The Path Is Made by Moving

Notes on the First Year After a Dance Degree

“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.”

― Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

For the past several years (omg… decades!) I’ve been invited by my alma maters and other schools to come back and speak with graduating seniors. Usually it’s a 90-minute class, scheduled near the end of the semester. The invitation is almost always the same: come talk about your life after graduating. Share how you “made it work.” Offer some insight or direction. I’m always honored to be asked—but I’ll admit, I often leave these sessions feeling like we’ve only just begun. The scope of life after school doesn’t easily fit into a single class visit. I often wish I had more time with these artists.

So I’ve started writing down what I’d want to share if we did have more time. This is for artists who are looking ahead at graduating in 2025—and it’s also for those of you in that first five-year stretch after graduation, which can feel thrilling, disorienting, expansive, lonely, nonlinear, and deeply challenging. These are some initial thoughts, questions, and invitations gathered from my own path, and from many conversations I’ve had along the way.

What I usually offer is this: not a plan, but a series of reflections. Not answers, but questions I wish someone had helped me hold. Not a roadmap, but a few ways to orient yourself as you enter the first year after the degree—especially when the structure dissolves and your footing feels uncertain.

This isn’t a blueprint. It doesn’t offer job leads or grant strategies or application timelines. Instead, these are notes on how to pay attention. How to take yourself seriously without over-identifying with achievement. How to build a life that doesn’t require constant productivity to feel real.

Mostly, this is a reminder that the questions themselves matter. That care matters. That the people around you—who witness, reflect, hold space, share meals, make things with you—matter more than almost anything.

And that the work of making a life in dance is rarely fast, or neat, or obvious. But it is yours to shape. And you do not have to shape it alone.

One of the first things to shift after graduation is time.

In school, time is compressed. The days are long, structured, and full. You move from class to rehearsal to critique with barely a pause. The rhythm is relentless, and also deeply clarifying: you always know where you’re supposed to be, and what’s expected of you once you get there.

That rhythm disappears. You wake up to long, unmarked hours. No one is scheduling your rehearsals. No one is grading your projects. No one is watching your progress—at least not officially.

Time stretches out. And in that stretch, a new kind of uncertainty emerges. You might feel like you’re drifting. Or like you’re “not doing enough.” You might even feel ashamed for resting, or for not being as busy as you once were.

But this shift in time is not a failure. It’s an opening.

You now have the chance to recalibrate—to ask how you actually want your days to move. To ask what holds your attention when no one else is directing it. This kind of attention is slow. Sometimes it’s boring. Often, it’s quiet. But it’s also foundational.

You can begin to follow what has energy, instead of what has urgency. Let your curiosity shape your day. Let the rhythm come from within, not from the next deadline.

Who Sees You Now?

One of the under-acknowledged roles that school plays is that of the institutional witness. Faculty watch your process. Classmates comment on your work. There is always someone noticing, affirming, critiquing, responding.

And then, after graduation, that witnessing falls away.

You may still be making things. You may still be moving. But now it happens in private, or with limited feedback, or for audiences that don’t know you. The loss of being seen can feel destabilizing—not just logistically, but emotionally. Especially if your sense of progress has always been tied to someone else’s recognition.

This is a good moment to ask: Who sees you now?

Not just as a performer, but as a whole artist in motion? Who understands the questions you’re carrying, even if they can’t answer them?

These new forms of witnessing might be small. Informal. A friend who checks in weekly. A collaborator who says, “Keep going.” A former teacher who’s still willing to read your work. These are your ecosystem. Not your network. Not your audience. But your web.

And while we’re here: let’s stop calling it networking. That word implies exchange, strategy, social climbing. Let’s call it webbing—like a spider. Something relational, delicate, and strong. Something you tend to over time. Something that can hold.

Not Everything Is Dancing—and That’s Okay

on view: me at Starbucks, Seattle-Chicago first year after graduation in 2007-2008.

While performance is central to some dance traditions, it is not what makes dance dance. To equate dancing solely with performance is to miss its full depth. Performance is one pathway—but not the only one.

At some point, you may find yourself not dancing. Not formally. Not publicly. Not at all. You may be working another job, recovering from injury, caring for someone else, or simply needing time away from studios, mirrors, and the idea that movement must always lead to something.

None of that means you’ve stopped being a dancer.

Dancing isn’t dependent on visibility. It doesn’t require a stage or an audience. Some of the truest dancing happens internally, between caretaking tasks, while walking with a loved one, or folding laundry. It’s in how you listen, shift, sense, and move through a day.

Dance may disappear from view, but it does not disappear from you.

Your dancing might shift form. It might show up in the way you listen. Or how you arrange your time. Or in the quiet instinct to move when no one is watching. It might disappear entirely for a while. That’s not failure. That’s part of the continuum.

Some of you will leave dancing permanently. Others will return later with different questions. Some will keep dancing but reshape your relationship to it entirely. All of these paths are valid.

Also: dance is not a language. It’s a proposal. A way of working, thinking, relating to time and space and others. More on that in another essay.

For now, just know this: whatever shape your dancing takes, it still belongs to you.

Practice Over Performance

In the absence of external expectations, many artists try to recreate them. You might feel pressure to stay productive, stay visible, stay relevant. You might confuse activity with meaning. You might reach for a goal just to have something to aim at.

But this is also a moment to ask: what does it mean to have a practice?

A practice is not a product. It doesn’t require performance. It’s something you return to, not to prove anything, but to stay in relationship with your work. With your attention. With yourself.

A practice might look like writing every morning. Or improvising once a week. Or making playlists. Or noticing what makes you laugh. Or researching something unrelated to dance. The form matters less than the return.

Practices create stability in uncertainty. They give shape to time. They make room for things to emerge that can’t be forced.

You’re Not Behind

At some point, someone you know will get a job you wanted. Or a grant. Or a touring gig. You’ll feel it in your body. You’ll wonder what they figured out that you didn’t. You’ll think about quitting, or rushing, or changing your entire plan.

Pause.

You’re not behind. You’re just on your own timeline. And it’s not going to look like anyone else’s.

We don’t really emerge. Not all at once, anyway. And no matter what stories get told—about trajectory, momentum, arrival—the truth is often quieter, more tangled. A patchwork of work and waiting, showing up and disappearing, grief, clarity, detour, joy. The first and most simple—but also most disorienting—thing I’ve learned while healing from my ACL injury is that healing doesn’t move in straight lines. Neither does making a life. Or art. Or meaning. There are seasons when everything falls away. There are seasons when things surge. And often, they exist right next to each other.

I graduated from a BFA program in 2007. Sixteen years later, in 2023, I premiered in a work by Tere O’Connor that activated the training I’d internalized long ago. That wasn’t a return—it was a continuation. One I never could’ve predicted at 22.

Some of the visions you carry now—touring, collaborating, teaching—may happen. But they may do so across decades, not months.

Feed Yourself

There’s no poetry in starvation. There’s no artistic integrity in chronic exhaustion.

Many dancers are trained to override their bodies. To perform resilience. To equate thinness or fatigue with seriousness.

Let that go.

Eat breakfast. Drink water. Rest. Take your body seriously—not as a vehicle, but as your actual life.

This isn’t a side note. It’s central.

The Path Is Made by Walking

So you got a dance degree. Now what?

Now you reorient your relationship to time.

Now you notice what draws your attention.

Now you deepen your questions.

Now you choose who sees you.

Now you build a web.

Now you stop measuring worth by visibility.

Now you listen.

Now you follow what holds energy.

Now you walk—without a map, but not without direction.

The path is made by moving.