Transcript
Speaker: learning how to collaborate with the other arts disciplines at the school, building a staff and a budget and doing the fundraising, doing the marketing. Courtney and I were sewing costumes at our house the night before the show. know We did a little bit of everything, but it really did show me that i I was excited about the prospect of building something and building a culture where the work that we produced provided a really meaningful experience and for the students, for the audience, for the all the people that kind of rallied around the mission of that school, which was a really great thing to be a part of.
Speaker: I'm Kaitlyn, a former professional ballerina turned dance educator and career mentor, and this is the Brand New Ballerina podcast. I am here for the aspiring professional ballerina who wants to learn what it really takes to build a smart and sustainable career in the dance industry. I'm peeling back the curtain of professional dance world with open and honest conversations about the realities of becoming a professional dancer.
Speaker: Come along to gain the knowledge and inspiration you need to succeed in a dance career on your terms.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Brainy Ballerina podcast. I'm your host, Caitlin Sloan, and I am joined today by Garrett Anderson. Garrett is the Artistic Director of Ballet Idaho, and before stepping into this role, he enjoyed a 20-year professional performing career with companies including San Francisco Ballet, the Royal Ballet of Flanders, and Tray McIntyre Project and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.
Speaker: Today we're talking all about his journey from performer to artistic director and what it really takes to build a career in the arts. So Garrett, why did you take your very first dance class?
Speaker: Wow, it was a long time ago. Let me try to pull that memory back. I saw a demonstration at my elementary school. Going home from that, telling my mom all about it,
Speaker: I was very excited at whatever I saw. I don't remember much about the group that came. I know it was not a ballet demonstration, but some sort of dance that was energetic and interesting to me. And I was in describing this experience to my mother who had been a dancer in her early life and um continues now to take ballet classes.
Speaker: as an adult, but she had always loved ballet. So once I expressed some interest into the art form at all, she said, well, the place you need to begin is with ballet training. And then from there, you can you can adventure beyond that. So the rest is history. She put me in ballet classes and I kind of got stuck in that genre.
Speaker: Yeah. What was your training like growing up? Well, I lived in a really a small town that didn't have a lot of training available. So my early training was, you know, one room dance studio with a wood floor and a a kind old woman who taught whoever would sign up. And she was very encouraging.
Speaker: I remember that. I remember I was one of two boys who were in the in the school. As one of two boys, you get a lot of attention. And it was fun having one other boy in there with me. And we sort of competed and tried to learn new moves. And I don't think we had a lot of technical rigor in our early training, but we at least discovered something that opened up that interest to what followed.
Speaker: From there, I started commuting about three hours a day in the car to go to a more serious ballet school. And this is this was run by someone that my mother grew up with. And she went on to have a professional career. She danced in San Francisco Ballet and American Ballet Theater.
Speaker: And so was somewhat famous coming from a small town in central California to have had that really prestigious career. So remembering this person and knowing that she had now taken over a ah dance studio, she started driving me up to the Bay Area. And I remember the stark contrast of that environment and how serious it was and how quiet it was in the studio and just how hard people were working. And from that moment on, certainly hooked.
Speaker: Just the the environment of that kind of dedication and the integrity of work ethic that was all around me and just ballet itself being so difficult.
Speaker: And the idea of like, this is infinitely a puzzle that I can continue to try to solve with my body. And So that that sort of opened up the idea that, oh, this could go beyond a fun after school activity and become something that I could spend my life doing. But it was that place, which was Contra Costa Ballet Center in Walnut Creek, California, that I was really introduced to professional level training.
Speaker: And did you do that all through high school or did you end up moving away from home to study? So I did, i stayed there. i eventually moved out of my home and lived with a host family with a young couple who had recently moved there to dance with a small company that was based in Walnut Creek, which is is still there, Diablo Ballet. But they they agreed to sort of take me in as ah a boarding student. So I didn't have to drive three hours a day, but it was a year later that the directors of the school, Zola and Richard, decided i was ready to go
Speaker: to a bigger school that would have more men's training. So they encouraged me to go audition at San Francisco Ballet School, which they had directed the San Francisco Ballet School before moving to the East Bay and taking on the studio. So it was an intimidating move and a very important one to do at that juncture in my development as a young dancer. But suddenly I was in a much bigger pond and I was definitely a small fish, which was, again, definitely what I needed. It was very humbling.
Speaker: So from there, what was your transition like from being a student to professional dancer? Well, I think from there, so I was very fortunate to be able to see the San Francisco Ballet perform on a regular basis.
