Broche Banter #14 -- Casey
Today on the show, we have Casey, a late-starter who has found her place in the dance world as a ballet dancer, teacher, and aerial performer. Listen to her story of how she got her start, forged her path, and pushed through her insecurities to become the beautiful butterfly that she is today.
Enjoy!
“If you’re ever interested in taking ballet, it’s never too late. If you have an interest in dance. Just do it. Don’t anybody tell you no.”
Julie: welcome Casey to the show. I'm so excited to have you on broach banter today to talk about your story with ballet.
Casey: I'm so excited to be here. Julie, thank you so much for having me.
J: So, Casey, for those of you who don't know you, Casey was with our Broche Ballet team here in Denver for almost the whole time that we were open in Denver, and started dancing with us very, very early on in the process, like just maybe for some months after we opened and became a teacher at our studio taught dozens and dozens of dancers ballet from the very beginning, all the way up through their first pirouettes. Casey is also an aerial dancer as well which is super exciting and fun. So that's just a little background about how I know Casey and how far back our relationship goes. So, where did it start? Casey? How did you get into how did you start ballet what what happened?
C: So I was in my late teens around probably 17 years old, something like that. And I had always had an interest in dance, but had never fully pursued that I had done theater. I had done music, piano and I'd kind of done all of it except for dance, and tried it late in high school and absolutely fell in love with it. Nothing gave me the joy that dance did.
And eventually my parents were like, Alright, you're going to have to pick which thing you want to do. And so I said dance. I actually started out primarily as an Irish dancer. I did that for gosh, probably four years or so. And then as soon as I felt that decided to dabble in some other forms of dance primarily ballet and contemporary. And I would say probably in college was when my love for ballet really started blossoming, a little bit more than any of the others.
I had an incredible ballet instructor in college. That was also a Pilates instructor. So she was also got me into Pilates initially. But she was the first ballet teacher I ever had that explain things that finally made sense. And, you know, she knew I was a late starter because a lot of people in the class has been dancing since they were little. So I felt like really anxious and nervous in that class. But it was one of the first ballet classes that I ever felt like I did well, and that thing made sense. And then post college started delving into ballet a little bit more, and had an amazing instructor who was trained in the Vaganava method shortly before I moved to Denver, she was also amazing. She was really the one that helped me get fairly strong one point.
And upon moving to Colorado, I knew that this was something that I had to continue. So just was doing some research. I took a couple classes locally in Denver. And they were they were good; they were all right. But I kind of missed that smaller intimacy one on one attention in class. Like I had with my ballet instructor, Sarah and I found Broche online when I was googling about ballet and I sent an email out little did I know it was you you responded to me and said, hey, let's meet for coffee. And so we met for coffee and I felt like I met a kindred spirit and was just like, yes, this sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. And then after that, I'm pretty sure I just jumped right in. I took classes with you for a couple months, I think like in October, I think it was. And then the classes with you through January or February was in February that you brought me, Kristen and Jackie on staff.
J: What a story! You see you've done so many different styles of dance.
J: When did when did aerial come into the picture and maybe just give the listeners a little brief overview of what aerial is in case you're not familiar with it?
C: So aerial arts are also known as aerial dance. is a is a branch off of circus arts. And it's where you have multiple apparatuses hanging from the ceiling. Some common ones people probably have either seen or heard of are the soaps which are the long fabrics that hang or the lira, which is the big hoop, or the trapeze, the swinging trapeze, those are probably the three most popular that people would know about. But I actually started doing aerial in Richmond, less than a year before I moved to Colorado had always been interested in it when I was researching more types of dance out there I was in a dance production with one of the places I taught dance at in Richmond and they incorporated some area in it and I remember seeing it and being like, Oh my gosh, that looks amazing. Look like you can dance in the air and fly at the same time. All things I wanted to. So I finally got the courage one day to sign up for a class and it was very much like my first Irish step dance class was it was like, Okay, this is this is the thing, this is going to be a thing.
