Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Coral Martin. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Coral thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I began taking dance classes around age two. As a young person I also was drawing constantly, on nearly any surface I could find (my parents found a few originals on the inside of lampshades). With my older sister, who is also a creative, I would create dance pieces and perform them for friends and family, we also liked to co-author short stories on our family’s computer. Being creative, taking input from the world, processing it and interpreting it and coming up with a spin on it all, has felt not only like second nature all of my life, but also a necessity. I suffer when I am not able to have an artistic outlet. I don’t think there was ever a point in my childhood that I considered anything besides an artistic career. By the age of ten I had begun traveling cross country to participate in intensive dance training in New York City over the summers and I continued that pattern for over a decade, more or less until I began my professional career as a dancer. I think my resolution to become a professional dancer began somewhere between those first classes as a two year old and my more dedicated training that began at age ten. There was something so compelling about the mixture of physical prowess, strength, elegance and eloquence required of dancing and these qualities all radiated from the professional dancers I encountered as a child. There was no doubt in my mind that I too I wanted to be a part of that tribe.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a performer and an educator. My main discipline is classical and contemporary ballet, but I identify myself broadly as a dancer. I began dance classes as a child and the path from pre-professional to professional dancer, while not without its bumps along the way, was a continuous and passion driven one. I have been teaching for about fifteen years now, I can’t imagine my creative legacy without the dovetailing aspect of sharing what I have learned during my training and career with other dancers in training.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Self advocacy is a tricky skill to master in the dance world, or so I have found. Other dancers might feel differently, but in speaking to peers and from my own experience, embedded within a lot of the ideology that shapes dancers’ training is a prizing of self abandonment and self effacement. Whether that self effacement is physical (dancing without fear of injury or bodily harm, softening or erasure of physical boundaries, etc.) psychological (pushing through states of mental distress, managing high doses of criticism and rejection) or political (being asked to enact works that don’t align with one’s ethos or politics) – I have found that these conditions are pervasive and even more particularly in classically inclined spaces. I don’t naturally do self-effacement well, but I learned a parody of it to gain advancement and curry favor in this form I love so deeply. I wish I had allowed myself to shed the charade sooner. I’m not a very good actress. Standing up for yourself and others is always worth it and while I didn’t have to come to this conclusion – I always have known it – actually enacting it, as a fish swimming upstream has been difficult, but I have never regretted it.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I often encounter this dynamic in conversations with folks who ask me about what I do. Me: I’m a dancer, Random Human: Wow, that must be so fun/rewarding/exciting, Me: (Aloud) Yes, it is! (In my head) and exhausting, painful, demoralizing, incredibly difficult to make into a sustaining source of income. I feel there is something about dance and dancing that automatically taps into a vision of joyfulness, carefree abandon, and even childishness for some and perhaps many people. While I do think those elements are at play in the work that I do and some of the threads in the tapestry of my experience that glisten most deliciously, they are interwoven with so much discipline and grit and austerity and toughness that I don’t feel many folks fully appreciate and I get annoyed when people act like I play around for work. The truth is yes, I totally play around and I love it, my nature is a deeply playful one, I would atrophy spiritually in a line of work that didn’t allow me to express that central part of myself, but again, it is a part. Just like any job, the qualities that allow a person to persist are myriad and being able to have a lighthearted spirit has to be coupled with a very steely will.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @coraldances

I am dreadful at social media. I really admire and appreciate folks who have created a sophisticated and comprehensive online presence – I am resolutely not one of them and perhaps that makes me a relic, but I don’t actually care.

Image Credits
John Hefti – jumping photo, Theresa Knudson – color photo