Speaker: i remember spending many evenings after class running over to the theater across the street and standing in the back and standing room and just soaking it all in. I mean, that was definitely formative for the artist that I was hoping to become. But I didn't think I had a shot at getting into that company.
Speaker: I had been spending summers elsewhere. i had gone to American Ballet Theater in the summer course and spent many summers going to Seattle and studying at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, which was a different stylistic focus, just a different environment. it For whatever reason,
Speaker: I had a different level of confidence there. And i think when I was invited to audition to stay for the year in their newly minted professional division, which is essentially a a trainee pre-professional program, I jumped at the opportunity and i was able to perform with the company, tour with the company.
Speaker: Also, we had our own full program with classes and some performing experiences as a student company. That was an important step for me, not only to broaden my stylistic technical toolkit, but to gain some different influences just to be in an environment where I felt like I could really contribute. And it gave me the confidence to feel like, oh, they're interested in me here. I may have a pathway in this company.
Speaker: And it was a great company. it was an exciting company also to watch and be a part of. But that's where I met my wife, Courtney. And after the first year of that program, where we had spent that first, was her second year, it was my first year. So she was ready to go out and audition. And so she went on an audition tour with several other students. And her first stop was San Francisco Ballet. And she got offered job. Yeah.
Speaker: So there I was trying to create a different path where I thought I would have a greater chance of success. And she got this offer and I said, and she didn't really know the company that well at that time. And i told her, you have to take this. I mean, this is a once lifetime opportunity, but that created a problem for us where now I'm back trying to audition there. And I think I auditioned formally once, but I kept visiting and taking class. And whenever I could, I would fly down and do that. So yeah,
Speaker: Eventually, i think Helge got tired of me auditioning and offered me a job. But that transitional couple of years at PMB was really important. I learned a lot. was able to kind of come back to San Francisco Ballet with a different set of experiences. And it's kind of a sense of who I was outside of being a student there. And I think it helped him maybe see me in a different light.
Speaker: Yeah. Do you think it's hard sometimes when you're a student at a school to break? Like the idea is that there's this pipeline from the school into the company, right? But do you sometimes feel like they see you as a student still and it's hard for them to change their perception of you?
Speaker: I think that's that was exactly my thought process. You know, I was not the biggest, flashiest dancer. And I think for me to to be able to come back and audition from a different program, I remember Helgi, the director at the time, saying, oh, yeah, I remember you.
Speaker: But I don't know if I would have been considered had I stayed there. Maybe I would have. and Maybe it would have worked. You know, maybe there is that pipeline. But it, again, was very competitive. And it's also just a matter of timing. Like, what kind of dancer do they need? What kind of spot are they trying to fill? You know, the moment that you're in that threshold in your own transition, and your own trajectory into the professional world. So...
Speaker: I tell dancers that all the time. You just have to keep trying. And every place I went nearly was was several conversations, several attempts or auditions or experiences where that desire was made known. And then it's just a matter of those those doorways aligning.
Speaker: And you've danced for so many different companies stylistically. you know You went from more classical ballet to dancing and much more contemporary companies. How did you decide to make those transitions? Well, I think each transition was really guided by the curiosity to learn something new.
Speaker: And again, timing being everything. i think there was, you know, a period in San Francisco Ballet where everything felt new and we were getting to do incredible work and work with both, you know, world-class dancers and some of the most in-demand choreographers. But after seven years, eight years there, we had been curious about what else can we experience, not only the content of the work, but the process and the environment and the culture. Living in a different place was appealing as well. As beautiful as San Francisco is and as wonderful as that company is, it was honestly a very difficult choice because it's a really hard place to leave. It's one of the best jobs you can have in this industry. So I will say, though, that working with certain choreographers provided some sort of openings into the way I understood and wanted to experience the art form.
Speaker: In addition to just seeing things on tour that were just so far and away different from what I was experiencing every day, companies like Batseva or Netherlands Dance Theater would tour to Berkeley or sometimes San Francisco and groups of us would go seek out those experiences. This was before you could just hop on Instagram or YouTube and see things from all over the world. So you really had to seek it out. And I remember some of those performances just coming away with a lot of questions and just a whole new framework for like, what am I, what am I doing? What am I seeking? What am I trying to build in my capacity as an artist?
