionally and take a job teaching dance at a public elementary school. I take classes but avoid modern, contemporary, and ballet. Instead, I try new styles, shifting my mindset. I even go to China and teach English for a year. I take an unpaid gig dancing back-up for a drag queen at Denver Pride. I try cup-in-hand kickball (fun) and rock climbing (very fun). 

Some of the most fun I've had dancing on any stage.

Slowly, I realize that I miss it. My body is older—less strong and flexible—but my brain is wiser. I have more perspective. I miss dancing, especially performing. I decide, with much support from my partner, to start dancing seriously again. I try to get back into shape, and in my very first audition, I get a job. It’s the beginning of something exciting for me, but it is not going to be paying any bills. I can still make a good margarita, so I head back to the service industry. I work at an italian restaurant and a country club. I start getting decent teaching gigs through friends, and my life stabilizes little by little. 

I decide that if I am chasing the dreams of my youth, to be a professional dancer, I can choreograph too. This is my true passion. I’ve always loved creating things from scratch. It’s an exercise in failure, too. The final product is never exactly what I imagined, and there’s a certain aspect of letting go of my controlling nature, which is good for me. The journey from the idea to the realization of a dance piece is a process, with plenty of mistakes along the way. 

Now, I like to think my failures have made my life richer, like a well-mixed cocktail—unexpected, a little bitter, but ultimately satisfying. I’m still a failure in the eyes of my teenage self, but what did she know? She thought success was a straight line, not a looping, messy improvisation. Like the video effect made by that hipster guy in that dusty basement, past mindsets recapitulate themselves into oblivion until they transform into something new, something better. 

Recently, I put together a resume for an application. Looking at it, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time—pride. Not because it was perfect or prestigious, but because every line was earned. Every gig, every near-miss, every “almost” that led me here.

Honestly, the pain of failure makes the triumph of success glow that much more.