We recently connected with Sadie Grace Shelburne and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sadie Grace 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.

In the fall of 2023, I had the opportunity to create a work titled Page 21 to 23 as a part of our advanced composition course at USC Kaufman. The work explores the uncomfortably extreme dichotomies between carefully maintained external presentations and inner narratives consumed by unhinged emotion and one’s darkest thoughts through a trio of distinct characters. The piece stems from a passage of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey when Franny wholly breaks down in a restaurant bathroom while on a date with her high-society boyfriend whom she is visiting. This passage and the work as a whole deeply stem from and resonate with personal mental health battles around injury, self-doubt, fear, and grappling with a lack of hope. The passage holds an intense potency for me. It feels reminiscent of some of my personal darker moments.

Salinger depicts Franny’s utter breakdown as disgusting but beautiful, hopeless but enduring, childlike but jaded, and of the highest intensity in all its dichotomies. He postures the preceding descriptions of Franny’s disposition with such presentational decorum. I am continually fascinated by the drastic contrast between this quiet, seemingly meant-to-be-perceived woman and the convulsively exploding, overtaken by visceral emotion figure Salinger later describes. My questions in the early stages of this work were: How can these two beings be one? How can our ugliest, rawest sides, soaked in fear, attacked by their own fragility, seeking power and control in the utter explosion of perpetually bottled grief and confusion, be the same as our carefully manicured presentations?

In the effort to convey such questions around dichotomies of the self, self-constructed internal narratives, and the almost terrifying agency we possess over our reality, I envisioned three characters for this work described below:
– The Narrator – What does it mean for the narration of one’s life to be consumed by fear-and grief-soaked thought patterns?

– The External Presentation of Self – The outer depiction of the beauty, frailty, power, rawness, hurt, resilience, fear, grief, and confusion contained in overpowering emotion and the attempt to veil it for ourselves and others.

– The Inner Force – The mind to some extent, but the mysterious part of it that allows us to dwell in our most fear-filled, untrusting, hopeless narratives or exist in hopeful, loving, safe-feeling community.

The work developed through a deeply collaborative effort for which I am immeasurably grateful. Charlie Richardson, a brilliant composer at USC, created the original sound score for the work. Xavier Williams, Sam Amey, and Brenan Gonzalez danced in the piece and were crucial collaborators, supports, and self-faith-builders throughout the process. Their collective and individual rarity of raw, nuanced, and complex movement, storytelling, spirit, and humanity is unparalleled.

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?

As a short biography, I am a choreographer and contemporary dancer in the third year of my BFA at the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. I spent my last two years of high school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts as a Contemporary Dance major.

I have been privileged to train in many environments that have made lasting marks on my dancing and perspective. At age 13, the American Dance Festival was an awakening training experience. OBOC Countertechnique, A.I.M., Gaga Lab, New Dialect, Chuthis, BODYTRAFFIC, Hubbard Street, and particularly the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance also built me in formative ways. In February 2024, USC Kaufman selected me for a scholarship to travel to London and choreograph in collaboration with composers and dancers at Trinity Laban Conservatoire. Moving Forward Dance selected me, with co-creator Lindsay Lykins, as choreographic fellows for our work “Presentation” to the original musical composition of David Hernandez. We performed our work at the Moving Forward Dance Emerging Artist Festival in September 2023. I am so profoundly grateful for opportunities and pathways to collaborate and share my work with new audiences.

I primarily produce and dance in choreography for stage. The opportunities for dance in film are so vast, but I am most inspired by the singular, shared, lived moment with the humanity of an audience. My own art explores the elements of life that confuse and scare me, such as feelings of imposter syndrome, the intricacies of public versus private presentation, displays of delicacy versus strength, and the inherent loneliness embedded in the life of an artist. Addressing those vulnerabilities with an audience takes on an important intimacy and demands honesty.

My unique brain and movement style are the complicated gifts that make me different. My inner voice, emotion, and thoughts are intense and unrelenting. When they are channeled into art, they are a great blessing, and, when unregulated in the more mundane parts of daily life, they can be a curse. For me, dance is simultaneously a coping mechanism and an activation of my fullest, bravest self, and it has been ever since I was young. Despite my being incredibly verbal as a preschooler, I would cling to the sign language I had learned as a baby when the social situations were big and overwhelming. Even then, sharing through movement felt freer and less permanent, definite, or intimidating. However, when within the comforts of home, my experience of movement became grand and glorious, as I would perform entire musicals with song, dance, and costume on the back deck. Now, dance continues to serve these seemingly opposing roles in my private and public life: it provides a way to manage my big, sometimes overwhelming, emotion, and it serves as my platform to speak boldly, publicly, and without reserve or inhibition. A beloved teacher once described my dance paradox as being “delicate and gutsy.”

