Calgary native having the time of her life
STAGE PRODUCTION: Star of Dirty Dancing idolized movie
When Gillian Abbott was seven and growing up in Calgary, her big sister Beth’s favourite movie was Dirty Dancing.
In fact, Beth and her best friend had a whole after-school ritual devoted to watching Dirty Dancing.
“They would watch it all the time after school,” says Abbott. “It would be on and I would see it.
“I knew who Baby was. I just loved that she was this girl running around in jean shorts and Keds because that was me. I wasn’t fancy. I didn’t go around dressing up in frilly dresses. I remember that and I remember loving the dancing aspect of it.”
Little did either Abbott know, but Beth wasn’t just binge watching the beloved 1987 drama starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey — she was also offering the perfect tutorial to prepare Abbott for the role of her lifetime.
That’s the role of Baby, which Abbott performs in Dirty Dancing — The Classic Story On Stage.
The dancing aspect of Dirty Dancing took hold of Abbott’s young life, which included training with various dance instructors around Calgary, studying at the Edge School with Sarah Dolan and her best friend, So You Think You Can Dance Canada runner-up Allie Bertram, all of which led to Abbott being cast straight out of the Edge School in the Las Vegas production of Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles Love.
That led a little while later to Abbott being accepted into the prestigious Juilliard School in New York.
There she discovered her passion for dance was having an existential crisis at the same time she discovered acting and theatre.
“For me at Julliard,” she says, “the dancing was movement for movements’ sake.
“It was more about expressing ourselves abstractly through movement, which I do love (to do), but my (artistic) goal — and as a human too — is to touch the edge of the human heart, I say.
“I want to move people and it’s hard to move people through that (dance) when it’s not as accessible a medium and so acting I always found more accessible because language is something we all understand.”
That led Abbott upstairs at Julliard, where she spent many an evening watching the theatre students rehearsing their work.
“I was really lucky that both the students and faculty let me up,” she says. “I watched (and studied in) classes, I watched rehearsals, I watched every show I could.”
For her first professional theatre audition, what should pop up but the role of Baby in Dirty Dancing — The Classic Story On Stage, a role that requires a trained dancer (and doesn’t require any singing).
“When this (part) came up, I was like, ‘This is perfect!’ ” Abbott says. “I don’t have to sing, I just dance and act and those are the two things I feel passionate about.”
The acting part of playing Baby is she starts out as someone who can’t dance at all, which is the opposite of Abbott’s life.
“You have to take that physical journey as an actor,” she says, “rather than as a dancer trying to look like you’ve never danced before, if that makes sense.
“Really let the physicality inform your acting too because she grows — not only physically, but emotionally too — from a girl to a woman over the course of this two weeks (that the play covers), which of course we don’t actually grow up that quickly (in real life), but with our first love or an experience like that (we do.)”
During a series of call backs — for the casting director, director and producers — Abbott was able to put those years of preparation to good use and convinced the show’s producers that she would make the show’s best Baby.
Now that she has crossed over from the dance world to the musical-theatre universe, Abbott realizes there’s something to be said — and communicated — through dance that you can’t do any other way.
“Now I totally know there’s things you can’t say with words, which is why contemporary dance is such a beautiful thing,” she said.
“But for me to have (the ability to communicate in) both is so powerful and there’s something about using your voice on stage that is another level of vulnerability.”