We recently connected with Erin LeBlanc and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Erin, thanks for joining 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?

I have been dancing since the age of 7yrs old and since the age of 12 becoming a professional dancer is all I ever wanted to do as a career. I come from the small town of Yarmouth in Nova Scotia and I love my province very much but it didn’t have the opportunities for me to grow as a dancer. That’s why I made the decision to up and leave my home of 18yrs and move to a completely new and BIG city to pursue my dream. At 18 I don’t think understood the magnitude of the decision that I was making. The choice was simple in my mind, I just wanted to dance but the reality was that I was leaving everything and everyone I had ever known. Looking back now and understanding how huge a move it was to leave Nova Scotia to come to Montreal I cannot believe I actually did it! I had the support of both my parents which, I believe was a game changer, and the bravery of an 18yr old girl with a big dream. Little Erin knew better than anyone that this risk was going to pay off and it did big time. I have now been in Montreal for almost 12yrs and for most of those 12yrs dance has been the central part of my life.

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 currently a full-time early childhood educator but my path didn’t start out this way nor did I think this is where I would end up! Most of my adult life I have been working as professional dancer primarily with a dance company in Montreal called Break City. With Break City I have accomplished much such as, performing two years in a row at the Halifax International Busker Festival, participating on the hit Quebec TV show Revolution and probably my biggest accomplishment to date would be performing in a production of Cirque Du Soleil. Alongside performing I have also been a dance instructor since the age of 13. I have always enjoyed passing along my passion of dance to others and through teaching young children dance I discovered a new passion of my own, teaching. It has always brought me such happiness to work with young children and just teaching them dance wasn’t enough for me anymore. I wanted to be more involved in the lives of young children so I decided to go to school to pursue an education in ECE. While doing my studies I continued to dance full-time and it is just recently that I made the switch to teach full-time instead. At first I wasn’t sure how I would like the change and part of me even felt like a failure for stepping back from my dance career. What I soon came to realize however was that as we age our passions change and that is ok. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to have found two great passions in my life and though a lot of my most proudest accomplishments do come from dance, I am unbelievably proud to call myself an educator as well.

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

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is honestly the fact that I get to do what I love for a living. I love that I get to wake up every morning and be excited about my work.

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

Before hand I told my story of how I moved from a small town to the big city of Montreal at 18 to become a professional dancer. That in itself shows resilience but the real part of that story that demonstrates my resilience is that I stood behind my decision to move even when things got hard. My first few years in Montreal were not easy. I was navigating not only life in a new province but also how to live on my own for the first time in my life! I didn’t know anybody in Montreal and my whole support system was back home in Nova Scotia. To top it off the initial studio I moved to Montreal to be apart of didn’t treat me with kindest either and I started to question weather I even still wanted to be a dancer. Luckily at a time when I almost called it quits another dance company, Break City, came into my life and I credit them with keeping me in Montreal to continue my dream of becoming a dancer.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: erin_airbear_leblanc