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

Alright, Katie 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 trained as a ballet dancer my whole life. I went to Butler University for Arts Administration in dance, was in a ballet company for a few years, and freelanced as a dancer for more than a decade beyond that. While I LOVED performing as a dancer, my best (and worst) idea will always be founding Dance in the Parks.

While I was a dancer at Kentucky Ballet Theater in the early 2000s, I participated in their annual collaboration with the Lexington park district called Ballet Under the Stars. Before our regular season started in the fall, the company performed an outdoor rep show on a temporary plywood stage built around a huge old oak tree in the city’s central historic park. The stage was always a little cockeyed. One year a squirrel kept throwing acorns on the stage during the show. Did you know that acorn guts are slippery? It was August in the south, so it was hot and so so humid.

But it was my favorite show of the year, every year.

The audiences related to us differently. The “rules” were relaxed. Families could come together and the younger kids could check out and run around until something caught their interest and brought them back. People brought picnic dinners and their dogs. They chatted and interacted with the show more with cheers and applause.

People I talked to later always said they enjoyed watching us when we weren’t on stage. There were no curtains or hidden backstage area. We changed in a trailer, then were just out in the park around the stage area. In some ways it humanized us. They could see us breathing hard or massaging muscles or just joking around with fellow dancers. In some ways it elevated us. You do THAT to get ready to go on? Was your foot bleeding and you just wrapped it up and put it back in your pointe shoe? The engagement in the whole production was different.

When I moved to Chicago in 2004, I discovered that the city had both a diverse and vast professional dance community and also a huge park district system with a long history of social and cultural engagement. At that point, those two communities weren’t really interacting. Most companies took the summer off, and neighborhood parks weren’t used and performance spaces.

I kept missing that Ballet Under the Stars experience, so I decided to try to build my own outdoor dance company for the city of Chicago. In 2009, I tracked down two women at the Chicago Park District who generously approved my proposal of outdoor dance concerts despite having no track record, money, or standing reputation in Chicago. We got paid almost no money, but they believed in the plan, gave us park spaces and portable stages, and let us do it. Free professional dance concerts in neighborhood parks throughout the city. We started with 4 shows, but got rained out of 1.

I planned all of it, raised money, begged and borrowed costumes, sound systems, marley flooring, and rehearsal space. I convinced dancers it would NOT suck to dance outside, and that we’d be doing “real” dance. There was no logical reason anyone should have agreed to any of it. But we did it. One of those dancers stayed with us for 7 seasons, and the park district trusted us to do it again.

The landscape of Chicago dance and park district programming has changed so much since then. The city’s Night Out in the Parks initiative now funds hundreds of summer cultural events throughout the city. More companies are programming during the summer, even if they’re not outdoor events. More artists are using park spaces (indoors and out) for performances and engaging with communities around their home parks.

16 seasons later, I have a tiny but mighty team of people who help me build the summer season over a year. Dancers return every year because they like working with our team and new choreographers. They believe in the mission of taking dance out of theaters and into neighborhoods. I still do most the administrative work, fundraising, grant writing, hiring, buying, laundry, and truck driving, but we’ve become a summer tradition. While I’m so proud to be able to pay artists to create and share it with the city, the best parts of this job are personal: I got a note jotted on the back of a feedback survey that said “Thank you so much for doing this. As a single mother I couldn’t otherwise afford to expose my daughter to this type of art.” Little kids dance along in the grass during the show and sometimes try to get on stage. Most recently, I was stopped while walking my dog at the lake. “Are you the woman who runs Dance in the Parks? The duet on last year’s program was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

That’s how dance is supposed to make you feel, and that’s why I still do it.

Katie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

As with most people in the performing arts sector, I do a lot of things. I’m a ballet teacher and company director/producer. I have an online editing job that I’ve done on and off for twenty years. I used to be a performer. All of these things require a million different skills and ways of thinking. My entire life and career have been run on a weirdly unshakable self confidence and the philosophy of “I can probably figure that out.”

I trained as a dancer. I remember none of my origin story because I was 4, but apparently I was a kid who didn’t sit still. My mom put me in all kinds of classes to see what I’d like, but I didn’t like any of them. She took me to a production of the Nutcracker (the gateway drug of ballet), and I loved it. So she signed me up for a park district ballet class. I barely remember those classes, but I DO remember the utter despair of having black ballet shoes while everyone else had pink.

Apparently, I got over it, because I never stopped. I trained at local studios and went to big summer intensives. I graduated from Butler University’s ballet department with a B.S. in Arts Administration. I knew if I went to college I wanted to get a degree in something the rest of the non-dance world could recognize. Arts Admin was business plus fundraising on top of a schedule full of dance classes and performances.

After school, I spent a year and a half auditioning for ballet companies and getting cut. Eventually, I landed an apprentice job at Kentucky Ballet Theater. I dance for the company for 3 years before moving to Chicago where I freelanced for more than a decade and founded the summer dance company Dance in the Parks.

But, as with all things, it’s never that straightforward.

I never ONLY danced. My first year as apprentice paid $100/week for 22 weeks, so I did other things to pay for my life. I waited tables after rehearsal days. Standing through a wait shift after a day of dancing is exactly as hard on the body as you think it is. But, the money was good, and the esprit de corps of a team of waitstaff in the weeds is unmatched.