When I graduate from USC, my goal is to work with a modern dance company. I am also deeply interested in choreography, improvisational systems, and developing my skills to engage in the community-oriented aspects of dance, but I will always have an ache if I do not get to perform. It is when I am most myself and alive: I have lived the most loved parts of my life on stage.

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 feel like I struggle with the fear that comes with success as much as my failures daunt me, or at least the doubt factory in my brain generates equal content whether an audition or application answer is “yes” or “no.” As a dancer, I am constantly questioning my rarity, unique gifts, and place in this profession so replete with innate talent and wildly impressive ability. I recently was accepted to a summer program I have dreamed about since high school. I have deeply wanted the experience that comes with this honor but also the reassurance from such an esteemed program that I have something recognizable to share in dance. When the shock of acceptance came, I just could not let the import and joy grab hold of me. It wasn’t initially gratifying and wildly affirming in the ways I had anticipated. In the immediate, I felt like people would question if I deserved it. Doubts jumped down from the walls of the vaulted framework of this great honor I have been working to achieve for years. I kept wondering, “How can one possibly be deserving of such a dance blessing?” Likewise, when my choreography has a powerful impact, I worry that I won’t be able to generate the next work with the same potency. “Will my creative magic dry up? Can I trust my instincts?” Grappling with my human imperfection is inherent in my triumphs as much as in my disappointments. Reaching for big dreams constantly requires wrestling out demons of doubt no matter how many achievements, accolades, or survived disappointments.

Whether the doubt and fear are generated by success or failure, the reality is that dance is part of my messy human purpose. The highs and lows of the dance roller coaster both lead back to the power of my purpose. If I get a big thing, and I am terrified and start behaving in fear and spiral out of self-doubt, there is a hidden existential little engine that keeps pushing me to reclaim purpose. I use tools to get into my healthier thinking and push on. When I fail and feel like the disappointment confirms my worst fears, somehow, hope keeps me showing up to rehearsal. A relationship with art has to have an unconditional love about it.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish young dancers knew about the pre-professional program at the American Dance Festival housed each summer at Duke University and other similar exposures to the world of modern and contemporary dance training at a young age. At the age of ten, I was a rare mover, but I did not have the kind of physical facility that made ballet teachers understand my potential. The competition world was recognizing my passion for dance and the gifts I had, but I knew I needed more technical training. I was straddling a world of competitive dance and ballet school training with many private ballet lessons and feeling a little lost and misfit. Ballet teachers were telling me that more formal and rigorous training in ballet technique was my only hope to have a career. I felt confused and scared. I loved to perform innovative movement, and the idea of only doing ballet classes didn’t seem like it would cultivate the part of me that held the most dance promise. Also, in my world, many competitive dancers I admired were getting accepted to impressive conservatories and having concert dance careers, so the advice wrung hollow. Struggling through some confusing years and stretching myself between two dance worlds, I was losing some faith and hope in my dance dreams.

When I was thirteen, the American Dance Festival summer intensive critically shaped my journey and experience with dance. Through exposure to evocative works and captivating people, ADF cracked open my very young understanding of movement and voice and awakened my social and political awareness. Coming from a large, competitive dance studio and these formal ballet environments, I learned about dance for the pure purpose of communicating profound inner truths and addressing complicated world issues. I saw how it simultaneously challenges and heals our society, and a quiet intuition assured me that this approach to movement was what truthfully aligned with my values and internal experiences. Following ADF, I pursued many more intensives with awe-inspiring dance companies in unique, exciting cities. These experiences elucidated and deepened my goal to dance professionally someday with one of these groundbreaking companies. Such clarity of values and purpose ultimately led me to make the bold life decision to attend the University of North Carolina School of the Arts as a contemporary dance major for my last two years of high school. At UNCSA, I was deeply fulfilled, and this preparation led me to the Kaufman School of Dance.

Without ADF, I would have likely never found a through line to my dream. Juggling competitive dance and strict ballet, I was growing disheartened and internalizing a narrative of incapability and limits. I did not know modern dance companies existed or the kind of work they were generating. I would have seen a clearer, more hopeful way to a dance career if I had known about modern dance at an earlier age. To this day, ballet classes put me in a more self-doubting and less open place about my dance ability. I have less of a growth mindset, and I fear snap judgments in that dance culture much more than in modern dance techniques – especially Countertechnique. Ballet is an important and useful tool and technique, but an overly Euro-centric and white perspective of its import clouds and constrains the potential of important new voices in dance.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @sadiegraceshelburne

Image Credits
Tyler Ely Jonah Tran Wyatt Florin (@wyattflorinphotos) Jada Alfred (@jamphotolab)