So I went for my first aerial training a couple months, ironically, after I started because I loved it so much in New York City, got my first aerial certification, and then taught in Richmond for about six months until I moved to Denver, and Denver circus aerial seems much bigger than Richmond was. So I was able to start taking classes more seriously. I would say here a couple probably again in October, around the time I found brooch, I started branching out into other circus apparatuses and continue to fall more in love with it. And a year or two later took another aerial training in Castle Rock, which gave me more credentials and helped me a little bit more on my journey both as a performer and as an instructor and One thing I love about aerial is it's a really great cross training for ballet. Because ballet is so much legs, aerial was mostly upper kadhi do a little bit with the legs, but it was a great way to stay in like overall shape. And aerial also really helped my core and made my core super strong, which helped me with balances and turns in ballet and having taken ballet. It showed up in my aerial in terms of my lines and made the lines look a lot prettier and the toes nicely pointed.
J: I have so many follow up questions for you Casey, where to even start so. Okay, so you started with Irish step dancing in your teenage years. Then at some point you got into ballet just really got deep into ballet was this all in Richmond that this was all happening?
C: Initially Yes.
J: Yes. And then in college as well? Did you study dance in college? Or did you have the ability to get a minor? What was the nature of that? How did that come about?
C: So I decided that I really wanted to continue dance into college and wanted a way to keep dancing. So I ended up mitering in dance. I got a dance minor. I was an English major. Looking back now I kind of wish I had majored in dance and minor in creative writing, but you know, close enough.
What does that mean? Now in your life, you kind of have managed to flip that where you major in dance and minor and writing, like, well, I'm doing a lot with a minor not a lot with a major right now. But you know, that could change.
But the dance minor was incredible, and honestly gave me the courage and the motivation and the skill set to even explore teaching dance. I as a minor, I didn't get all the classes that majors have, but I was able to take both contenders. And ballet technique, at least one of them each semester, I got to do dance history. I also got invited to join a special choreography class that was supposed to be just for majors. But the dance director gave me an override. And they let me enter that class, which was really special and kind of gave me my love for choreography, which I've really been enjoying exploring in the last couple years and hope to continue to explore more going forward and was also able to do some improvisation classes, which helped me get more comfortable just moving without any specific combinations, which for me, was always very challenging. I was like, tell me what to do, and I'll do it. But because of that class, I love freestyling. Now, I love both I like enjoy both.
And that the cherry on top of all of that, for me was at the end of my college career. I had four credits left, I'd finished all of my English credits at 42 credits left and the dance department was doing a four week dance intensive in London. The summer that the Olympics were over there, and dance director came to me and said, Hey, I know you've been to London before having studied abroad, we're going to be in this similar neighborhood. I know you have four credits left, want to come along again, I was the only minor on the trip and felt incredibly honored. So I got to do both ballet and contemporary at some incredible venues in London and some incredible teachers pretty much dancing non stop for four weeks.
“It was just the most incredible experience and after that was kind of what gave me the real feeling that yeah, this I want this to not only be a part of my life, but I would love to work in some way to be able to share dance, and have fun.”
No idea what that was gonna look like. But after college, I was able to find a studio that let me teach some dance to some kids. And some teenagers specifically that had never done dance before, like they had always wanted. And I taught them ballet. So I think that was initially what gave me my love for sharing dance with people that were late starters like myself. Yeah. And the director of the dance studio said, Casey, I know you also started ballet when you relator around these girls age, I feel like you'd be the perfect fit to teach this class and felt very scared very nervous was like, Oh my gosh, like how can I be their first Valley teacher? I feel like I still don't know half of what I should know. My pirouettes aren't perfect yet all of those things. But teaching that class was such a incredible experience and several of the girls went on to Continue ballet and are still doing it. And they're doing really well. And just knowing that I was able to just give them that little spark, if anything, and then they were able to go on to train with teachers that were more advanced, that got them started on their journey. And that was really special.
