We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jillian Schmitz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jillian below.
Alright, Jillian thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
I love this question. Artists typically do what they do because it’s meaningful for them, but so often, once that passion turns into a profession, the industry quickly strips away meaning for means. I don’t think meaningful is monolithic so I have three projects that I’ve experienced, and continue to experience, as particularly meaningful.
In 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, I had come to accept that much of my work, as I knew it, may not fully return. Instead of fighting this realization, I accepted it as a natural life progression and began to come to peace with my fortunate career of television and film work along with my weekly staple of live burlesque performances – which I was most concerned about not returning post-pandemic. As many people recall, bars and entertainment venues were the first to be shut down and the last to reopen.
Eight months into the lockdown, I received a call from celebrated choreographer Marguerite Derricks offering me an opportunity to be a burlesque dancer on the fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, written and directed by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino. It was such a massive opportunity and I felt like everything I’d done up to this point had prepared me for this job. I had always wanted to merge my expertise of live traditional burlesque with my experience in tv and film. It was such an extensive experience that I still am shocked at how lucky I was to be a part of it and have that experience. Professionally, it was very meaningful.
Once we wrapped season four and I returned to Los Angeles from New York, I filmed a burlesque piece that I previously performed live in November of 2019. Located at the beloved “Sweat Spot” (Ryan Heffington), the famed L.A. art show by Legalize Dance called CONGRESS (Denna Thomsen and Zak Ryan Schegel) gave my piece its debut. It was there I met filmmaker and director Mēsha Kussman after one of the shows. Together, for over a year and a half, we had been dreaming up how we could capture the original performance and turn it into a short. We shot “This One Is For You” over two days in Los Angeles and it’s been accepted into the following film festivals: San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Los Angeles Women in Film Festival, The Lake County Film Festival, and DOC LA Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival. The film has been extremely meaningful due to its intimate nature. It started to become a personal mission to tell my own stories. The piece is a series of personal monologues set to a traditional burlesque strip. It was artistically cathartic to create and perform. My goal was to capture complicated emotions, show philosophical nuance, and layered metaphors. We plan on releasing the film to the public in late 2023.
Continuing on my journey of storytelling, I started a podcast in the fall of 2022 called Grey Maybe. With a focus on recovery, each season tackles challenging subject matter and, as a social experiment, aims to encourage others to tell their stories, have hard conversations, and feel less alone, by sharing my own personal experiences and the experiences of others. This project has kept me personally creative and has fulfilled the desire to tell my own stories. I have received a lot of feedback that people are indeed sharing and having conversations they never thought they would have, and that it’s really helping people.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started formal dance classes around the age of 7 or 8 and moved on to a competition dance studio quickly after. Upon graduating high school, I moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles to train at The Performing Arts Center’s apprentice program. It was a very intense two years of training. After I graduated from the program, I began auditioning, which I found much more difficult than I had anticipated. I was getting rejected 8-10 times a week and this lasted what seemed like a couple years. During this time I had joined “Ladies In Lace,” a burlesque group that performed weekly, created by Carey Ysais. I enjoyed this show and continued to curate new acts, actively trying to get burlesque work. Slowly, after about four years of putting myself out there, I started working consistently. In addition to industry jobs like television and film, I did a lot of stage work, burlesque club work, and started teaching. I added skill sets like partnering, pole work, and aerial arts. Being a versatile performer has been very beneficial to my career, giving me many more opportunities to be right for more projects. I also focused on what I offered that weren’t based on looks or specifically related to ability. I work hard and have a keen eye for detail. I am professional, fair, dependable, and I have a lot of integrity. I’m most proud of the sheer volume of work I’ve been able to do over the last twenty-something years. I’m even more proud of the creative works I’m doing now, using my voice with my podcast Grey Maybe and my short film “This One Is For You.” When I was a young dancer I never would have fathomed speaking so openly about things I felt so ashamed about. The first twenty years of my profession I let my body speak for me through movement, acting, and presentation. I want the next twenty years to be about my voice and telling my own stories and being an advocate for recovery.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
I think there is an idea, that society affirms, that if you are an artist, or if you do what you love, you should somehow just be grateful to get to do that, and therefore making a living wage for that talent is secondary. It echoes that art and artists are somehow not as important in society as other professions and shouldn’t be taken seriously or properly compensated. Many times dancers, or artists in general, are asked to donate their talent and time for benefits or charities. Even on industry projects, artists are asked to work for free for “exposure” or “meal and copy.” We cannot escape it, even in our own community, when dancers are asked to dance for free at showcases and dance industry award shows. Dancers are not paid to audition (unless on a SAG/AFTRA project and they have been at the audition for more than an hour). The amount of free hours dancers give without compensation is heartbreaking and if you start to add up time getting ready, rehearsing, traveling (plus transportation costs), it’s very expensive for artists to work for free.
I would like non-creatives to consider a career switch. For instance, I could learn a majority of non-creative jobs. It may require extra training or schooling but I could do it in probably four years, give or take. However, to be able dance, which requires picking up and retaining choreography quickly, long rehearsals, communication related to dance specifically, and performing skills at the level that is required for professional work, would take most non-dancers decades to acquire, if they could acquire it at all. Artists should not only be highly compensated because of the time spent mastering their craft but also because of the value it provides to the various industries it serves, many times enhancing their value. In addition, creatives are offering something that cannot be completely taught or learned, but rather requires artistic input, quality or interpretation.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
I think we’re at a pivotal time in society. I believe we are on the edge of a giant technological revolution. With autonomous vehicles, AI, and other advancements, we are going to see a lot of jobs that people used to occupy become obsolete. I do think we will need to move to a different type of economic system. Capitalism will not continue to work. Robots do not participate in the economy, except to serve the entity it’s making money for. I have always thought there should be more investments by our government in art. On all levels. City, state, and federal. If the arts had a quarter of the military budget, imagine how much better our country would look and feel. When farmers have a hard time with crops, the government has stepped in. When Covid shut down the country, all of a sudden universal basic income was able to be done and, for the first time, a majority of people had disposable income. They reinvested it into other workers in the form of tips and commissions. Artists will always create, it’s what we do. But if we had funds to use towards our creations, and a way to make a comfortable living wage. I think we would see so much more good in our country and economy.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jillianschmitz.com
- Instagram: @jillianschmitz
- Twitter: @awaken2dream
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/jillianschmitz/videos
- Other: TikTok: @jillianschmitzofficial Grey Maybe Podcast on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5EZSjtUDHY2YDrEno6JWaf?si=7d22557a84e34e22 Grey Maybe Podcast on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/zw/podcast/grey-maybe/id1649138666 ‘This One Is For You’ IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21284430/fullcredits
Image Credits
Grey Maybe Podcast Image (black and white) Photographer Jose Perez Photo sitting on chair with red dress: Photographer Jake Lake Photo reaching up in shadow: Photographer Jake Lake Photo of ‘Angel’ from Marvelous Mrs. Maisel dressed in blue robe: Photograph by Loriel Hennington Posters for ‘This One Is For You’ Director of Photography; Mēsha Kussman