Ashley, it seems, was headed for dance from infancy. Her mom says she was always walking around on tiptoes and moving her body, and she had an ear for music.
Though Ashley was born in Virginia, as her dad was in the military, most of her childhood was spent abroad, in Naples and Stuttgart, where she took ballet classes from small studios from the age of seven on, continuing to do so after the family’s return to Virginia, when she moved first to Virginia then Maryland for high school.
So, what deflected her path from ballet to contemporary dance? “In ballet there’s a good and a bad way to do things. You’re right or wrong,” says Ashley. This narrowness, at least as she then perceived it, pushed her away. She found the love-hate relationship she was developing with classical ballet to be toxic. “I’m more multi-faceted than this,” she thought.
Fortunately, at the same time she was taking jazz and modern dance classes at her high school and became intrigued and then excited about discovering different positions and movements, and through them different characters in herself. As she was at a college prep high school where going on to higher education was a given, dance was a natural major for at Shenandoah University, where she got her BFA degree in dance.
As her introduction to the wider dance world beyond school, Ashley became a part of DanceWorks Chicago, a company (or community as they prefer to call it) “committed to build a foundation for the individual artistic growth of dancers and choreographers, providing a laboratory from which early career artists propel themselves and the art form to a new level through training, collaboration, mentorship, and performance.”
In a number of ways, it was a good choice, Ashley says now. Training and performing with DanceWorks expanded her experience in crucial ways. As did the city of Chicago, because, although of course it has the drive, pace, and harshness of an enormous city, there is also a kind of “mid-West homeyness” there. And “it’s a 9 to 5 city,” she notes. “I appreciated that it felt like people in Chicago really stood by good work/life balance. Whenever the work day was done, it was done. I learned the importance of those boundaries between work and personal life. It has helped me to remember that I am a person first and dancer second. “
Ashley’s Chicago period lasted until she went to New York to audition successfully for Whim W’Him. She frankly didn’t know what to expect. All the different non- even anti-ballet ideas, movements and positions (like the famous Whim W’Him ‘sickle-pickle’ or turned-in-not-pointed foot) were very surprising in the beginning. “But now,” after a few months with the company, “it makes sense, though sometimes I feel my ‘ballet body’ trying to come through. “If you had to choose one word,” she says, to describe her feelings about this taxing but inspiring new stage in her life and career, “it would be whiplash.”
When I ask Ashley for her first impression of her new city, she says, “Honestly, I have found Seattle to feel a little cold. I think this might come from not only the weather but also people’s colder and more reserved exteriors. However, I’ve found that once the clouds dissipate and cold exteriors are dropped Seattle has felt like it can feel like another home for me. I’ve really enjoyed meeting the Whim W’Him community. I didn’t realize how much of a supportive community of donors, supporters, and board members I would be walking into when I first joined.
And she much appreciates the smallness of the company. It is a familiar and comforting feeling to be a part of a close-knit community. With all new works and multiple choreographers each season, there’s so much “turnover of new choreography and an accumulating body of work to learn and retain. It’s a huge challenge.”
“Sometimes maybe I would like an extra week,” to learn and perfect material, she thinks, “a bit slower time to navigate. But it’s exciting. I won’t get stuck in one way.” That’s both the hard part and the good part. “I need to figure out—how can I work like me within this?”
