We were lucky to catch up with AJ Negron recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, AJ thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

In 2018 I decided to blindly move to Europe to pursue freedom within my craft as a professional ballet dancer. I wanted the ability to choose who I could work with after years of having no say in how things were done. I wanted a broader community, more diversity in my work, and interesting influences outside the world I had in company life. The most critical: I felt that where I was would not forward my personal and emotional growth. I had worked too hard to get where I was to plateau. While my family and colleagues were convinced that quitting the job I worked so hard to achieve would be catastrophic, I decided to release myself to the stream of the unknown.

How I ended up in Amsterdam is not easy to explain. As a youth I was often forced into roles of silence and servitude (church, school, ballet). I’ve found freedom and personal spirituality in my practice. I made my own path to my own holy places; in philosophy, in silent moments on stage, or receiving messages from birds out my window. The quiet serendipitous symbols that would speak to me as I moved through my days. As such, a whisper grew in magnitude until it became a reality, “Amsterdam.”
So my best friend, whom I lived with in Portland OR, and I, sold his house and moved to Amsterdam. We had 2 bags and Elliot, the cat. Looking for a quick solution to my unemployment, I signed a contract with a ballet company in Poland. Good work, fun and interesting to try, I decided again that it wasn’t my place, and rejoined my friend and cat full-time in the Netherlands.

Life in Amsterdam is pretty lovely. It’s an extremely diverse community, busy and functioning with plenty of expats with expendable cash. Full of tulips and grassland, tall beautiful people who speak English as well as you do, it seemed like a fresh opportunity compared to my experiences in the states. It’s an international city with accessible government subsidies for culture, so I took my bite.
For the past 5 years I made a living in finding opportunities: performing locally and touring, teaching, staging ballets, writing subsidies, creating initiatives, producing films, filling every role possible in my own projects and for others, and theater technique. Focusing on dialogue and collaboration, finding ways to repurpose resources and learning how to solve problems before they appeared.

For the first time I was able to build my own life, expand my skill set, and acquire physical things that made me start to feel like I was at home.

But Amsterdam soon too became a place of compromise. I found the subsidies too exhausting, requiring too much effort and too little return. My colleagues had less experience and didn’t always put in the level of effort and thought as I, projects ended up unfinished. The general public doesn’t believe in spending more than $10 on a performance because “tax dollars sponsor it.” Riding my bicycle became a health risk with so many unsafe and aggressive drivers around. I started to notice how much energy was being stolen from me, just by living here.

My mission started to change from collaboration to self respect. I drifted away from colleagues who didn’t bring professionalism to the table. I said no to last- minute performances that only paid me as much as what I had scheduled. Stopped teaching for pocket cash, and went only where the inspired were.

This shift to caring about my life and wellbeing more than my craft came at a cost: I no longer possessed the fanaticism required to be entertained by my art.

My work ethic is still my pride, but I long for a craft that is tangible. Something I can create that will exist. Land, my love for plants and watching things grow. Wood and clay, herbs and roots and tasty bacteria growing in jars. Togetherness, and handmade clothes. Silver and steel and wool, the smell of pine needles soft around me.

For the past 6 months I have worked as a “groenteman”, a veggie-man, who shops for wholesale produce, lifts it into his cargo bicycle and sells it to restaurants throughout the city. The joys of normal work are beyond the guaranteed salary. It’s being able to walk away, not having to be creative or think for solutions. I get to be outside, and connect with food (my second love) and the world around me.

Of course, it’s not the end of my art. It’s a moment of rest before I step into the next unknown.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, I started dancing ballet at the age of 8 through an inner city outreach school called Ballet Tech. I enjoyed missing school every week to go take ballet lessons, and so it kept my intrigue to find out how far it would go. I later joined the School of American Ballet, and after went on to train more privately at Ballet Academy East. At 19 I left NY for San Francisco School of Ballet, working alongside the Trainee program. We performed with the main company and learned minor roles, and did community initiatives. I took my first contract with Oregon Ballet Theatre in Portland that year. After 2 years with OBT, I left for Milwaukee Ballet Company. Shortly after I quit my company job and returned to Portland, picking up short term gigs and began teaching. I knew it would be temporary, but I had a safe space to workshop and become acquainted with a new way of life outside the pressure-pot of a ballet company.
Moving to Europe and needing a visa, I quickly found a contract in a Polish ballet company. They said I could work, but my tourist visa would expire before they could get me a working visa. I decided to apply for a freelancing visa in the Netherlands, and ultimately settled back in Amsterdam, where I do things related to dance and project development: basically any role within a project that helps bring it to life.