Speaker: We also did a week long workshop with Alonzo King um that was designed for professional dancers. And he's so good at encouraging artists, that process of inquiry and asking questions and challenging the way that you evaluate your work, which was, you know, something as a young dancer that i struggled with, wanting it to feel a certain way and be perfect and be sort of measured a certain way up against a really difficult set of comparison, you know, being and in a company like that, which at the time we left had 85 dancers. So you're also just in a in a massive machine.
Speaker: But I think it was was working with a few different choreographers that really kind of opened up my sense of what I wanted to experience as a dancer. But intellectually, working with William Forsyth was pivotal.
Speaker: He really encouraged us to challenge that paradigm. And I think what he was doing... innovating within the form of classical ballet was so exciting. And of course, what he was doing with his composition, with his art form was exciting, but also what he asked of the people within that work was so inspiring and so challenging.
Speaker: And that really awoke in me something that I wanted to further pursue. So we did this whole world tour of auditioning at lots of great companies. And we landed in Antwerp, Belgium, at the Royal Ballet of Flanders, where his former rehearsal director, Catherine Bennett, was directing at the time. So where there was a very close relationship. We were doing a lot of his work. We were touring his work, full evening works, and very immersed in that work.
Speaker: sensibility and in in that practice. That was a really important step, kind of leaping from very classical ballet company that was doing very exciting new work as well. So I definitely had the introduction there, but then going to a company that was more focused on a set of choreographic ideals with Forsyth and others. and We got to work with Yuri Killian, who at the time you know, had stopped traveling overseas. So if if you wanted to work with him and not just do restaging of his work, you had to be on that continent. And that was exciting. That was also a game changer for me, but more so just the approach of process that I learned.
Speaker: dancing in Europe, which afforded a lot more time. It afforded a lot ah lot more experience, a deeper experience within the work. A company like San Francisco Ballet is a powerhouse for creation and pumping out really exciting rep.
Speaker: But you're in this sort of pace that you are rehearsing two programs during the day, you're performing two different programs in the evening. You're working six days a week. As I said, it was very exciting, but the pace didn't afford, for me anyway, a lot of deepening of my knowledge. It was sort of just keep up, get out there, do your best. You know, I got a ton of experience as a performer, but I wanted, i think, something different at that point. So the opportunity to slow down, to really explore the work at a different pace and to then perform that work for an entire season on tour was amazing.
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Speaker: And coming back to companies like Hubbard Street in the US, did you have that same time and process there as you did in Europe? It was a little bit of both. So I think we had we had a similar time constraint when we were building a new program that would premiere in Chicago, but we also had a touring rep that we had more repetition with. So it was a nice balance actually. And there we did a lot of new creation as well. And so that was something that was very appealing. And then the people we were getting to work with, I mean, this was, in my opinion at the time, like just one of the most exciting companies in the world to dance for. And I just felt so honored to even get to be in the room.
Speaker: Yes, I would say it would it would add the the sort of pace of an American company producing work at a deadline that we were gonna then go to the Harris Theater and perform it. But we also had consistent touring with works that we had sort of in ah in a rotation. So we would get to perform those a lot. You'd get to move, you know, your position within that work might change. It was a small company by comparison. So everyone danced all the time.
Speaker: You kind of had to be ready for anything. And looking back over this 20-year performance career, I mean, that's pretty long for a dancer. So what do you think allowed you to sustain your career for that long?
Speaker: I mean, I think I was fortunate to not have had any traumatic injuries. I certainly had my fair share of managing my body and a lot of chronic stuff. I had really good resources in terms of being able to take care of myself. I think that's a big part of it. And i don't have ah a real wonky, flexible body, which has its shortcomings, but also it had its benefits. I didn't didn't have a lot of strains or you know hypermobility. So as I said, I think having those resources to daily be able to take care of what you need and really the longer you dance, the more you learn how to do that and learn what you need as a preparation and and maintenance. And that becomes more and more of ah of a time commitment as you get older. But I found it you know interesting to try to figure that out. And I think honestly, a big part of it was changing the modalities that I was working in. I didn't spend my entire life
Speaker: pounding my body the same way. i think had I stayed in a ballet company asking those same things of my body for many years, it maybe would have been different. But I think by the breadth of work that I was able to experience, there was some balance physically there. And I think contemporary work has a little bit more pliability in terms of how you use your body as a tool within that. Of course, it's still a technique and it's still very demanding and rigorous.
Speaker: But I think I was afforded some freedom to figure out what does this movement vocabulary look like for my body instead of trying to fulfill a more distinct paradigm of what is correct. That kind of goes back to the whole reason I was interested in in moving beyond ballet. And the thing that Forsythe really was an exemplar of, I think, giving the freedom within a form to say, you don't have to fulfill a historical idea of what this is.
