Bristol, 25 June 2020

Dear all of you entering the world of dance,

My name is Laïla Diallo.

I write from my bedroom. The desk in the spare room is my usual writing spot but for now that room is full of the trips to charity shops I haven’t been able to make recently, and all the shredded paper ready to take to the dump, and the piles of stuff still to be sorted. I can’t get to the desk today.

I write from my bedroom while downstairs my partner and son are going through yet another Joe Wicks workout. I sometimes wonder if they are perhaps the only two people in the whole country still tuning in to Workout with Joe. I admire their perseverance.

I write from my bedroom for the time of a Joe Wicks workout.

 ……………… 

For a living, I make dances and perform and lead classes and workshops. I produce choreographic work independently and collaboratively, I work on peers’ projects and across art forms, I do movement direction and choreography for theatre and opera. I love that my work is such that one day I am working with Year 3 Juniper class school children and the next with Judi Dench (although the latter is not, to be absolutely honest, an every-other-day type occurrence). At this moment in time what I do above all else is that I am one third of a little family. That’s been my main job this Spring.

If it wasn’t for my friend Maude I wouldn’t have had a career in dance. Maude and I were 10, I think, when she enrolled in ballet jazz lessons and I followed her in. It could have been chess club or diving lessons… but it was dance. What followed were many years of me awkwardly growing into a purple-lycra-clad teenager. I was so shy but that shiny lycra made it impossible to disappear into the wallpaper in dance classes. In spite of my best attempts.

I stuck with ballet jazz.

At 18, I graduated with a diploma in contemporary dance from L’ Ecole de Danse de Québec (Canada). It was time to make a decision:

Option A. Going to uni
Option B. Trying to get a dance job
Option C. Finding new ‘training grounds’

I didn’t feel ready to audition around.

I wanted to travel and, with a little governmental support, some savings and some help from the bank of mum and dad, I decided to go train elsewhere and give this dancing lark a go and that if it didn’t work out I could always go to university.

I packed a suitcase and went to France, leaving home for 9 months to take part in a project run by choreographer Régine Chopinot, especially designed for dancers like me, just out of training. That year was a complete shock. A dance culture shock. All my ways of doing challenged. So good in retrospect. So hard in the moment. By the end of it, I took my shaken self to London, where, I told myself (and my parents), I would spend a year on the MA course at London Contemporary Dance School. Except I did an audition at the end of that time and got a job with a company in London. I would do it for a year before going back home to Canada I told myself. But I was hooked and inspired and I stayed where I was for 8 years. That wasn’t planned. Now Bristol is home and it is a good home. But it wasn’t planned either.

I think my childhood friend Maude is a lawyer now.

I am very glad I followed her into ballet jazz lessons when we were 10.

And I still regularly contemplate Option A: Going to university. One day.

……………..

What’s not mentioned in my bio?

All the injuries.

Dealing with injuries has been without a doubt the most challenging thing in my dancing career. That right knee and that right shoulder which over the last 20+ years have both been recurring sources of trouble.

It’s tough when things feel like they are out of your control. And that there’s no knowing really how things will go, or how much better they’ll get.

Injuries have felt like that often.

Now feels like that too.

As painful and frustrating as those injury times were, they enabled a lot of stuff:

I wrote my MA (I would never have done it if I’d been touring as planned).
I slowed down enough to listen with more care to what I was asking of myself/of my body.
I made space for other interests - those set aside while I was happily dancing my little heart out.
I considered afresh the choices available to me, the things I could try my hand at.
I remembered why I wanted to dance.

Now feels like that too.

“Don’t put all your dreams in the same pocket.” Or something along those lines…. A character in a novel I read as a teenager said something like…: “Don’t put all your dreams in the same pocket in case there’s a hole in it.” I can’t remember which novel it was, but it was one by a favourite French Canadian author Réjean Ducharme. It stuck with me. It helped me and helps me, while navigating a specific experience, to also remember other loves, and to envisage other possibilities, other ways of being in the world, as much for the case where things might not go to plan, as for the joy of imagining a scattering of pathways. 

………………

Joe Wicks is done downstairs. That’s my cue.

Go well everyone,

Laïla