Aspiring artists of all types, listen up!  Everyone may be telling you to have a Plan B, your Plan B doesn’t have to mean giving up what you’re passionate about  – what we used to call “selling out” back in the ’60s.  If you’re a savvy artsy type (NOT an oxymoron) like Greenbelt’s Angella Foster, a career in dance can mean not just dancing but also teaching and a Plan C – choreographing, producing, and managing a whole company.  She did that by making sure she acquired some essential complementary skills along the way, like grant-writing and costume-making (Angella’s actually worked as a professional costumer), and by working in arts administration – for Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham dance companies in New York.

The career Angella has devised for herself is more than full-time: teaching dance at U.Md and Towson State, directing Greenbelt’s dance studio and teaching classes there, plus directing and performing with the Greenbelt-based alight dance theater.   That adds up to 60-70 hour weeks – too much – so she’s decided to stop teaching college, starting now.

The Road to Greenbelt
Angella came to Greenbelt by way of – well, she says it’s a long story but after growing up in Kentucky she ended up studying at the University of Maryland and working as a grad assistant at its Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, doing “community engagement.”   One of their events was a showing of the 1939 documentary “The City” paired with an event here in Greenbelt, and she “just fell in love with the place.”  For its small-town feeling, without being small-town isolated.  For its arts program and its community involvement.  Also because it’s close to campus (she was still in school) and affordable.  She and husband Ben live in GHI.

To learn more about Angella and her equally interesting husband Ben (also a Kentuckian), check out their bios.  Ben’s a geographer and works for the National Geospacial Intelligence Agency, specifically for their Board of Foreign Names.  Who knew there was such a thing?

alight dance theater

I’ve seen alight dance theater perform twice now and am a big fan, so I asked Angella how it all works.  The performers all have day jobs and rehearse and perform with alight with no pay, just for the love of dance.  To accommodate the dancers’ full lives, there are no rehearsals on Sunday, or during August.  And while the organization is run in a business-like way, with dancers required to sign contracts guaranteeing at least six hours a week of their time, Angella says they’re very supportive of each other- a community within the community of Greenbelt.

This Summer- Hometown Heroes

The company’s latest work Hometown Heroes illustrates the lives of the women of Greenbelt in its first years, and will be repeated July 15 and 22 in and around the Greenbelt Museum.  (Here‘s a terrific photo story about a recent performance.) Two other parts of the project include a one-day installation at the Greenbelt Community Center on Sunday, August 5, 1-3 p.m. and an on-line short film to be posted on YouTube.

Here’s a video Angella created to raise money for the project.  I love that she’s showing off the original kitchen sink in her own frame home.