Prologue, Dream Ballet

  Performing your craft on a great stage is like feeling your soul float on a cloud of ecstasy. Your high comes from riding the high.

Your adrenaline is pumping, your heart smiles wide, and you leap so far out of your element that you land exactly where you are supposed to be; vulnerably present. I have performed in over fifteen musicals, ten live award shows, 10 industrial gigs, and counting. This sensation is always steeped in the same bedrock, just with different architectural designs. Same recipe, different garnish.

It’s irrational yet euphoric. 

I call it the curtain rising phenomenon. 

It takes a certain type of person to bare their soul on a stage; an artist. People tend to look at artists as fish out of water. Those same people may wonder what it feels like to perform live on a stage with millions of people watching.

To generate the sensation that combines nervousness, excitement, eagerness, and hyper-awareness, meanwhile tiptoeing the verge of emotional hysteria is a feeling that takes place when that curtain goes up. 

In an industry that is, by design, superficial, volatile, financially unstable, and discriminatory you wonder what drives people to choose art as a career? The Curtain rising phenomenon is why. You will never feel more present and in your own element than when you are on a stage doing what you love the most. The stakes are always high. 

In my book, Don’t call me a Dancer, I freeze-frame this sensation, peek behind the metaphorical curtain, and rewind time taking us to what got me, the artist, to that point. Who is the woman behind the curtain?

At the end of every chapter, I choreograph a written dream ballet.

A dream ballet in Musical theatre is an all-dancing, no-singing production number that reflects the themes of the production. In this case, a whimsical, majestic scenario that is a utopian version of my reality. In other words, the Instagram curated-post, of my reality.

Concluding each dream ballet, say out loud, “and then…I woke up.”