We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amanda Szeglowski a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

​​I’ve been drawn to storytelling since childhood. I started begging for dance class when I was three and at eleven I wrote my first play. I cast all of the neighborhood kids and scheduled rehearsals in the garage, but I never actually produced it. I was having too much fun rewriting the script day after day. (Ironically that’s still a big part of my process).

I chose to center my education on dance, but writing always remained part of my practice. I attended a high school for the performing arts in Florida; it was there that I learned about the possibilities that arise when I combine dance and theatre, and that fascinated me. It was also there that I had my first experience with visiting artists. Dance companies from New York who were on tour in my city would make a stop at our school and give master classes. I always knew I was going to be an artist, but when I think back to the moment when I could actually put my finger on it – the direction that I wanted to go – it was right there in my high school dance studio. Seeing real artists who were making exciting work and who got to tour all over the world performing and teaching…that instantly became the dream.

When I got to NYC, I worked with choreographers extensively. Though non-verbal, much of the work was using narrative in a way that I hadn’t really seen before, and it impacted me greatly. Then when I launched my company, cakeface, in 2008, my personal blend of dance-theatre began to crystallize.

Seven years later, while on tour with my company in my hometown, I was asked to teach masterclasses at my high school alma mater. My career had come full circle. Now, whenever I need a little confidence boost, I reflect on that moment.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a New York City-based writer, director, choreographer, and performing artist and the Founding Artistic Director of cakeface.

cakeface is a contemporary American dance-theatre company that makes darkly humorous work about human existence. Breaking the mold since 2008, my all-womxn company has become known for its inimitable synthesis of quick-witted text and precision choreography. Examining universally relatable themes such as aging, irrational fears, and shattered dreams, cakeface projects deliver a poignant look at our shared experiences.“Szeglowski’s cast members, for their part, are nothing but talented, and are capable of getting into the minds of their audience with bitterly truthful life stories. Even better, they make you laugh along the way.” – The Village Voice
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Being a woman in our society provides me the perspective from which I write, the
rationale for the creation of my all-womxn company, and many of the bleak topics to which I am drawn. While those issues are serious and I can be intense about them, I’ve found that humor can serve as a release valve for that intensity. All of my works have a dryly humorous tone. I like to work with grim themes that everyone can relate to: fear, death, failure, etc… Pulling out humor from these dark threads is a passion. A critic once said that my work is “as disturbing as it is delightful.” I love dichotomy.

My work is truly a hybrid of dance and theatre, and as the writer, director, and choreographer, I think about things with multiple hats on from the start. Once I determine the central theme of the piece, I then consider duality within it. Either a secondary storyline, or different worlds on the stage – I take the theme and explode it. Then I go into research mode. I scour the internet, read blogs, watch movies and a lot of TV, listen to people on the subway… Then I develop a set of questions around all of the tangential topics that interest me, and I begin interviewing people – a lot of people. I go over all of that data and map out a loose structure for the piece, and then I begin writing.

Although most would consider me a dance artist due to my training and experience, the playwriting comes first in my creative process, as well as in the way I view my work. I’m definitely a fast twitch person and that comes through in my writing. Physicality is an essential part of my work, though the extent of it varies from piece to piece. My choreography is always led by the script, and not the other way around.

There is so much gender inequity in the dance world when it comes to who receives funding, commissions, awards, residencies, you name it. There are loads of womxn artists in our field that are brilliant and capable, yet unable to accelerate at the speed of the much smaller population of men. I formed cakeface to provide not only an outlet for my own artistic voice, but also as a means of performance opportunities for womxn. After 16 years as Artistic Director, I am even more committed to this driving principle today. I’m a mom of two small girls now, and I will continue to provide space, however I can, for womxn’s voices to be heard and celebrated.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Simply put, changing people’s lives. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not. In 2017 I premiered a work about shattered dreams called Stairway to Stardom. It was inspired by an eponymous NYC public access tv show from the 1980s. It’s a dissection of the American dream and what it means to “make it” – I developed this piece over three years while in residence at HERE Arts Center in Soho, NYC, and I spent hundreds of hours interviewing broad swaths of people as research for my original script. Much of the choreography is inspired by original performances that aired on the tv show, and hours and hours of internet research and media consumption of shows like “Toddlers and Tiaras”, movies, blogs, and magazine articles… The result was 5 sequin-clad women serving up an elaborate look at our society’s dream-crushing effects on peoples’ lives. It was a beautiful piece that I am very proud of, but most importantly it moved people.

My mission is to give audiences the opportunity to relate to something familiar, yet cast in a distinct new light. Stairway to Stardom was a mirror for many of those who witnessed it, and the impact of that experience stayed with them. A friend’s father came to the show. He had worked in computer programming, unhappily, for 20+ years. After he saw the production, he made a life-altering decision. He quit his job to follow his long-shattered dream: becoming a train conductor. I remember my friend telling me in 2020, when all of us were afraid to step outside our doors, that her dad was proudly showing up to work each day – driving the NYC subway trains. Art impacted his life. Art changed his life. Something that I dreamed up, manifested in a way (with the help of talented performers, collaborators, and producers), that empowered him to change his life. That is the best part of being an artist.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

With every new project, I set a challenge for myself. For Stairway to Stardom, I aimed to explode my concept and elevate my practice; I wanted more text, more perspectives, and my first grand-vision with a robust team of collaborators. For my subsequent work, this is now, and now, and now., I wanted to write a “play”.

In August 2019 I signed a contract with a venue in Brooklyn that would be presenting my next show. The premiere was going to be the first week of March 2020. (Yes, RIGHT before the world shut down). But that was unknown, of course. The most unnerving issue on my mind was the fact that I had 7 months to make a world premiere and I was a first-time mom with a 6-month-old baby. I realized that I was going to have to adapt my creative process to fit my new lifestyle. It was going to be a big pivot.

Up until this moment, I would work with my company from the inception of a piece. I’d come into rehearsal with bits and pieces of text and movement and flesh them out in the room together, building day after day on the progress of the previous rehearsal. But with an infant, and a full-time job, my independent time for creative work suddenly had to fit into a tight schedule and intensive, ongoing rehearsals with my company were simply not feasible. It was fortunate that this project was to be more of a play than any of my previous works because I quickly determined that my new creative process would involve me working alone to write the complete script and then bringing it to my company and setting the choreography.

My last production saw us working together intermittently over three years. With this piece, I wrote the entire script from home and only rehearsed with my company over the two months leading up to the premiere. The experience forced me to really focus on and elevate my writing, because if that wasn’t strong, we would be in an impossible situation come January as there was just enough time for direction and choreography – not rewrites. It also taught me to learn how to find inspiration and creative drive during the scheduled times that I had to work with. That was challenging at first, but I’m someone who needs deadlines and works well under pressure. So, I reshaped these moments in my mind and created mini-deadlines for myself – fleeting do or die windows of time each week.

this is now, and now, and now. had a sold out run and was honored by the New York Dance and Performance Awards, The Bessies, for “Outstanding Production.” I am extremely proud of that success and recognition, and it is that much sweeter when considering the challenges that I overcame to make it happen. I’m proud of a lot of things in my career, but finding a way to work through this moment, when life felt so hard, and winding up with my most acclaimed production yet, really takes the cake.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cakefaceart.com/
• Instagram: ohcakeface
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-szeglowski

Image Credits
Tom Kramer, Maria Baranova, Steven Schreiber