“And this is Jamee, she is a dancer.”
I used to write creatively all the time. Over the past few months I have felt the urge to get back to it. There is so much to process. I am a new mom. I purchased a business and revamped both that and my existing one as well as paused my artistic career. There are new relationships, new bills/loans, new opinions, ever changing schedules, important hopes + dreams and so many individual steps involved both long term and day to day, which I wish to share. I will start with a little mosaic of my upbringing, my personality, and my choice to live a life centered around dance.
I come from a very athletic family. We are movers and we are good at it. My little sister was drafted on full scholarship to a university in the States in her Grade 10 year. I believe she was the only one of the team with that high of a scholarship and the skills that got her there were widely apparent from the time she was 6 years old. Then we have two cousins who received baseball scholarships and on my dad’s side (different than hers), I have a cousin who played on the Canadian Women’s Water Polo team for a decade, competing across the globe and at the 2017 Pan Am Games in Toronto. Then, most importantly, there is my father - he is a world champion in Racquetball. My older sister and I grew up on the courts watching him. There are trophies throughout his office and childhood photos of us in a number of gym restaurants throughout Ontario and Montreal. He exemplified how sport can be taken seriously and professionally and his competitive spirit was definitely passed on to me.
Continuing on with this family perspective, I was moved around a lot. I was the new kid on more than occasion. I got to see different versions of dance and dance studios throughout my life, which has been a huge asset in my current position. In Grade 11, during the second week of school, after already starting my Lyrical solo for the year, I abruptly went from life in Burlington to Newtonville, Ontrario. Uprooting both my school, my job, my dance relationships and comforts literally overnight. But in two short years I was back to competing in multiple solos, I was cast as a lead in the production and I was voted class valedictorian + student council representative of our graduating class at high school. I also received academic + leadership awards from the faculty of sciences and graduated with straight A’s. I entered a very small community where the students of the dance studio and students at the high school had been in the same classes with the same students often since kindergarten. There were 15 year pins rewarded at the studio and parents who babysat their kid’s fellow classmates since their days in diapers - yet the politics were put aside because my commitment, past experiences, general openness and most importantly my effort allowed me to integrate and succeed within the studio and school.
Speaking of effort; I need to tell you about my commute to dance … I lived on Concession Road 5 in Newtonville, went to high school in Newcastle (that one you can see from hwy 115) and danced in Oshawa. I would go to school on the bus and then after school I would take a family friend / cousin’s bus to the town of Newcastle and then take the Go bus from Newcastle, through Bowmanville and Curtis, to Oshawa. From what I recall high school finished around 3:00 pm, maybe earlier, the Go bus came around 4:05 pm and dance would not start until 6:00 / 6:30 pm some nights. There was a lot of waiting but it worked…It had to.
Pre-Oshawa, back when my mom drove me to dance everyday, I was enthralled by my teacher, Sandra Nicholson. When I received tutus from her senior students from other studios I became apart of her legacy. She cried watching my trio once. She choreographed to a song that played at her brothers funeral and the trust and privilege lives in my bones to this day. When I was the first of my class to receive choreography en pointe, my worth, well my worth as a person, skyrocketed. And the funny part is I cannot picture a clear memory where I saw her dance…ever. She watched and instructed and walked around in her white sweat pants and extremely turn out legs, maybe physically correcting or maybe just talking and giggling when we were way off. To this day, some decades later, she remains one of the most important people to ever be apart of my life. And I could easily write two more paragraphs about Franci and Juliana who steered the programs outside of Ballet, giving us so many opportunities in addition to competition including full black light puppet shows that we performed at Halloween, parts in an Opera with La Scala Opera Company, trips to Italy and beyond.
Closing the competitive dance chapter of my life, I went York University where I had hoped to double major in Dance and Acting…but that was not as straightforward as I’d thought because the school did not allow double majoring within the same departments, i.e. - you can do fine arts and science but not fine arts and fine arts. So instead I learned about culture, took auxiliary dance classes and joined lots of clubs including a performance group and the cheerleading team. I had never cheered before, and shied away from acro / gymnastics growing up to focus on acting and extra ballet. Then poof, there I was competing first year university among all these club cheerleaders in an American competition, which we won. Then later, to my complete surprise, I was granted “Rookie of the Year”!
Thereafter I went to George Brown full time for concert dance with a major emphasis on Ballet and maintained some University classes at York online and at night. I also worked in the office of the school and at Jack Astor’s and I danced for Cadence Contemporary Ballet on Sundays. Then, leading up to graduation, I decided I needed to choreograph more so I created a 1 hour show with the dancers in my program while also being a member of the extra performance ensemble that toured Ballet Jorgen company works and of course attended the standard 8 hour school days comprised almost entirely of, you guessed it, DANCE.
Following this ‘school + school + dance + dance + dance + joe-job + office job = hustle’ regime I built for myself, I missed graduation to move to the Yukon to Can Can, thus marking the beginning of my actual professional performance career and contract based lifestyle. I would later bounce back and forth between concert contemporary dance, choreography and more entertainment based performance work while slowly but surely uncovering my passion and abilities in teaching and mentoring; finding my own way to recreate what Sandra, Juliana and Franci gave to me.