Speaker: You get to be the the author of it now, which I didn't think was a way you could approach ballet. At least it was never named that way. And it was never encouraged in that same sense. And he said something amazing right before a premiere, which was, show me what you know. And the empowerment that came with, like, you you know an incredible amount. Your body contains an amazing amount of of wisdom about this art form. And you get to define what it is tonight.
Speaker: And it won't be the same tomorrow and and it won't be the same with the person next to you. But it's all really important to be able to express, which felt very freeing and exciting instead of, oh, man, I hope I nail that moment or I hope i look OK in that penché. Yeah, that's really beautiful. I'm going to keep that in my back pocket. Yeah, I like that.
Speaker: Did you always see yourself taking this path to become an artistic director? No, I had no interest. I had no designs or plans to become an artistic director. You know, I went to school while I was performing. I always had the thought that, you know, I'll do this as long as I can do it. And then I'll go find a different career. I'll have a different life, you know, outside the dance world. And, know, I had a lot of different interests and curiosities. And I really found myself pulled back into it just by circumstance. You know, I had transitioned away from full-time performing was still living in Chicago we had two young kids at the time and I was selling real estate. I had a small design business that I had started. was exploring and thinking about what kind of entrepreneurial life might I have or how can be an artist in a different field?
Speaker: And I did really miss being in the studio. I missed that sense of you know the mastery that I had built in an art form that I'd spent my entire life devoted to. So as exciting as it was to explore the things, I did feel kind of subconscious pull. My body missed it.
Speaker: So I had started teaching more to earn extra money and buy diapers and put food on the table and all that. And I was invited, a former colleague of mine from San Francisco Ballet,
Speaker: Had been offered a job. She was working in Albuquerque for National Dance Institute there and had been invited to interview for a job in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at a then young performing arts high school called New Mexico School for the Arts. She told me, I don't think I'm going to take this job, but I thought of you and Courtney. And I just wonder, you know, is this something you'd be interested in looking at? And I was in San Francisco at the time performing with SF Danceworks, but I flew there on a weekend. I interviewed, I taught a class. I met all the people, saw the campus, flew back and they offered me the job and said, we need you to come in two weeks.
Speaker: And I said, ah I think I asked to think about it for like 12 hours and then said, you know what, this sounds really exciting. This sounds new and different and let's give it a shot. So that experience is really what opened me up into the pathway of becoming an artistic director. That was my first experience with you know, leadership and learning how to mentor and teach in a different way.
Speaker: you know, a variety of people learning how to collaborate with the other arts disciplines at the school, building a staff and a budget and doing the fundraising, doing the marketing. Courtney and I were sewing costumes at our house the night before the show. You know, we did... A little bit of everything, but it really did show me that i I was excited about the prospect of building something and building a culture where the work that we produced provided a really meaningful experience for the students, for the audience, for the all the people that kind of rallied around the mission of that school, which was a really great thing to be a part of. And I was
Speaker: Very happy to stay there and thought maybe I'll i'll be a school teacher. I was a state employee. I had my teaching license. They had a nice pension. You know, it was like a very comfortable place to to live, a beautiful place to live. And then I was visiting friends in Boise for a wedding.
Speaker: And i heard that Ballet Idaho was looking for an artistic director and that they encouraged me to apply. And at first I thought, no, I don't, I wouldn't get the job. I don't have, you know, that level of experience, but I thought about it more and more. i was like that, all the things I love about the job I'm doing now, I could do with professionals as well.
Speaker: There was still a school. I would still get that opportunity to, you know, build new talent and guide, but I get to create work with professionals and I was missing that. So I just applied just, just for the experience of applying and got the job. So here I am eight years later.
Speaker: How do you feel like your perspective has changed from going from a dancer to a director? How do you see this industry differently? That's a really good question.
Speaker: I think that as an artist, you have a really important and very focused perspective on the art. You get to exist inside of it. You get to be part of the authorship. But I think being an artistic director affords you the experience to be able to step out of that experience that a dancer has. And to be able to see the full ecology of what a dance company is or any institution that is helping to create or produce. And to really understand all of the conditions that need to be present for art to be made and to survive. It's a really interesting and challenging job.
Speaker: And I think my perspective, getting to be part of all of those pieces, similar to what I mentioned at the the school, being an artistic director, you know, you're not, at least in my experience, you're not in a silo of just building an artistic vision and telling people about it and coaching the dancers to help that come to life.
