Digestif

“I've been thinking a lot about the future of live dance. It's not an easy question these days when there are so many unknown factors looking forward.”

Allison Elizabeth Burns was one of five participants in Fresh Meat’s first ever paid online training program offered in October 2020. Participants were paid a professional fee to participate in a series of training workshops designed to help build a sustainable artistic practice in Ottawa. At the close of the program, we invited them to reflect on what they had learned, and what it meant for their own artistic journey, and create a digital offering for our community. Each piece is as unique as the artist who created it: some made short films, some made slide shows, while others channeled their thoughts into writing or podcasts.

You can read Allison’s offering below, it’s a transcript from an audio file:

November 3, 2020

Allison Elizabeth Burns

I’m Allison Burns.

I'm a dance artist. I'm a choreographer, performer, educator, producer, administrator and no matter which of these hats that I'm wearing one of my main goals is to make connections between artists, audiences, and communities. I aim to empower people to have experiential and visceral interactions with dance through again, multiple activities that I engage in. And I'm always initiating new and collaborative dance projects.

A project that I initiated several years ago was a Dirty Feet podcast, it was a dance podcast and for the first three years of existence myself and my team produced an episode every week for 3 years. The podcast hasn't been active for a couple of years now, but it was a project I was always really passionate about and something I've been recently thinking about bringing back and reviving. So with this Fresh Meat assignment I've decided to dive back in and see how it feels.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected my practice greatly. It's now October and back in March is when things all started. I’ve spent the time primarily working on professional development and setting up a plan for my career moving into the future. A big goal of mine is to create a more sustainable way of working and part of that process is to move from a project-to-project structure to a more ongoing creative practice and output.

So this Fresh Meat 9 Festival has allowed me further professional development through a series of workshops and also interacting with different members of the theatre community who are unknown to me before and some of whom were known to me. But it's been a really nice opportunity to develop relationships and to further reflect on my own career and build skills. I've been thinking a lot about the future of live dance. It's not an easy question these days when there are so many unknown factors looking forward. Some of what I've been doing with my time is skill building for capturing dance on video, collaborations with artists from different disciplines, and engaging in conversations about how to creatively manage the challenges facing the industry right now.

Going into the Fresh Meat experience I expected to learn some practical skills from the workshops offered, things about marketing, writing, dramaturgy. What was unexpected - but quite delightful - was this invitation into big picture thinking. So in addition to these skills that I'm taking away and this new knowledge, it has also opened up my mind and furthered that conversation in my head about the future of performing arts, how we can survive now and how we can stay relevant in the future. What was impressed upon me throughout this process was the responsibility we have as emerging and mid-level artists to effect what the community and the industry looks like moving into the future. Part of that has to do with being aware and conscious of privilege and power, and finding ways to create space and offer power to others.

Through designing my own hero's journey reflecting on my career history so far, I’ve also come to the understanding that the things that pulled me away from my mission from my vision, are usually the things that make me doubt my ability to perform in my chosen career. Things like jobs outside of dance that take me away from what I should be doing. Training in skills sometimes that are peripheral to my domain but don't actually serve the furthering of my creative process.

For me this reinforces this idea of moving into a more continuous artistic practice. Vowing to create at least one output a month into the future and leaving for myself flexibility for what that output looks like, as I continuously change focuses and interests based on what inspires me in that moment. So for example bringing back a podcast as an offering. So for me Fresh Meat came along at just the right time, and for me I took away from it exactly what I needed. Into the future I will prioritize my creative process, creating attainable goals for myself so that I can be accountable to both myself and my audience and my community for the outputs that I'm planning. I'm really excited, I'm working on a lot of collaborations with musicians, with videographers, with photographers, with theatre artists. I'm starting to create my own video dance projects - something that I haven't done since University. I've got a vlog project in the works one draft done and another planned, and with this I am relaunching my podcast.