Kids & Career
Jacinthe Pauze, mother of a 12-year-old boy named Gaël and a 9-year-old girl named Saskya, and Loic Noisette, father to two-year-old Liam, both spend their evenings dancing in "A New Day," the Celine Dion show at Caesars Palace Colosseum in Las Vegas. Their days are spent using up relinquished sleep time to play with and tend to their children. Neither of them would have it any other way.
Before her first child came along, Jacinthe was a professional ballet dancer in Montreal, Canada. She said, "I just stopped dancing just when I realized I was pregnant. So I stopped dancing for five years to take care of the children and after that I started back."
"It was really, really hard. Really, really hard." But she was determined and never even entertained the possibility of opting for career over kids. "Ah no. Ah no. They're amazing children. It's amazing what they give you...They're sponges. They're questioning. They're giving so much joy."
Then about a year into her return to dance, along came auditions for "A New Day." "I did the audition and happened to work it out finally and realized that we have to move all the family here. The kids didn't speak English; I didn't speak English. So it was really hard."
If the language problem was hard, however, her yearlong separation from her family was worse. There was an arduous six months of rehearsals in Belgium, followed by another six months of staging in Las Vegas. Jacinthe stayed in touch through daily phone calls but admits that the calls didn't completely assuage her longing and her need to be involved in daily activities. "I missed telling story at night. I love to put them into bed and telling those story. I always have to make up something. I ask them to give me a subject and then I just go on with the story." Small moments perhaps, but they yield lifelong memories.
After the year's separation, the family was reunited in Las Vegas but the adjustments weren't over. Now they had to work out the difficulties of conflicting work schedules and the children's daytime school routines. "We have each our nights...Monday and Tuesday is my day because I have my day off and I want to be a part of their life, so I wake up Monday and Tuesday early and do all my mom duties. And it's amazing. I just love it."
And so does Loic Noisette, a native of France. He eagerly trades off early mornings with his wife, Julie, and is enthusiastic about balancing a career and a family. He said, "...Everybody used to say 'It changes your life.' I don't think that way. I think it changes yourself first, you see what I mean." What he means is that when people tell him, "It changes your life," they generally mean he'll be forced to give up things he enjoys. He has found the opposite: he's gained something he loves immeasurably.
"From my experience, but also other people, I really, really recommend to do it before the end of your career because going back on stage after is not the same. You are changed inside and you're not the same dancer after...because it affects deeply your personality. So it obviously affects your way of being an interpreter, or actor, or a dancer. You have other weapons."
Those weapons are visceral. The body no longer dances to simple counts of eight or adjectives like "fast" or "slow." It dances to enhanced senses - to taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight. A tap riff, once merely a counted combination, is suddenly salty enough to taste; a jazz turn is fresh and sparkling, lemon-scented; a single violin lifts a tour en l'air higher off the ground than ever before; a battement is crushed velvet. Movement becomes violets and crimsons and emerald greens.
Loic added, "Having your child coming to see you onstage? After his birth, it's the most emotional day of my life. It's a show I'm going to remember. When your child comes and sees you, it's beyond comprehension. You don't think. You are. I felt all my body relating to just two eyes. And you're scared. What's he going to think? Is it going to affect his way to see me?"
"I think if you have babies or children because you want it, the rest of your life is going to adjust around it. If you really focus on that, you're going to be happy. Don't try to figure it out. Just do it." For Jacinthe and Loic, kids and career have turned out to be a good mix - a honeysuckle sweet, hint of rain, sky blue, rose petal soft, string quartet.