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

Alright, Katie 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?

One of the biggest risks I’ve taken was leaving my career as an Associate Choreographer to do my own work. Associate work is incredible – you learn so much, you get to work on sites and scales that would never be available to you as an up-and-comer, you learn from incredibly experienced and gifted mentors, you meet people that will be your colleagues for the rest of your life, and you have a steady income. I was an Associate Choreographer on Once, Amelie, American Psycho, and Moulin Rouge (in addition to a bunch of off-Broadway shows) – all told about 7 years. And there came a time where I realized I had learned enough to strike out on my own in full force, but the stability of the paycheck was so hard to leave. My friend Jason, a scenic design genius, told me over a cocktail – we all think that some job will come along and the transition from associate to lead will be seamless. In reality, you just have to jump and trust that a net will appear. It was absolutely terrifying, and my lifestyle changed drastically – freelance work makes it so much harder to make ends meet. But I grew exponentially as an artist.

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

I started my career as a professional dancer in Chicago; I was performing professionally two years before I graduated from Northwestern University. I already knew that performing was not what I wanted to do – I was already choreographing and directing in school – but the pathway to become a choreographer and/or director is circuitous, shrouded in mystery, and never the same from one person to another. I decided to work my way up from chorus girl to dance captain; and after dance captaining for a few shows, I began to ask to assist, and started assistant choreographing; then I started choreographing in smaller, off-loop theaters while assisting and performing in the larger musical theater houses in Chicago. Soon after, I was choreographing at a steady clip on the stages I used to dance on. Through the amazing observership program with SDC (the director/choreographer’s union), I wound up working for Steven Hoggett; I moved to New York to begin my career as an Associate, and would jump back and forth between Associate gigs to do my own choreography work in regional theaters around the country. A few Chicago theaters really invested in me as an artist, and gave me my first shots at directing; and The Notebook came through shortly after…and that’s about where I am right now.

My brand, or rather my style, is very Ensemble focused. I think it’s a result of having forged my artistic identity in Chicago, where Ensemble is valued above all else; and also the byproduct of having danced in many ensembles where no one told me why I was there or what my presence meant – they just wanted a clean double. I think the Ensemble is there to shape the tone and nuance of the entire story; they tell us what world we’re in, they tell the audience how to feel about certain things and people, they show us the values and rules and quirks of the community we’re in for two and some odd hours. So building relationships, finding collective truths, and creating shared history are the most important thing for me, whether I’m directing or choreographing. I’m drawn to generative artists who are excited to play, generous with their ideas and collaboration, and have a sense of humor – I think you have to be able to hold the art closely and intensely, but laughter is the most important thing in a rehearsal room.

I think the other thing that sets my work apart is my focus on women and female/femme bodies onstage. A running joke of mine, when people ask me about my ‘take’ on a particular show, is to say “I’m going to direct the show; and the woman is a person.” It’s a quick quip I’ve developed, but there’s a shocking amount of truth in it. I’ve spent time in a lot of the classics – Oklahoma, Music Man, Cabaret, etc. – and these were all written and composed by men. When you add into that a creative team of all men (which is, unfortunately, incredibly common), the women in the story begin to get more and more two-dimensional, because there is no one behind the table or in the text advocating for their complexity and their humanity. Marian Paroo? Incredibly deep and human, not a spinster shrew. Laurey? A woman who is terrified to relinquish the little power she has in a wild, borderline lawless society where women are treated as property, possessions to fight over. The list goes on. But having grown up as a chorus girl, having been asked to stand still/look pretty/lose weight/take less focus/take up less space, and having been an audience member watching woman after woman onstage reduced to a haircut and a sexual background, I made the decision to get behind the table and try to shift the way we present women on stage.

I am incredibly proud of how hard I have worked to carve out a lane for the type of work I do; and incredibly aware of the enormous gender gap between male and female creatives behind the table. I even started tracking the gender breakdowns of creative teams on Broadway, and the number are pretty embarrassing across the board. We’re halfway through the 24/25 Broadway season, and so far, only 2 of the 21 shows that have opened this season have creative teams made up of 50% or more women.

It took me 20 years to get to where I am; I intend to spend the next 20 continuing my journey down this hallway, but making sure as many doors as possible are unlocked for women as I leave them behind me.

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

I think this question is the question of the moment. I’ve been lucky to travel extensively with my job, and I was floored to learn that the take on artists in the United States is very different from how they are viewed in other countries. I’d say on average, Americans consume about the same amount of art as other parts of the world: we have incredible museums in this country, the movie industry is rooted here, Broadway is here, the regional touring market and the non-profit regional circuit are incredibly popular, and we consume dance, television, and music voraciously. Yet for some reason, there is a dissonance between the amount of art and culture we consume in this country and the narrative of the artists inside of those works. Colloquially, our society still does not respect artists – how many times have you seen the nasty “get a real job” comment on Twitter? Governmentally, we do not support artists – the NEA has been hacked down to its absolute skeleton, and grants are disappearing left and right. Financially, it is almost impossible to survive as an artist in this country; our industries are based in the cities with the highest rents, landlords scoff at 10-99s when you apply for apartments in those cities, the most recent tax bill that went into effect a few years ago has substantially reduced what artists can deduct from their living expenses, and along with the rest of the country, our wages have not risen proportionally alongside the increase in the cost of living. I’m not sure I have a solid answer as to how to solve this problem, but something needs to be done about the narrative of what an artist is, how hard they work, and how much we rely on what artists make in order to move through the world. I find it ironic that a country that devours entertainment in every form, and discusses artists in every magazine, newspaper, and tabloid still does not take them seriously as contributing members of society.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Deep Work by Cal Newport was a huge influence on me. I’m incredibly interested in how our brains work: how they process images, how we visualize, how we connect one thing to another. A lot of choreography is figuring out how to make an abstraction of an emotion, a thought, or an experience; and I am fascinated by how minds wrap around a concept. For instance, my brothers are both math geniuses, and are very successful in finance. My brain could never wrap around mathematic concepts like them, and for a long time I thought that meant I was a failure, or stupid (see: how we value artists in our society again). But when I got to Northwestern, I slowly realized that the way my brain worked was amazing: just very, very different.

Newport’s book touches on a lot of the science behind neural pathways. It is, for me, a guide to making art in the hyper-connected age. The loose moral of the book is “unplug to create,” but he explains how the brain’s pathways get disrupted when you are thinking and, say, your phone buzzes, or an email pops up. And the pathway you were forging collapses. I find the science of neural pathways endlessly captivating, and this book really connected that information to creation, and changed the way I work.

Contact Info:

• Website: katiespelman.com
• Instagram: @k8spelman
• Facebook: Katie Spelman
• Twitter: @k8spelman
• Other: tiktok: @k8spelman

Image Credits
Kai Ravelson Katie Mollison