News from Weber Dance

Spotlight on the Dancers:
Shannon Humphreys

My name is Shannon Humphreys and I have been performing in Jody Weber's choreography for the last ten years.

So I am at a party or dinner, meeting new people, and inevitably the question is asked..."What do you do?" This always presents a dilemma for me. I understand the question. I know I am being asked to reveal where I spend 35-40 hours every week in exchange for my bills being paid. The asker is hoping to be able to learn something about me, based on the decision I have made regarding this time-for-money exchange, which he/she probably assumes is my career. In this culture so much of our identity, both how others view us and how we view ourselves is rooted in what we do for work. I try to make the philosophically complicated answer to this question as simple as possible. I am a secretary - but this answer is inaccurate for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that this title has nothing to do with how I define myself (in point of fact my actual job title is quite long and fancy and is even further from what I imagine as "me"). I like my job and I am pretty good at it, but what I really do is dance.

I am a dancer. From my first ballet class at age 4, I have been a dancer. Throughout my training I took classes is every genre available to me, but when I was 12 I was allowed to take my first modern dance class and it quickly became my favorite. In retrospect I think I connected with modern dance because it allowed so much freedom without abandoning structure, and the technique I spent so many hours in ballet classes mastering. Despite the fact that I had several excellent modern dance teachers, there were no modern dance companies in Central Florida in the nineteen-eighties; so I trained with the only professional dance company in Orlando, a regional ballet company. Notwithstanding the blockbuster movie of my generation, I was never particularly interested in fame. I decided early on that my goal was to make a living as a professional dancer and I thought that I had a better shot at this in ballet. This was not because I was better at it, or more suited to ballet (I wasn't). It was because there is at least one small regional ballet company in almost every area in the US. At that time modern dance companies only really existed in major cities and the only ones employing dancers full time were the "big ones" in New York. New York is not my thing, so I tried ballet - the small regional variety. Even working full time for the ballet company I couldn't make ends meet, so I started bartending. This was the first in a long line of jobs I've held that enabled me to pursue my career in dance. Hungry and plagued with an ankle injury, it wasn't long before I decided that if I had to work another job as well as dance; I would rather be doing modern dance than ballet. Many years and many jobs later I work 9-5 at a desk job and rehearse with Weber Dance on Sunday mornings and some evenings. I am often envious of dancers who have managed to find day-jobs in the field, but that hasn't worked for me. For now, I am grateful to have an employer who supports my having a full life outside the office and gives me a lot of flexibility, especially around performance time.

I am extremely privileged to be a part of Weber Dance. Jody's ideas are consistently interesting, her choreography is always challenging and she is extremely generous with her collaborative process, providing me with inspiration and a structure for my own movement ideas. Dance making can be an intensely personal endeavor, and I am very grateful to Jody for inviting me to participate in the development of her art. The thing that gives me the greatest joy in life is to interpret her artistic vision with the expressive power of movement. I am a dancer.

To learn more about Shannon Humphreys, please visit http://www.weberdance.com/people.htm