FRINGE ARTS
19
Lesley Charters Cotton and Street Dancing: A Story of Alchemy “What I’ve Done Around Dance in the Last 20 Years Is Just Exploring My Limits, Figuring Out Who I Am in It, and I’m a Lot in It.”
Victoria Lamas
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I trained to be a secretary and I learned to type with a fellow student at the back of the room. We were not into it, and she would bring straight vodka to class. And we would giggle, we would type and we would giggle, and somehow it got us through this nonsense of secretarial [studies]. We couldn’t imagine ourselves as secretaries.” Lesley Charters Cotton didn’t stay a secretary for very long. The 71-year-old Montreal street dancer leads an exciting life. She’s traveled, studied, followed her passions, and often circled back to being a teacher. Charters Cotton bridges people and disciplines. When she was 31, she taught a photo print making class at Concordia’s Loyola campus, and she’s been a teacher of Chinese medicine for decades. For parts of the 70s she worked for an airline in Alberta, selling tickets, handling luggage, communicating with
Charters Cotton’s Definition of Street Dancing: “[It] embraces many different styles: hip hop, house, reggae, popping, cardio, and stretch.” The challenges: musicality and grove. The rewards: health, confidence, and community building.
head office. After, she worked in an architect’s office as a secretary. “They asked me to do the bookkeeping and I’m sure that’s probably why they ran out of business because I wasn’t very good at that,” she said. “But that was a thrill because I worked with some now internationally famous architects, so I now think back to the days when they used to hang out by the front desk and they would chat.” Charters Cotton wasn’t dancing then. She was 12 when she got sick—with paralyzing migraines, body pain, loss of sensation in her extremities—and until doctors diagnosed her properly and cured her at 50, she couldn’t partake in dance, the medium that allows her to express who she is. “And then I was able to dance,” said Charters Cotton. “And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. And I thought I would maybe get it out of my system, that it would last maybe three or four years.”
But Charters Cotton never let go of the love she found: street dancing. She is prominently a house dancer, but has tried a lot of styles over the years. “If I were a two-dimensional artist,” she said, “I’d be collage. It’s multilayering, but it’s also multi-textural, so that the mood can change as it does with the music.” Charters Cotton knows everyone in the Montreal street dancing community and they all know her. She has danced with every instructor, attended every event. She goes to dance battles and street dancing events around the city, danced in every studio. “It’s been almost 20 years since I have been doing this seriously,” she said. “And when I say seriously, it means making an effort to grow with it and at the same time really not necessarily having a goal.” “It’s very interesting when you get in your sixties, and now I’m in my seventies, this sense of ambition changes.”
OC TOBER 2019