Speaker: That's certainly part of it, but really you have to understand how do we speak about this? How do we create a message that's inviting and compelling in our marketing? How do we create access with outreach? How do we build educational programs to then feed into the pre-professional program that could then feed into the company? How do you sustain like your own ecology? with the dancers.
Speaker: And then how do you fundraise and and build effective strategic plans around how to produce that work with both your sales and your contributed support and and then building you know your own team of advocacy and resources that a a board of directors provides and navigating, you know inspiring, communicating and helping to navigate all of the work that that board has to do to keep the company going. I mean, there's infinite components, you know, from the all the backstage technical things, which I learned a ton about as well in the last 10 years. But really, as a dancer, you are insulated from some of that. I think I was a dancer who paid attention to what was going on around me and asked questions about how is this all working or when companies were having a hard time, like why? Why is it suffering?
Speaker: And how can the dance world be better? How can it evolve? So in terms of that evolution, what's your philosophy as a director? What type of environment are you trying to create for your dancers or for your community? Like, what do you want to bring to this industry?
Speaker: Well, a bunch of things. I think to start, I do encourage a permeability within our organization so that the dancers do understand and appreciate outside of the studio, all the work that's happening. And I encourage the staff members to come into the studio and see the work as it's being built.
Speaker: So we are all part of the same effort, aware of all the holistic work that happens so that we don't take it for granted. You know, I don't think dancers intend to do that, but it is a kind of immersive, sometimes isolating thing.
Speaker: So I encourage us to open our eyes. to look around both as a group of dancers so that it's not just an individual effort, but that we really work as a collective. And I think a big part of creating that atmosphere, you know, a culture in the studio is super important to us and to be able to have a culture where people feel safe to take risks.
Speaker: Something that I think the Dance World Ballet Company specifically fall prey to is this sense of perceived mastery at all times. And something I encountered you know moving into the contemporary world was I had to admit that I don't know how to do these things.
Speaker: I have some skill, I have some experience, but I i was new to a lot of the ways of using my body and working in the ways that you know a contemporary company dancer is much more fluent with.
Speaker: But I think that very humbling experience of being able to ask questions and feeling safe, knowing that i I'm to have help. People here, are we're all creating this from nothing today. You know, this piece doesn't exist. This choreographer doesn't even know what the movement vocabulary is going to be. Very different from working in a vocabulary that you've trained, you know, in ballet classes your whole life, and then you're supposed to just be perfect at it. So it felt already moving outside of that framework. It already felt safer to say,
Speaker: wow, everything in this piece we're inventing right now. So we all started kind of from the same place, but we all brought different skills to that process. What i came away from, you know, my years with Hubbard Street more curious about was how how can we apply some of those things in a ballet company environment?
Speaker: Like how can we assume everyone's got our back all the time? And what would that do to our ability to take risks and to grow and to ask questions or to just throw yourself into something that,
Speaker: you might at first look and feel foolish and that's okay. Cause I saw the opposite to be true where people, you know, a choreographer might've had an amazing idea or this image in their mind. They're like, what if we did this? And in in articulating that to the dancers, you could almost immediately see people feel unsafe and pull back because, oh, I might look silly.
Speaker: I might not be able to do that. And that's, of course, not always the case, but those moments I felt like, what could that piece have, where could that have gone if we would have just said yes and, you know, or or just tried it first before before that pulling back.
Speaker: And I think we are capable of so much more than we think we are capable of. Whether or not we are consciously saying that, anything that we've achieved this level of mastery, there is a sort of protective reflex.
Speaker: And yet we can do so much more. I mean, we've seen this industry and the skills that a dancer has evolved in massive ways over the generations. That's what's exciting about it is to be part of an art form that is constantly evolving. So what I try to create in the studio is a safe space to to be part of that.
Speaker: And that has to be a place where you can take risks.
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Speaker: So when you're holding auditions, what really draws you to dancer? Is it a dancer that's open to taking those risks? Absolutely. Someone who, I think part of that is you can't take yourself too seriously.
Speaker: know, you have to be able to laugh at yourself and try it again. But really what I look for is curiosity. So someone that may have had limited experience in the breadth of work that we're doing, that's not a limiting factor necessarily. I think if someone walks in the door and they want to learn about it, and they're willing to put themselves out there and they're thoughtful about how they're doing that, again, I think there's so much more capacity than what we see on the surface. So I look for curiosity. i look for someone who's going to be a good citizen.
