San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Emily Hansel: Dancer tirelessly travels to gigs, works studio front desk
On a winter Saturday night, dancer Emily Hansel was performing onstage at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. By the next Monday she was back at work at ODC Dance Commons in San Francisco.
“Just one class?” she was asking cheerfully from her position at the front desk. “You save if you buy more.”
A seven-hour shift checking people in and taking their money for dance classes pays minimum wage, and Hansel is glad to have it. Her wage for rehearsing and performing with a small dance company is usually less than that. Either way, it is all part-time work and Hansel, 23, logs 55 to 65 hours a week.
“She is one of those driven and tireless freelance dancers who you see everywhere,” says Mona Baroudi,
longtime dance publicist.
Upon request, Hansel tallies the San Francisco companies she either dances or does choreography for. Because she is on a work computer at ODC, she counts on her fingers, and it takes all 10. Then she tallies up the dance companies she does administrative work for, and it takes fewer fingers.
Her system works because dance studios, like yoga studios, are open day and night and weekends. If you are flexible, you can always pick up an extra shift, like on Christmas Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which was the day Hansel let a reporter lurk around the desk while she did her job, still hacking from a bad cough she took with her on the Friday flight to New York and brought back Sunday.
“I do make sure I only dance six out of seven days. It’s good to give your body a rest,” she says.
“She was 15 and living in the Tenderloin. She has no fear that I’m aware of.” Cindy Hansel on daughter Emily Hansel
But she’ll do admin work seven days a week, at studios all over town and even at home where she does freelance admin work. She also mans the box office and works as a house manager at ODC, wearing a headset.
“As a kid I was always super-organized,” she says. So organized, that when her mother, Cindy Hansel calls on a family matter, she is referred to a shared Google calendar that contains her daughter’s schedule. Only when she is booked for two places at once will she start marking it red. This is her “Warning. Overbooked” signal, and she’ll text around to reluctantly find subs for some work shifts. This usually happens after 10:30 at night, after she’s locked up at ODC.
“I love not knowing what I am doing the next day until I check my calendar before I go to bed,” she says. The only fixed date is class, which is actually an hour-and-a-half workout. That’s at 10 a.m. daily. Only rehearsal overrules it.
Hansel lives two blocks from her most consistent employer, ODC, in a five-bedroom rental split six ways. Her story is similar to that of Mia Dolan in the movie “La La Land,” only Hansel comes from a lot farther away, Rochester, Minn., where her father, Bruce Hansel, is a software engineer for IBM.
Growing up, Hansel always had too much energy. After-school tap-dancing class was a good place to burn it. On a lark, she tried out for a community dance production of “Annie,” landing a role as a dancer in the chorus. From then on it was dance only, which ended her other promising career, playing second base on a fast-pitch
softball team.
Her public high school, Mayo (named for the famed clinic), did not have a dance program, so after her freshman year, Hansel tracked down a summer program with the American Ballet Theatre in Alabama. From there it was successive sophomore and junior summers at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet.
“She was 15 and living in the Tenderloin,” her mother says. “She has no fear that I’m aware of.”
By her senior year, Hansel had a 4.0 grade-point average and near-perfect test scores and was in student government and drum major for the Mayo Marching Band. She could have gone anywhere for college, so she chose the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“With my husband and I both being engineers, you can imagine what we thought when she said, ‘I want to go to school for dance,’ ” her mother says.
But she cobbled together scholarships in the same way she later cobbled together a living. She took her bachelor of fine arts in dance performance with honors in just three years and flew to San Francisco to live in a room she arranged through Facebook.
“I didn’t know it could be done,” Emily Hansel says.
She had no job, and she had no leads on dance opportunities. But she had enthusiasm, and this is where her story diverges from that of Mia in “La La Land.” It did not take Hansel six years to catch a break, the way it took Mia. It took her six months.
She was one of 20 to endure a three-day audition for one season-long position with the Anata Project, a contemporary company in San Francisco. She still has the email from Jan. 20, 2017, that said she’d gotten the job, as one of five company members. She was only 21 and had a nine-month contract, split into spring and fall programs.
“She is incredibly enthusiastic and very technical and present,” says company founder Claudia Anata Hubiak. “She’s willing to experiment and collaborate.”
In April, she performed 11 times, a good month. In May, she had a small part in “Falls like Rain,” put on by Marika Brussel at ODC, and she’ll have a larger part in a trio that Brussel is taking to New York in August.
She’ll audition or do fill-in teaching, with five minutes’ notice. “I carry my dance shoes at all times,” she says, “because you never know.” Sure enough, 10 minutes into her shift at the front desk of ODC, Carlos Venturo Ventura, head of the dance school, comes by to ask if she can take a kids’ class. Hansel has auditioned to dance for ODC but not been hired. Still, because she clerks there, she does get free classes and a discount time. Her greatest advantage is that she is still young enough to be on her parents’ health insurance.
“That’s a big part of why this works,” she says.
Another big part is that she and her boyfriend, Mike Fix, go halfsies on their rent in the group apartment. Hansel doesn’t have a car. If she cannot get there by Razor, she walks. If she can’t walk, she takes Muni, even to a performance. Lyft and Uber are not on her budget.
Her roommates alone can fill a house she dances in. Add her brother, Peter, a rising sophomore at Stanford, and she can deliver a crowd of 20. Her parents are always willing to fly out, “but she gets mad if we spend too much money on her,” says her mom. “She is very cost-conscious and efficient. She likes to shop at Goodwill.”
Hansel knows the freelance dance life is precarious. The small companies don’t pay any more than they have to. The best she’s done is $20 an hour, for rehearsal time, plus a small bonus for performance time.
Her negotiating stance when offered a role is “yes, please. Awesome. You want me?” she says, which limits her bargaining power.
There is always somebody younger coming up behind. One bad injury and it could be over. But she made it home to Rochester in time for a Christmas Eve party. When people asked her what she was doing, she was able to answer truthfully and without grandiosity, “I am a dancer in San Francisco.’ It was cool being able to say that.”