Roads Taken and Not Taken

Making a Place in the Dance World

By Dana Nichols ’14

Every time I tell someone that I am a professional dancer, I’m shocked by my own words. I spent my first three years at Haverford talking myself out of it. It’s going to be too hard. I don’t have what it takes. I won’t make any money. People will think I wasted my education. It’s too late.

But by my senior year, I was learning to listen to my desires, despite all the “what ifs.” I had to start making courageous decisions—even if it meant failure. Finally, I said something out loud that I had never before been able to say: “I want to be a dancer.”

I had studied ballet very seriously as a child, six days a week, but I never saw myself as a ballet dancer. The girls I trained with were religious about it. They obsessively practiced and studied videos of their favorite ballerinas. I did not obsess. For me ballet was a discipline—an act of mastery—but mostly it was a way of achieving bodily freedom. I just wanted to float and leap across the floor.

When I entered high school, the logistics of my ballet training schedule became too difficult. My school was 20 miles from my home, and going to dance classes every night meant my mom and I spent hours in the car, often parked in rush hour Los Angeles traffic. Something had to give. I needed to prepare for college, so I ramped down my ballet training.

At the same time, I was falling in love with the freedom of contemporary dance, and I began spending more time with my modern dance and lyrical jazz teachers.

As a teenager, I had changed in so many ways. I was a black girl growing up in segregated Los Angeles, coming into my racial awakening. I was hungry to learn about the artistic contributions of my people. Ballet had my heart, but I felt other callings. Around the time my dance peers were beginning to commit to conservatory programs and full-time pre-professional tracks in ballet around the world, I was immersing myself in issues of diversity and social justice. Though I continued on page 78

Dana Nichols ‘14