The Monthly interviews dance practitioner Dylan Quinn – Part 2 – A career in dance

Do you go on to college or university?

I knew I wasn’t really going to do well in A levels. They weren’t going to be my route. That year the BTEC National Diploma of Performing Arts came out at Ballymoney Tech; it had just changed to North Antrim College. I was fortunate in that it happened when I was leaving school so I was part of the first intake in that course.

That was a stepladder for me to go and do a Bachelor of Performing Arts, a Degree, at the Northern School of Contemporary Arts. I was very lucky in that the cards fell in the right direction for me.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do although I knew I wanted to go to a performing arts college, and I was leaning towards dance, but I was being pushed towards drama. Mags Byrne had shown me the Prospectus, so I went to the Northern School for Contemporary Dance for two weeks to do their Foundation Course as part of a work experience programme and I thought it was fantastic. It was pretty scary because it was culturally so different to what I was used to. But I knew that was the thing I wanted to do.

Things emerged at the right time?

Yes, they did, and I was lucky in that they paid your fees to go to study these courses, and also the Dance degree that the Northern School of Contemporary dance was offering was affiliated to Leeds University. And even luckier for me, there wasn’t a lot of writing required, it was very much a performance based degree, which suited me.

Once I had that trajectory to do my training, then the other part of the business, as any freelance artist knows, is getting jobs, and getting experience with different choreographers and companies.

I ended up taking a route, it wasn’t my preferred route, but I wouldn’t change it because I met my wife there and I we have four kids now. But it wasn’t the route I would have chosen if I am honest about it.

What happens then?

I was a worker. I went to dance college to work. Some people went to party and enjoy the university experience, but that wasn’t me. I really enjoyed hard work and I started getting work as a dancer in my third year. That gave me a little bit of experience and I headed to London. I had been in London for 6 months and had got a little bit of work, here and here, I had auditioned for various companies, companies in Europe as well, and I had got close but just hadn’t been able to cross over the wire, and I decided to audition for a company in Lancaster.

A guy I knew in College called me and he said there was an audition going for a company, Ludus Dance Company, and it was the leading dance and education company. They were in Lancaster, my brothers were in Liverpool, and it was coming up to St Patrick’s Day, so I thought I would head up to see my brothers in Liverpool. Ludus were paying for my travel, I didn’t really want the job because at that time it wasn’t really the work I wanted to be doing, but I would do the audition spend time with my brothers and head back after St Patrick’s Day.

When I went into the building, I felt that there was something I could learn from this company. There was something I hadn’t learnt at Dance College. Something about the cognitive understanding about the world around us.

Lloyd Newson, one of Europe’s leading choreographers, had gone through Ludus. Wendy Houston had gone through Ludus and Nigel Charnock had been there. These were all dancers around my time so Ludus had a great pedigree of producing thinking dancers.

I also thought I could learn something which would give me a career, because dancing 9is such a challenging career. If you injure yourself that’s it. What do you have to fall back on; not much? I got the job, and it took me off on a particular trajectory, and I learned a huge amount and lead me towards the social sciences and peace studies. It educated my brain, a little more perhaps than I had been used to, and it offered me a chance to develop my skills.