Work Smart
Marcia Urani is the Line Captain for "We Will Rock You," the musical by Queen at Paris Las Vegas. She's been the Associate Choreographer for "Saturday Night Fever," has performed on Broadway in "Grease!," "Saturday Night Fever" and "West Side Story" and in EFX, starring Michael Crawford, David Cassidy and Tommy Tune. She is an outspoken, well-spoken advocate for the benefits of education and believes that with today's fiercely competitive market, a dancer needs to work smart to be successful.
Marcia's dance training started in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "Our dance studio not only taught ballet, tap, jazz, gymnastics, acrobatics, but we also had a musical theatre program at our school. So in the course of the recital, we would do a piece from a musical, be it the newest musical that year, a revival, whatever...And we sang and danced and we always had little interludes for the songs that constituted dialogue, so not only did people have to get up and dance at the recital, but it was an opportunity for kids to sing, say lines, to not be afraid to speak in front of people."
"That's the importance of getting a good discipline and a good structure for a student, and it also teaches them that you just can't do everything you want to do. You have to grow in a progression to make you well rounded. So we all had to take ballet first and then once you had a few years of ballet, you were either allowed to add your tap or your jazz and you had to continue with your ballet. And in order to take our musical theatre class, you had to be in the jazz technique class, the ballet class and whether you wanted to take another class, that was fine but you had to be registered for those two."
"Some studios really gear themselves to dance competitions - tricksters doing three minutes of one routine with no other style...My dance teacher didn't really care that much about the dance competitions, but she cared about the fact that we could speak, that we could sing, that we could dance and we were versatile because she knew that in order for us to be marketable, that's what we needed...And we weren't allowed to take certain things until we had mastered ballet in the beginning, where in some studios kids get a solo when they're four years old. There's no way. And they're dancing to songs like 'I Don't Know How to Love Him.' She's four."
From those early studio days, Marcia went on to Point Park University in Pennsylvania where she graduated with a Dance and Business Management degree. Why, though, did she think college would give her anything she didn't already have? "Because there's something that you learn in college, not just about dancing and style, but there's something that you learn about yourself. You learn that there are 500 people out there that do exactly what you do and are as good, as tall, as short, as pretty, as nice and they have all the same aspects and the same talent that you do. And they're going to be out there with you, vying for that same job. So you have to learn how to make yourself marketable."
Without that, a dancer might, or might not, survive the in-between times or the injuries. "At eighteen, they might get lucky enough to get the Radio City Christmas show and then not have to work for a few months after that. And then they're bartending because they don't know what else they can do. And then they get stuck in that route because they are making a lot of money. But is that what you went to New York for? So you need to find other skills you can market yourself as."
"If you know that you want to be in a ballet company, just because of the way that companies have gone thus far, is that if you don't know at fourteen that you have the feet and the legs and the body type to take you into that company, you better start taking some jazz or tap, because at fourteen they're taking company class at Pittsburgh Ballet...So those students who know that they want to be in a ballet company? At eighteen, they're in it. Then their college can come after that, because their life span is even shorter...At least we can sing a little bit but there, they have to strap those shoes on no matter what."
"To each his own and definitely people are brought up and given different skills and with those skills, they just have to think that the goals that they choose should match the field that they have." Work hard, yes, but more than that, work smart.