The Monthly discusses a life as a dancer with Michael McEvoy – Part 2 –  Development of Craft

How do you develop your craft?

There are of course many people who deserve a lot of credit, but I think I learned my craft from a mix of life experiences and from my own perseverance.

If you want to learn how to produce shows, go wait tables, work in a restaurant. You will soon learn everything you need to learn about businesses. You’ll learn about customer services, staff management, networking, about what providing a public service is all about. Those experiences of working in cafes and bars were as much part of my development as anything else.

With regards dance though, I went straight from the Belfast Met to Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance for three years, I started there in 2016. The same year I started at Laban, I choreographed my first main stage show in The Mac. I choreographed a production of Evita, a musical.

I had done 2 years of training, I was still performing in Belfast, I was teaching musical theatre, teaching jazz in Antrim, and I was teaching line dancing in Ardglass. I was also teaching hip-hop, ballet, everything I could possibly do. I had to fund my travel and find money for auditions in London. I was also working in cafes and restaurants as I said earlier. I started my first job in a cafe when I was 14 and worked in cafes and bars until the Pandemic.

It was a very intense 2 years at Belfast Met, but it always felt very organic. I was able and I felt ready to transform my life and everything I was doing was just part of that process.

How did you find studying at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance?

There is a particular method which Laban uses to teach dance and choreography. Their starting point is that you have to strip back every aspect of your life, back to the core of what you are as a person and as an artist.

For three years they played devil’s advocate with us. They would say that you have to look at the moves you are using. They would argue against using specific dance moves.

Continually you would be asked to discuss the moves you were using and whether they were your moves. They were always interrogating you on what was it that was yours. You would constantly be asked, “Where is the art?. They hated my choreographic style.

I could whip things up very quickly because I was used to choreographing 60 kids every summer. I already knew how to work with lighting designers and technicians. I already knew how to work within a theatre space. I knew the history of musical theatre. What I didn’t know was anything about contemporary dance.

They would ask me about specific dancers, like Trisha Brown and Wayne McGregor, people who were working in contemporary dance right at that moment. They would suggest that you needed to know the history, but you also needed to know what was current.

I had really only seen the Phoenix Dance Company at Theatre of the Mill. I really hadn’t had access to the contemporary dance world because very few works came to Northern Ireland.

I had 2 years at the Belfast Met learning technique and the skills required to dance and then an even more intense period at Laban interrogating the history of contemporary dance. They just would not allow you to simply put steps together and call it choreography. You had to bring something new to the table.

My craft was developed through all those experiences: life experiences, all the work I did teaching and working with young people in musical theatre, along with the intense 2 year period at Belfast Met and the 3 years at Laban.