J: And you also have a lot of experience with performing as well and actually modeling to write so you've found so many different ways to have dads involved in your lifetime. How, how did you get involved with performing and modeling
C: performing started back in Richmond, I did perform with that dance studio that I was a part of what but also they had another branch that was primarily a theater branch. So they would put on these big productions every around Christmas time every year that they had, like 18 shows it was something crazy like that. had a big cast all adults, youth, kids. Everything, auditions, all of that. And I, I had been in theater for several years I did be I started getting into theater when I was I think, like 10 years old. So I did theater, or performed a lot of theater productions, most of middle school and high school. So I had had the experience of performing in that way. But performing with dance for the first time in college was a little different. Because with theater, I felt like I could hide behind the character, I wasn't Casey Patil, I could become another character and no one had to know it was me. But with dance, I felt a little bit more vulnerable and more exposed and had to be very intense intentive with my movement to communicate what I was saying, whereas with theater, you have lines and that's a little bit easier to communicate what you're saying in that way. Um, but after my First dance performance I just loved, like the energy that I felt in my body getting to perform in front of an audience and realize that it was a whole different type of performing but also felt very similar. And once I got deeper into Irish dance, they had lots of competitions that you would do as well as festivals that you would perform at around St. Patrick's Day. So I started doing some of those and I still question how I did some of the competitions that I did like later on, I ended up stopping competing because it wasn't where my heart was. It wasn't where I wanted to go. I really value those experiences. I think they gave me a lot of confidence. But I realized that I loved dance because I loved it. and wanted to do it because I enjoyed it and wanted it to become more of a special thing for me rather than kind of develop a love hate relationship with it in terms of aspect.
J: So it's funny that you say that dance was more of like more of a vulnerable experience than performing theater where myself and a couple others have talked about where anything where we have to use our voice actually feels more scary than if we're just performing dance. So you so it makes sense though, knowing how expressive you are as a teacher with your voice that makes a lot of sense that you first found love and performing with with your voice and not with your dance that that's very interesting to put that together.
C: Mm hmm. For sure, no, it it was funny to me like a lot of I was very, very shy when I was young. And so a lot of people when they heard that I did theater, or like Wait, what Wouldn't you be really scared of that? And I was I always got butterflies but I always loved playing pretend and make believe as a Kid. So just pretending that I was somebody else, for some reason just came easy to me then. But with dance, I felt more like I was showing up as myself and using my body to express. And having dealt with an eating disorder for a long time as a teenager, using an expressing with my body was a very difficult thing for me to do. So in a lot of ways dance actually helped me really learn how to use my body and how to actually speak with it in potentially a more powerful way than I would have known or learned otherwise.
J: So kind of instead of hiding and suppressing your body and kind of, you know detaching from your body, you were forced to really connect with your body and use that to say my body is good enough to share with the world.
C: Exactly. And it was a long journey. Like I look back to my first dance performances and old videos, and just See how timid I was, and how the movements were so little and so small. And then I revisit some performances from last year. And it's just incredible to just see the confidence that I've grown in over the years and how dance has continued to be not only therapy, but is been a part of my self growth as a human being. And this continued, as I continue to progress to the next level, my technique, I feel like my character and my confidence in myself has gone with that. And that has been a challenging but incredibly rewarding journey that I'm still on and hope to beyond the rest of my life.
J: Well, it's funny, you mentioned in the beginning, that some of these experiences gave you confidence and that in the beginning, you were a little bit anxious about going to experiences and from where I know you now, I don't I can't picture you at a time when you didn't have confidence like you're just so you just have such a presence when you walk into a room. So tell me about the beginning stages like what it what were you worried about? What can you remember some of the things that made you nervous in the beginning?
C: I think a lot of what made me nervous in the beginning is early on, when I started performing dance, I was in groups of kids that were a little bit younger than me. So for example, I was in like the school that I was in, had adult classes that were very beginner. And then they had some youth classes that were a little bit more advanced, and I was really kind of in the middle of the two. But closer in age two, I was in college at the time, so I was closer in age to the high schoolers than the adults that were in their 30s or 40s. But a lot of these kids had been dancing since they were young. And so for me, rather than looking at looking at it as a compliment If I was being put in a slightly more advanced class, I saw it as I'm not as good as these other dancers, what am I doing upon this stage? And so I think that aspect of feeling just insecure in my own abilities. And then also, I was slowly coming out of my eating disorder at the time. So I think it was a combination of still not quite feeling comfortable in my own body and as a result, not trusting it, to do what it probably already knew how to do. And let my brain get in the way of my body at that.
