Mara (Class of 2021) hadn’t planned on spending most of 2020 and 2021 at home in British Columbia. The SelfDesign learner was rocketing towards a career as a professional dancer when the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.
Now she’s taking her passion and drive to study health and life sciences at university, with an eye on possibly using the skills she gains to help other dancers in their careers.
Trajectory to dance
In 2019, Mara’s future seemed clear.
The Duncan, B.C., teen had spent the previous year training and rehearsing to compete at the 2019 Dance World Cup finals, held early that summer in Portugal. As a member of Team Canada, the 15-year-old performed in three dances with her teammates and an original solo contemporary dance piece.
From there, she travelled to New York City to immerse herself in a four-week summer intensive dance workshop at the prestigious Joffrey Ballet School.
“It was amazing,” she says. “We stayed in dorms, but they didn’t baby us. We had to look after our own meals, our scheduling, our finances, and so on. And we worked with the instructors for eight, nine hours a day, training, working and dancing. I learned so, so much.”
As a result of her work during the workshop, the school offered her a coveted scholarship-funded spot in their year-round jazz and contemporary dance trainee program for young pre-professional artists. Graduates of the program have gone on to perform with world-class companies such as the American Ballet Theater, Houston Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet.
“If I had stayed in the program, I’d have gone on to dance professionally,” Mara says.
Balancing academics and dance
Being enrolled with SelfDesign helped make it possible.
“There is no way I would have been able to train the way I was training or stay in New York if it hadn’t been for SelfDesign,” she says. “When you’re in the studio from midday until 9 or 10 o’clock most nights, it’s challenging to fit school work and all the other things you have to do around that.”
Mara’s schedule was more than full, says her SelfDesign learning consultant, Jill Christie.
“From the moment we met, it was evident that she had a plan and a drive like I have never seen in a 15-year-old,” Jill says. “We had met briefly just as she was leaving Duncan and heading to New York City. I was amazed to learn that her plan was to carry the full-time load of a grade 10 learner while managing a 40-hour-per-week intensive dance program.”
Mara says she saw some New York classmates struggle to balance training and schoolwork, but unlike them, she’d been involved with SelfDesign’s online and personalized education model for years. She was used to motivating herself and to monitoring her progress.
SelfDesign also honours a person’s learning journey beyond coursework – it recognizes that learning happens everywhere and all the time.
“You can focus on other things and fit your Observing for Learning meetings and your theme group discussions and projects around that,” she says. “I was also able to apply so much of what I learned during my dance training in my schoolwork and personal projects, which was really helpful.”
Mara took advantage of this in her first personal project, Jill says.
“She represented her New York experience by visiting, observing and documenting the museums and art galleries she visited. She fulfilled her schooling requirements while doing something that she was passionate about and in the process created a memoir of her time in New York City.”
Mara’s SelfDesign journey
Mara took her first dance class when she was three years old, in South Africa, where Mara was born. Her family moved to Port Alberni, B.C., on Vancouver Island, when she was about six. After a brief, unhappy spell at a local elementary school, Mara started with SelfDesign Learning Community.
Through all that, she kept dancing – taking tap, jazz, ballet, contemporary and other dance classes.
Things changed again when she was 12 years old. The family moved to Duncan, B.C. Mara signed up with a local dance studio and started getting serious about dance.
She also returned to classes at a brick-and-mortar school.
“I’d been on the honour roll, and I wanted to see if that would translate when I was in ‘normal’ school,” she says. “There’s a stereotype about homeschooling – that it’s less academic and less rigorous. I wanted to see how my grades compared in regular school.”
She maintained her high grades, but the classroom routine didn’t work for her.
“I’m pretty independent, I have a lot of opinions, and I’m outspoken,” she says. “I had a hard time adapting to the rules and rigid structure of regular school. And the schedule! It was really difficult to fit ‘school’ in with my dance classes.”
Mara returned to SelfDesign and doubled down with her training, supported in her learning by her learning consultant.
“I owe so much to my learning consultant,” she says. “She did everything humanly possible to help me realize my goals while keeping me on track with my learning. It was such a gift to have had that kind of support – a real privilege that I will forever be thankful for.”
In 2019, as Mara took on her full-time dance program, a full-time grade 10 theme, and two add-on courses, it became clear to her learning consultant, Jill, that this learner was going to use the flexibility of SelfDesign’s learning model to pack her high school career into two years rather than the usual three.
“The more she took on, the more she thrived,” Jill says. “SelfDesign’s environment offered her the chance to do this. She just needed my support to advocate her plans, the support of Ruby [from SelfDesign’s Guidance team] to help her plan and organize the coursework, and her own unwavering drive.”
Jill says, “There is brilliance in the ways of Mara’s learning – her creativity, her eloquence, her newfound love for poetry, and her determination and perseverance, and also in her ways of wondering about what’s possible. There didn’t seem to be any boundaries around this, and I can’t count the number of times Mara would ask, ‘Can I do this?’”
Usually, she could.
COVID drops the curtain
On March 22, 2020, halfway through Mara’s second term at the Joffrey Ballet School, the governor of New York declared a state of emergency. All non-essential businesses across the state were shut down to limit the spread of COVID-19, which was hitting New York City especially hard.
Just like that, the Joffrey programs were cancelled. With no reason to linger in the city and many personal-safety reasons to leave, Mara packed up and returned home to Vancouver Island.
To Mara, it felt like the end of her dance journey.
“I was so disappointed and disheartened and – I don’t know – fed up. For six months, I stopped dancing,” she says. “I actually was thinking I might give up dancing altogether.”
She spent the spring and summer thinking about what she wanted in life and what her next moves might be.
But dancing is too much a part of Mara for her to leave it for long. By September, she had a plan. She returned to the Duncan studio where she had trained for years and started dancing again – but only part time this time. In addition to the five hours she was training each day, she worked part-time at a local coffee shop when pandemic restrictions allowed.
And just as she had been preparing in the spring, Mara spent the next learning year fast tracking through high school. She also applied to university.
Next moves
Mara obtained her Dogwood Diploma (B.C. Certificate of Graduation) in June 2021. She started classes in the University of Victoria’s Health and Life Science program in September, where she’s studying biochemistry, and might transfer to the University of British Columbia in 2022. Her plans include graduate school in science or a health field – preferably back in New York – with internships in labs and clinics for experience.
Ultimately, however, she says she’d like to bring it back to dance. “There aren’t many dance physiotherapists or rehabilitation specialists who have been dancers themselves and who have that intuitive understanding of dance training,” she says. “It’s a real gap in the field, and I think that would be a really interesting direction to explore.”
Whatever happens, she’ll always be part of the dance community.
“Maybe I’ll keep dancing,” she says. “Maybe I’ll start competing again one day. Maybe I’ll teach dance. Maybe I’ll work with dancers as a dance physiotherapist or whatever.… Dance is part of who I am, and it will always be.”
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Learn more about paths to graduation at SelfDesign
Learn more about SelfDesign’s grade 10–12 program
Learn more about mental health resources and supports at SelfDesign
