Greetings to all of you, my beloved readers! I hope that you have been enjoying an incredible summer full of hard work, rest, relaxation, and preparation for a fantastic 2017-2018 season. It has been very odd for me to take so much time off from writing these past few months. But it was absolutely necessary for me to take a few things off of my plate to make space for my extremely challenging schedule. July was quite murderous for me with daily commutes stretching as long as 9 hours (thanks to summer traffic heading into NYC), weekly teaching schedules including 12+ classes, weekly podcasts, and preparations for our move to NYC. I'm aware that I have been running a very fine line between setting up my work life for our move and burning out on my tedious travel schedule. In good news, I feel like I have finally gotten over the hump of summer insanity, so I want to offer you a very brief update before I go back into blog-hiding again for a little bit.
First and most exciting, my Danya and I have officially given our 60 days notice that we will not be renewing our lease in Philadelphia. After 19 months of super-commuting to see if transitioning my career to New York City would be a good fit, it became so overwhelmingly clear that we are 100% sure that this is the right thing to do. I have spent most of the summer teaching regularly at Steps on Broadway and Broadway Dance Center, but have also spent a lot of time teaching my kids up at Greenwich Ballet Academy in Connecticut and Port Chester, New York. I have also begun developing the 2nd year of what I hope to be a 4-year contemporary dance training syllabus for pre-professional ballet dancers. Beyond this, I have gained employment one evening a week with another school in New Jersey this coming fall. While I still have room for additional choreography, teaching, speaking, consulting, and private lessons, I will have my first set of stable work and income since I began freelancing back in 2011. I bet you can hear the great sigh of relief that I just let out having put this down in writing to share with you.
The second piece of news I have could be seen as good or bad news, depending on how you view it. Part of the reason I needed to take a break from writing on LoFD was because I had severe writer's block that I had never experienced in the 5 years of continuously developing content for all of you to read here. I couldn't figure out why I didn't want to write, aside from assuming it was a symptom of my overwhelming travel and work schedule. When I finally gave myself permission to take some time away from here, my initial reaction was that I was done with blogging. But as I continued to rest my mind and repair my thought process, I came to realize that I am having such difficulty coming up with new material because I have evolved into a new stage of my career. While I will always have the heart of a freelancer and likely continue to work as a freelance dance educator, choreographer, speaker, and who knows what new additions I will add, I have not had any new experiences as a performing freelance artist in quite some time. Most of what I've written on here in the past two years has involved recollections and memories I had during my tenure traveling the country from company to company. This combined with the fact that blocking online bots from spamming my blog also stopped major search engines from offering my writing to the general public (I went from 250-1000 daily views to 20-50). I couldn't figure out why I should continue writing on here, especially with the tedious process of starting from scratch to regain the former visibility my blog had retained. Having some time to think, I realized that I still love to write and want to continue sharing valuable information and intriguing personal and second-hand experiences of dance artists publicly.
Taking all of this into consideration, I determined that if I was going to start over building my blog's audience, I was going to do it in a way that is now relevant to the career-style that I am living and breathing. For this reason, I have decided that I am going to stop writing for LoFD, archive all of my valuable posts for readers here and in the form of an E-Book, and launch a new blog this fall about the life of dance educator, coach, choreographer, speaker, and whatever else comes my way. I am hoping to cover all relevant topics for the stage of a dance career that happens once a performing artist takes their final curtain call. I am not quite sure the title of this venture or when it will launch. But it will likely happen soon thereafter my husband and I transition our lives 90 miles north to New York City. So, be sure to stay tuned on here for a major announcement that will likely happen somewhere during the time period of October or November.
Lastly, I just want to take a moment to thank all of you for being so understanding as I figure out what is happening in my life and how I can continue to provide the best content for my family, friends, colleagues, and readers. I hope you will continue to join me on this fascinating journey that has been my dance career.
(And, if you want to catch up on any of my former posts, click here for a general archive of content)