During my first year in the company, one of my dance colleagues was leaving a teaching position at a studio in a neighboring town and kept asking me to take it over. I never wanted to teach. As a dancer, I didn’t always love class. I did it because you have to do it to keep your technique in top form, and I worked hard in class. But, I’d much rather have been in rehearsal or on stage. So, teaching young people classes really didn’t appeal. But, he kept bugging. Eventually, I figured it made way more financial sense to take the regular money, and maybe sit down once in awhile. So, I started teaching. Two things happened: I realized I LOVED it, and that I was also pretty bad at it. My students and I always had a good time in class, so I got away with not being great at puzzling out the best ways to build solid technique, strength, and coordination in young bodies. We learned together.

20+ years later, I’m still teaching and still learning how to do it better. It took me almost 10 years in Chicago to find the studios that fit me best. I have great bosses who want to raise great dancers and great people, even if they never pursue a professional career. Though I teach dancers of many ages, I do love tweens and teens. I can handle a salty 13-year-old any day of the week, but grumpy 4-year-olds are HARD. Teaching has been the financial foundation and most consistent source of fulfillment in my professional career.

I founded the professional dance company Dance in the Parks in 2009. We are a seasonal dance company that performs free, portable concerts in neighborhood parks. I think public art is important. I think free access to art is a human right, but I also think art is work and artists should be paid for their time, labor, and experience. In partnership with Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks initiative, we create a show of 6-8 pieces of choreography performed by 6-8 dancers on temporary stages in neighborhood parks throughout the city and neighboring towns. In 2024, we did 10 shows in 12 days for more than 1200 people. We invite youth partners from the immediate performance park communities to perform. We want to showcase local training opportunities and youth talent. We want audiences who like what they see us do go fine their NEXT dance experience, so we give away donated tickets to upcoming professional dance events.

This company is the embodiment of “I can figure that out.” I had an idea, and I figured out how to do it and who could help me. Just like teaching, I’ve learned a lot. 16 seasons in, we’re still tweaking and improving processes and timelines. Dancers and choreographers return know the drill and are ready to work at warp speed. Returning dancers’ unflappability over slippery floors or sub-optimal temperatures set the expectations for new/young dancers. I have a small team of dedicated people helping to lift now, and some institutional memory that helps smooth the way. But, I still do all the laundry.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I trained as a ballet dancer my whole life. When it was time to actually enter the professional industry, I couldn’t get a job. Whether there just weren’t many jobs to be had, or I didn’t find a company that was the right fit for me, or I didn’t look right, or just wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t find a job in the industry for more than a year. When I did get a job, I was the only professional who showed up to a combined youth summer intensive and professional combined audition. So, at least I was better than the kids, right?

It was a small company. I hoped that meant I’d be dancing a lot and probably doing new works instead of big, old, traditional ballets. Those things turned out to be true, but that company wasn’t the right fit for me. After 3 years, I had to decide if I was going to stay in an environment I didn’t want to work in so I could “be a ballet dancer” or go somewhere else and see what happened.

I moved to Chicago. While the city does have a big ballet company, it is not a big ballet town. It’s a contemporary dance town. I was never in a ballet company again. I did Nutcracker every year (bless the ballet gods for that financial gem) until I retired from dancing. Everything else I performed in that time was as a freelancer in modern or contemporary projects. I loved doing it. No one ever told me I was a disaster, but I always felt like my training was missing integral parts of what made my peers really good at contemporary movement styles.

But that big shift also opened the door for me to put my skills to use creating Dance in the Parks. The scramble of the first 5 years in Chicago trying to find jobs to pay bills, meet dance people, stay in shape, and get a feel for the community opened up new perspectives and opportunities that have made me happier and more fulfilled than I probably ever would have been if I’d stayed at that ballet company.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

My stakes are low. My expectations for myself are very high, but the stakes are low. I don’t have a family to support. The dogs are happy to be wherever I am. I come from a long line of world-class make-it-doers. I’m confident in my skills to take care of myself and know I have a network of people who will help if I am in need. I am happy to do different things in different place every day and plan my available time around 3 jobs to make sure I can make the money I need to live. The variability keeps my brain interested and solving problems. The lifestyle is unorthodox to many, and, understandably, a nightmare for those whose well-being is based on security and predictability.

But my low stakes mean that I’m usually willing to try anything. If I think it’s a good idea, I’ll do the work, learn the things, find the people, and try it. I hate to fail, and I’m willing to put in the time to do something the best I can. But, I’m also willing to take the lesson and move on to the next iteration if something doesn’t work. This is true on a daily basis in classes and rehearsals, and on a career basis over the last 20 years. If it’s not working, I’ll find a way to make it better or move on.

I think a little willingness, or bravery, to just try the damn thing opens up so many creative, intellectual, and emotional opportunities for people. Even small daily tasks like taking a different route home, walking the dogs a different direction, or taking a class in a new skill create opportunities to see new things, gain skills, and meet new people that just add new input and experiences to your brain to draw on in other situations. Novelty and improvisation are skills that take practice, and small bits of every day practice prime you to be ready to use your knowledge and skills to make creative changes in big ways when necessary.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://danceintheparks.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/danceintheparks/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DanceintheParks/

Image Credits

All PC credits are in file names:
Topher Alexander https://www.instagram.com/tophr/?hl=en
Eddie Eng Photography https://www.eddieengphotography.com/
Nehama Shots https://www.nehamashots.com/
Ashley Deran, A Deran Photography https://www.aderanphoto.net/
August Tye