The interesting aspect of my career has been my discomfort and constant problem solving to find a way to make things work. I am not a natural dancer. I learned to detail technique and coordination, expand my brain into searching my body for pathways and responses. I used food and nutrition to supplement the ways I had to force my body. To better understand my role, I learned what my colleagues had to do. I always search for new ways to make it easier, and then use the freedom to find ways to challenge myself.
But from the very early on in my career, I knew it wasn’t going to be about being the best. Those were my friends who were born into wealth and talent. My career was going to be about growing as a person and doing the best I could for myself to learn and expand.

I’m 30, and have been in my craft for 22 years. While I still work enough to maintain my skills, I’m moving myself away from an industry that no longer serves me, and searching for a new place of excitement and love for my practice.

I love everything that I have gone through, no matter how moments of struggle and fear, tears or horrid feelings. I have overcome and am a more beautiful person for all that I have experienced. I will always be a dancer. I will always be from Brooklyn. But my future art will be the natural world around me, and my dance, the life I feel that is worth living.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I believe there is a large population that is hungry for meaning in life. The joy and appreciation for art exists but many don’t understand where to find it or how it weaves its way through our lives. Appreciation and value for art then only comes from moments of personal engagement, instead of through constant everyday interactions with the world around us. For me, a big gap in artistic value comes down to throwaway culture, ie: We have forsaken craft for ease and affordability.

There is too much acceptance of the convenience of having something with superficial value rather than the effort of searching for something that satisfies our true need and desire to connect with what we experience.

Sure, sometimes we all need a simple movie to forget about life for a few hours without thinking. But how much more valuable is it to be entertained by something thought provoking or educating? Or even to consume pure entertainment, but made with handmade integrity instead of being shot in front of a green screen?
Most dance companies’ budgets in the US are dependent on “the Nutcracker” sales in order to perform anything else in the season. Because that’s what people know, so that’s what people buy. How much pressed wood gets thrown away once we are ready to move out? Familiar and convenient consumption defeats the challenge of expanding your comfort zone, or spending months in wait for something that will intrinsically engage you.
It’s hard work to be a thoughtful consumer. We’re all guilty of it; part of that is okay, and part of it belongs to the necessity of the moment (and affordability). But the other part of our lives, where we have freedom within our choices, should be awareness and commitment to upholding the ideals that we are humans, not searching for corporate uniformity and impulse buying, but for enrichment by the detail and stories within the world that we surround ourselves with.

So I say wait. Don’t satisfy your every need. Find out where impulse comes from, and what the root of desire truly is. And if you find your truest desire is to put your underwear away, get a wardrobe that has a story behind it.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the most difficult mentalities for me to overcome was how I related to the people around me. Ballet is hierarchical, so there is a particular method of how to perform well and advance. You work for your boss. There’s a choreographer who says “it’s like this” so you digest it in your body and feed it to the audience at the appropriate time. Your colleagues are your family, for better or worse. But you don’t work for them. We all do the best we can, and try to deal with our own struggles. They won’t give you anything other than drama because they’re not in a position to do so. Shifting to freelance performance, my colleagues became my bosses. There was nobody to work hard for because there was no longer anyone on top. My colleagues were no longer the friends or the “family” that I knew before. They were resources, partners you could create something with, or employees who would drag a performance down that made your work look unpolished.
Doing this in the Netherlands was extremely different than I had experienced in NYC, or on the west coast. The Dutch people don’t live to work. There’s an amazing social safety net for unemployed people. There’s a great social housing program. They have families and friends with expendable income and general wealth to support their projects. As an immigrant I had none of this. Even though I could hustle and create work for myself in this type of society, the outcomes were severely impacted by who was around me.
I often am an overly generous person because I like to believe in good people, and I feel that what goes around comes around. But it’s not always this way. In such a transient place like Amsterdam, I found myself spread thin and taken advantage of, my colleagues would benefit from my work yet neglect to return the favor. Learning how to not help, to not do work that was simple for me yet more difficult for other people became something I had to accept. It seems like a waste of resources and energy, but I don’t have to make it my problem.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/whotfisajn/
• Linkedin: https://nl.linkedin.com/in/alex-negron-b187301b4

Image Credits
Ivar Hagendoorn @continuouss.visuals Gerben de Jong Aryan Jauregui