J: Yeah, that's a lot of completing factors. And for a young, a young woman that's a lot to select to handle for any age, but especially someone who's in their youth and kind of still trying to discover who they are.
J: Now I want to get into some of your experiences with performing because That's a huge for many of our our listeners and in our community performing is a really big deal and really exciting I mean for some the idea of performing just makes them want to go call it or the blankets but for many they really want to be a part of performing and you Casey have had so many performing opportunities you perform for a while there be earlier this year you have multiple shows every single week. So how did that how did you how did you make that happen? What what do you what do you do? How do you make this how do you go about finding these opportunities and really taking taking the reins?
C: So that is a really good question. Um, a lot of them. Um, honestly early on fell into my lap. I was given I was part of communities that wanted to give people opportunities to perform. And so I was able to then take advantage of that. Back in Virginia when I moved here to Colorado. A lot of the area's studios I was involved with did yearly either student showcases or special Tea shows. And so I was like, Okay, I perform with dance before performing in the air. That's a whole new thing. So I signed up to do a student showcase one year, even though I was teaching at the time still, I taught Ariel for about a year, but I had never performed with it. That was another thing where it went back to when I first started dance was like, okay, comfortable doing this in class and in the studio, but oh, what, um, and again, it was one of those experiences where I just felt so empowered being on that stage.
And a lot of people saw me perform and said, You have real potential. And we would recommend you continue to train at these venues and that you consider being in our like, big performance at the end of the year, which was different than a student showcase. It was performance you had to actually audition for most of the students showcases, they would just you know, create your little piece and you get to go do it. So I auditioned for a big aerial show and got in and got to be part of like a big group of dancers on fabric, which was really, really fun. And continued.
Networking is huge. Networking is also not something that is my strong suit, believe it or not, I had to learn how to do it, and had to learn how to ask and I just continued to take classes at various studios make friends with various other instructors and co workers and I eventually met the owner of Denver dance, which is an aerial dance studio here in Denver, Marguerite Emsley and she runs a special area late night show At the clocktower, cabaret, which is a very popular venue in downtown Denver. For those of you that live in Colorado, apparently people even out of Colorado know it. It's a pretty famous venue. But one day she had taken a couple of my sling classes, which I was like, so like Internet like marguerites and my sling class. She's like one of my aerial idols. She's incredible. And she comes up to me after about a month of taking some of my classes and she said, Hey, I, you know, have this show that I've been starting. The cast is still pretty small, but I would love you to join the join the cast, and a lot of the people that were in the cast are aerialist that I trained with that I have taken privates with that I have done private coaching from as student.
So getting to perform alongside them was it was one of those experiences where I honestly couldn't take it in initially because I was like, I don't feel like I'm on the same level as these people. But also assumed that if I was asked that they thought I was capable of that. So I started performing there about a year ago. And I'll be honest and say that that was a tremendous confidence booster for me. And it really affirmed how much I loved performing. And then after that, continue to just look for other outlets. And yeah, it's been, it's been an uphill ride from there.
J: Well, I would, I would just add my perspective to your story on that which I've seen it from from the outside looking in. Right. And I think you don't give yourself enough credit in the beginning by saying you know that these opportunities fell into your lap and that you're just sort of given them because I think you work really hard to put yourself out there for them. You are you take class so many times a week you're probably in class more than anyone else that I've ever seen whether whether in your area classes you always going to area classes and how putting yourself out there always going to ballet classes, putting yourself out there, always kind of having that energy. And I think that that sort of thing goes a long way. And people notice that people notice the dedication and the hard work and what what you're putting out there into the world and want to kind of gravitate towards that and, and, and give you those opportunities. So I think Don't Don't sell yourself short with the amount of work that you've put in to show people that you're ready for these opportunities and that you're interested in these opportunities. Because these same opportunities didn't fall into my lap, they clearly only fall into the lap of people who were actually looking for them and working for them. So I would, I would just throw that in there.
