Our scholarships have been awarded to 90 dancers. Meet our scholarship holders who have completed their individual career plans.
Folk dance choreographer. For many years he danced with the “Śląsk” Song and Dance Ensemble. Graduated from the Ballet High School in Gdańsk. Winner of numerous prestigious prizes, among others – two awards granted by the President of Poland.
fot.z archiwum Zespołu Pieśni i Tańca ŚLĄSK im. Stanisława Hadyny.
I consider my dance career to have been very successful. I felt highly valued at work and together with “Śląsk” Song and Dance Ensemble, I visited many interesting places in Poland and abroad. It was also through dance that I met my wife and started a family.
Currently, I work as a dance instructor and choreographer, I give dance classes for children and organise ballet performances. I also work with seniors. In my work, I make use of my musicality, sensitivity and creativity. Through the Career Transition Programme for Dancers I have broadened my experience in dance, creation process and conducting classes and my understanding of the dancers and their work has deepened.
I started considering career transition seriously, just when I learned about the existence of the Career Transition Programme for Dancers organized by the Institute of Music and Dance. Before that, I had already known that my dance career would not last until the age of 45 and end with a retirement pension. But before the Career Transition Programme for Dancers was launched,
I clearly lacked the impetus to start thinking seriously about my further career.
The hardest part of the whole change was simply to make a clear decision to do something else than stage career. But when the idea came up, giving that new thing a try and proving myself in it wasn’t that difficult. It was a great help for me to meet a career counsellor as part of the Career Transition Programme. It was during the counselling sessions that I came up with the idea of a new profession and I received practical help in designing my transition in such a way so that I would be able to implement it and enter a new profession.
At the beginning of the career transition, I found it very new to work with seniors.
I had worked with children before and I knew that I felt good about this job. In terms of working with seniors, it was crucial for me that the ladies I worked with were satisfied with their classes and their achievements within them. I also wanted to be able to see the results of my work and be content with them. Working with seniors turned out to be a very nice and positive surprise.
The ladies I work with have a great passion for dance and I like observing this passionate flame in them. I am also very happy to know that have already started meeting outside my classes in order to repeat and practice the choreographic phrases. Working with children and seniors has two things in common: the first one – you need to spend quite a lot of time on repeating the choreographic phrases, the second one – the participants are having great fun while working with you. Both the children and the senior ladies. Well, perhaps the ladies have even more fun than the children, and they are definitely more diligent in the classes.
When I look at myself from the perspective of having completed the career transition, I see the same person as before. The only difference is that it is not me, who will be dancing on the stage, but the people I teach. This also brings a lot of satisfaction – different than when you dance by yourself, but equally rich.
The difficult part of the career transition is that I will not have as much contact with those
I worked with for many years, as before. I have always felt good on stage and leaving it has brought about a feeling of sadness. I realized that I was actually closing a certain chapter in my life. But
I also think that this is a very natural thing to do because nothing lasts forever. These are facts and this is the reality of life – that’s what I’d say to other dancers. What I’d add to that statement is that maybe they should start thinking about a career transition a bit earlier than just before the end of the stage career. It is not good to leave this for the last moment and to make snap decisions.
My message to young dancers who are at the beginning of the stage career is: “Use your chance to dance onstage to the full and show your potential. But also, start looking for some other things that you are good at and to educate yourself in them.”
Koszęcin 2019