Dissecting Your Dreams

Advice for Planning a Dance Career

If I could go back and tell myself one thing before I graduated college, it would be this. 

(well, honestly, I would have so many things to tell myself, I don’t know how I would actually just choose one, but luckily it’s all hypothetical and I’m telling everyone now.)

Dissecting your dreams: 

I promise this won’t be gross, I really do not like doctors offices so you all will be fine. 

When I was in my last semester of college, we had a whole class dedicated to “planning our future dance career,” looking back this is hysterical to me, because you can control your dance career about as much as you can herd a cat. If I were to give any seniors advice it would be to do this exercise; 

STEP 1: Visualize

Close your eyes and picture you dream dance career. Picture the most perfect moment in your day from this ideal life you came up with. Take a couple minutes with your eyes closed. Get as much detail as possible. 

STEP 2: Free Write 

Free writing is a tool used in a lot of dancer’s artistic processes, it means set a timer for a certain amount of time 5-10 minutes should do the trick. Get a piece of paper and a pen and start writing, the only rules: write the whole time and never stop writing. 

This writing is not going to be turned in for a grade, it’s okay if it’s sloppy, all over the place, and only kind of makes sense. 

Your Prompt: 

• Free write about what you saw and felt in your visualization/daydream. If you think about your dream career a lot, use those daydreams too. How did you feel? What were you excited about? Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? 

STEP 3: Treasure Hunt

Go back through your free write, don’t worry about the writing, this isn’t an editing session. The goal here is to dig into your writing and the moments in the free write that pull at your heart strings. Circle or underline these sentences. 

For example, were you with a group of friends going into rehearsal or were you alone on stage performing. Were you in a big city, a different country, your hometown? 

Make a list from your writing of these things. Feel free to add more “wants” if you come up with them or if you find something missing. 

STEP 4: Dissecting 

Now is the time, go through your list and dissect this moment to its root. Ask yourself some tough questions, but try to find out what is the core desire for this “want” on your list.  

If that sounds a bit like metaphorical mumbo jumbo, I don’t blame you. Let me give you some examples. 

If you were on stage in front of an audience, perhaps you enjoy performing more than rehearsing. Do you enjoy performing for live audiences, because you like the applause, meeting people at the stage door afterwards, would you be as happy performing on film where there is no crowd? Or does that not interest you? What about other live art forms?

If you saw yourself with a well known company, perhaps you like the prestige of being with a big name. Would you be just as happy with a small company that no one has heard of if it was a similar style or would you rather be with a different well known company?

If you saw yourself touring to different countries or traveling, is this because you want to take your art around the world, share dancing culture through the stage? Or do you want to see the world for other reasons? Would you be just as happy traveling for fun without dance or performing?

Allow yourself to ask deep questions. Don’t judge your answers. And don’t answer how you THINK you should answer. 

STEP 5:  

You should now have a dissection of your dream. Hopefully you can see a bit clearer what you really want. Sometimes we pick a dream and then find a way to project everything we want onto this dream. Perhaps I’m projecting onto everyone else, as this is what I did. I had one dream that I really wanted and I made it hold all my hopes and desires. But when I started to dissect my dream job, I realized that I wanted a strong community, to travel (but not necessarily for work), I wanted to perform for people, I wanted to introduce people to art, I wanted to perform theatrical shows. I broke down what I thought I wanted and was left with what I needed. 

You now have your own list of your Root Desires, let these true dreams guide you to your own fulfilling career.