Speaker: you know I think going back to the environment we're trying to create, we have to we have to approach the work as a group. It's not just about personal gain or inward focus, but someone that's aware of, like especially in a smaller company, the community part of that is so pivotal to individual success.
Speaker: What's your long-term vision for Valley Idaho? Where do you see this going or what's your like your big sky dream for this company? Hmm. That's another great question. It's interesting to look back at what I said i wanted to be doing in this job when I applied for this job.
Speaker: And then to ask myself, what did do periodically? Are we doing that? How has that changed? How have I, how have my experiences informed that? Or do i need to recapture some of that imagination that I had when I came in? One thing is that this is a regional company in a pretty isolated region. There's not a lot around Boise within striking distance of that are doing the same things we're doing. So I think as opposed to being in a big metropolitan area where you have lots of dance companies and lots of things coming through, we don't necessarily have that level of exposure for us exposing the work that we're doing beyond our little Boise bubble.
Speaker: or being influenced by, you know, seeing and sharing work with others. So I think part of the goal then is to is to tour, is to get some visibility for what I think is incredible work we're creating here. But we need that to exist beyond, you know, our immediate audience. I think it's really important also for the dancers to be able to get on stage more. know, we have now six programs a year, but there's so few performances of each program. My dream is to to take what we were already creating and just scale it so that we can make this a full season for dancers, that they they can really call this home and dance really just as much as possible because this career, as you know, is so short.
Speaker: These moments are so precious. you know I was just remarking on looking at the company and thinking, wow, it's almost a completely different company, whether it's people that were here that have really grown and changed, matured, or it's new dancers that have joined since then. It's remarkable to see you know that growth when you're around it all day, every day, you don't necessarily see it in the same way.
Speaker: So sometimes stepping out of that and seeing where we are now is is pretty exciting. But we're ready to do more. So i'm I'm constantly pushing for new opportunities, building relationships outside of this community.
Speaker: And I think, you know, the people that support this company always say like, this is really amazing. More people need to know about it. Something that Trey McIntyre Project did really well They had Boise as their base where they created work and they had a steady following here.
Speaker: And they were able at their scale with their support from all over the country, to be able to get out and and travel and and be known all over. Different model, different kind of company, but it shows you there really are no limits.
Speaker: You just have to be able to invent and reinvent within within the structures that you have. But Garrett, you've had so much experience across your entire career, but if you had to give aspiring pro dancers one piece of advice as they pursue their career, what would you want to tell them?
Speaker: I would go back to what I kind of just said about, you know, this career is so short. And I think when we're in it, we get stuck measuring it, comparing it, wondering if should we be in this kind of company or should I have gotten opening night casts and I'm only doing the matinee cast or I didn't get chosen for that piece. whatever it is, comparing and measuring, and then you're not really present with what you are doing. And the a huge gift that it is to be able to do this career at all, I think is easily lost in the striving for it to be better and different. And of course we need that. That is part of our DNA as dancers is,
Speaker: striving to learn and grow and and perfect. But I had a ah moment in my early career where I was struggling with, you know, judging the work very harshly at times and fixating on what I thought it should be and how it should have, how I wanted it to feel.
Speaker: And then i really wasn't appreciating it. I wasn't valuing the work I was i was producing. And I luckily had some really good people around me to remind me that I was wasting it. Like you have to enjoy every single moment. And I see that now as as a director and I see the pitfalls and the the psychology and it's, of course, it's 90% the struggle, you know, in your head. And if we can just trust ourselves and forgive ourselves and...
Speaker: and really just accept that it's all a gift and every every single moment, yes, there there are disappointments, there are struggles, there there are hopes. I guess what I'm trying to say is an openness to really appreciating what it is.
Speaker: You know, you can't necessarily engineer a dance career. There are things, you know, you you think you're going to do, like like we've described in my journey. I didn't know where any of this was going to take me or where I was going to end up. And every every place that I did end up,
Speaker: was a happy surprise. And it was really never what I expected it was going to be. That's good advice. This was so nice talking to you today, Garrett. If anyone listening wants to learn more about you or about Ballet Idaho, where should they go?
Speaker: Go to our website. Of course, you can follow us on socials and we're posting always, but go to our website, balletidaho.org. Thank you, Caitlin. Thank you so much for this. Yeah.
Speaker: Thank you for tuning into the Brainy Ballerina podcast. If you found this episode insightful, entertaining, or maybe a bit of both, I would so appreciate you taking a moment to leave a rating and hit subscribe.
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