C: No, you are most definitely right. And it is true hard work and dedication is really what will help get you places it's again, it's we can keep trying to get that parallel and we'll just keep working at it until we get it and it's one of those and I'll tell you that there were definitely many times for I was tempted to give up and thought I was never going to get a certain skill or thought I was never going to get a certain step. And would go back to the days of I started Ballet too late, I started aerial too late, and then got better perspective, and was like, you've worked hard for several, several years, and it's paid off. And it's just been really neat to see the fruits of your labor in that way. And that really, you can do anything you put your mind to. It just takes hard work and dedication. And if you love something enough, it's almost as a fun journey. It's becomes less of like a chore and more of like, I enjoy this. And even if it doesn't go anywhere, I'm still getting a bunch of joy out of it. And if it leads to other bigger opportunities, that's just a bonus.
“And that really, you can do anything you put your mind to. It just takes hard work and dedication. And if you love something enough, it’s almost as a fun journey. It’s becomes less of like a chore and more of like, I enjoy this. And even if it doesn’t go anywhere, I’m still getting a bunch of joy out of it. And if it leads to other bigger opportunities, that’s just a bonus.”
J: That's a very, I think powerful outlook, especially coming from you who started late and has made so much of yourself in this world where you start later than people might think that you could do these things or even that you think that you could do these things. You maybe started later than then many people would have thought you could have these opportunities that you've made for yourself. So I think your your story and your outlook is really inspiring to people who want to go after the things and want to make it happen. It really, you have to show up and do the work. But when you show up and do the work, people do start to take notice and you you build those connections, you build those relationships, and through all of that you build yourself.
C: It's really, really true. And it's definitely changed my perspective, especially post college and realizing that you don't always have to go the standard path that everyone tells you to go. You can have in this and I'll turn it back over to you I was so when I first met you for coffee and learned that you started Valley around the time I did and that you had a dream about bringing ballet to adults specifically to adults and it's it's probably a thing somewhere somewhere else in the world, but it's not super common and for you to have that vision and to go after that vision so young and have it take off in the way it did in even though our physical doors are now closed for it to still continue through justice new studio through you online me Kristin, Jackie and Crissy, Chenoa, all the other instructors taking what we've learned from Broche and taking it elsewhere. It's the huge creating Broche Ballet has just rippled and is now actually going to so many other places than it could have gone that we just stayed in Denver.
J: It's so true that the the ripple effect of these things is huge. And I think one last kind of piece that I that I want to point out from from what you said earlier is you know that you're getting so much joy from the process. And from the end from what's happening in your, in your life and the journey throughout all of this. And I think sometimes we forget to. Sometimes we forget that that joy has an impact on other people, and it can feel selfish. But when you talk about the joy that comes from making your dream come true, you don't know who that impacts in a positive way, and how that actually goes out into the world. So the joy that we feel from our performance from following our dreams from from working hard and building ourselves up actually does have an impact on the world. So I think that's something we forget. And it's hard to take time for yourself because you think it's really selfish, but actually in, in a way, it's the least selfish thing you can do and gives people hope, hope for the future.
C: And if there's anything I've been learning, particularly over the last couple months is if you don't nurture your own soul, and if you don't take care of yourself, then your walls gonna be dry and you don't have anything to get out into the world. So whether that's taking a ballet class for yourself, whether that's doing a puzzle, whether that's going on a walk, whatever that looks like for anybody to make sure that you give that to yourself. And then either share what you love with other people or use what nourishes you to then bring out positive change into the people in the lives around you.
J: What a wonderful story. Casey, thank you so much for being on the show today. I hope your story inspires so many of our listeners that they too can can work hard, follow their dreams and make something super super cool of their life. And really just even if they don't know what that passion looks like, they don't know how it manifests in the beginning, but they know it's there. And they know it's real, just like you did when you were young. You knew it was there if you didn't know what it meant. Just like that. I hope that even if they don't know exactly what it'll become that they still start and follow and and just go for it with with everything they've got.
C: Julie, I can't thank you enough for having me on here. And we'll always grateful for the incredible influence that you have with Broche Ballet.
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