One step at a time
Ryerson dance professor rose from humble roots
From humble Alberta roots, Vicki St. Denys has danced her way to the academic top as head of Ryerson University’s performance dance program. It’s been an interesting journey. “I was a hyperactive child and I guess I was driving everybody crazy so my grandmother said to my parents, ‘I think you should put her in dance,’ ” said St. Denys, a tenured professor of dance since 2006 — a rarely conferred honour in the field — and director of the program, considered one of the country’s finest, since 2014.
But Red Deer, Alta. — population 25,000-ish in the 1960s — had only one dance school and one teacher, Arlene Bain, so at the age of 5, St. Denys started learning highland dance and tap, a combination she laughingly acknowledges as “bizarre.”
St. Denys didn’t study jazz dance — her passion — until she was 13. She was 14 before making her first foray into ballet, getting her folks to make the 90-minute back and forth journey to Edmonton on weekends until she was old enough to drive.
A stop in town during that time by the acclaimed Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, best known as BJM, was a revelation.
“They (BJM) were one of the more prolific touring companies in Canada ... and for some strange reason they came to Red Deer. We only had this tiny community theatre, but for some reason they performed in Red Deer and I saw that company and I said, ‘ah, that’s what it looks like, I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but that’s what I want to do,’ ” she recalled.
A mentor urged St. Denys, then 17, to make the trip to Los Angeles to audition for the dance academy founded by the late Roland Dupree, best known as the reference model for Peter Pan in the 1953 Disney classic. Her parents scraped the money together for the plane trip and a stay at a cheap motel near the school.
What followed was a gruelling two-day audition against more than 1,000 other competitors.
“They ( judges) would just call me Canada, they didn’t even know my name. They would just say, ‘Canada, come back tomorrow.’ At the end of the second day, I was one of 13 people chosen,” she said.
“I didn’t know very much given my background and I hadn’t had the same kind of high-level professional training that others had. But I was brave and I was passionate. So I got this scholarship and I phoned my parents and said, ‘I’m not coming home,’ ” St. Denys said. Her grandmother — the same one who got St. Denys into dance in the first place — located some distant relatives, an elderly Mormon couple, who lived in Camarillo, outside of L.A., who drove her back and forth to school six days a week until they just couldn’t do it anymore.
“I said, ‘no, no, don’t worry, I’ve got a place,’ ” St. Denys said she assured them, although she didn’t, and began living secretly in the dance school’s locker room for a few months until a fellow student caught on and let her move in with her temporarily.
St. Denys soon found her own place with roommates and lived a Bohemian life for two years during the heady days of the1980s, which saw the popularity of movies such as Flashdance (1983) and music videos starring the likes of Madonna and Prince.
“So we starved and lived on popcorn and tuna. It was an exciting and crazy time and I was very, very young and super naive. But a couple of years in L.A.
DANCE continued on GT3
will teach you a thing or two,” she recalled, adding she took on “a couple of strange, crazy under-the-table jobs” to make ends meet.
Post-graduation, St. Denys lived a nomadic life, touring as a performer throughout Canada and abroad, including Europe, Australia and the Middle East, spending a year in Japan.
“I was a (nomad) for a long time. I did everything and kind of said ‘no’ to nothing. I took every kind of dance job,” she said. “I was kind of homeless. I didn’t have an apartment for a long time, but I didn’t need one. I didn’t have anything, but I didn’t need anything.”
In 1990, St. Denys got a job at the Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville where among the performers was a young Shania Twain (then known as Eilleen) who launched her career there with a three-year stint. St. Denys decided to end her itinerate days and settled in Toronto soon after. But the city’s dance scene — especially the jazz scene — was still relatively modest.
But St. Denys soon made connections with some of the key players in the dance scene, such as George Randolph, founder of the Randolph Academy of the Performing Arts — where she worked for a while — Stelio Calagias of Metro Movement, Toronto Dance Theatre co-founder David Earle and Danny Grossman of the Danny Grossman Dance Company.
“I always wanted to stay a per- former ... but I kept getting asked to teach and asked to choreograph. So in keeping with my outlook on things, I always said ‘yes,’ even when I didn’t know what I was doing, which was often,” she said.
Most importantly, she met former National Ballet of Canada principal dancer Nadia Potts, who served as director of the Ryerson performance dance program for 27 years, the job St. Denys now occupies.
“So I taught a class and she watched about 15 minutes of it and said, ‘OK, if you want a job, it’s yours.’ Nadia was somebody who mentored and supported me very strongly. She believed in me,” said St. Denys, who began teaching and choreographing at Ryerson in 1991.
St. Denys has applied the life lessons she’s learned to the Ryerson program, which requires students to study four disciplines of dance — ballet, modern, contemporary and jazz — throughout the four- year program.
“We have really maintained the conservatory training approach. It’s a very rigorous program. Our students train in four disciplines of dance. No other program does that. I don’t even know that there are American programs that do all four disciplines in the way that we do. It’s the top program in the country, without question, the top university program,” St. Denys said. The program, which has moved into a modern space at 345 Yonge St., also teaches students the skills they need in a job market that remains difficult and competitive, she noted.
“The reality for a dance artist is most dancers are going to have independent careers now, in Canada anyway. The days of big dance companies where they hire dancers for full time jobs are gone, they just don’t exist anymore,” St. Denys said.
“(Students) have to know how to market themselves, how to produce themselves, how to find some money to get things going. They have to wear a lot of hats. They’re armed with a lot when they graduate,” she said.
“They have to be patient, they have to have courage, they have to have drive. It’s tough out there, but it’s exciting, too,” she added.
“I was a (nomad) for a long time. I did everything and kind of said ‘no’ to nothing. I took every kind of dance job.” VICKI ST. DENYS RYERSON UNIVERSITY