We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Faustine Lavie a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Faustine, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
I like to feed my own creativity with various forms of art. As a professional contemporary dancer and choreographer, I of course go to see performances as often as possible and get inspired by other people’s work, but I also love going to see other forms of live performances such as musicals, concerts, plays, etc. I also go to the museum a lot. Finally, I think you can feed your creativity from anything that surrounds you but most importantly I use my own experiences as a human to create art, whether it’s a positive experience, some rough times and challenges, or news that I relate to.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m a French professional contemporary dancer based in New York City, NY. I dance for many dance companies there, such as The DynamitExperience, iKADA Contemporary Dance Company, Six Degrees Dance and sarAika Movement Collective. We perform a lot in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, but also in other cities in the US. In parallel, I also have my own company called Faustine Lavie Dance Project. I started it right after the pandemic, and my dancers performed my works many times already in NYC and Philadelphia. With that project, I just got accepted as Artist In Residence with University Settlement in Lower East Side, I’m extremely excited to have this opportunity to develop a new piece. My work usually is about events happening in the world or my personal experiences about something that many other people experience daily. This new piece is going to be about immigrant experiences in NY, the positive things and also struggles that they go through when they arrive in a new country and how they felt when they were trying to get integrated. As an immigrant myself, it is a subject I wanted to approach in a dance piece for a long time.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
My qualities are definitely my work ethic, resilience and curiosity. I started dance when I was 3, and mostly did ballet for about 15 years. The toughness of the ballet world definitely taught be how to be resilient and survive difficult experiences. Ballet also taught me my work ethic I think. It’s very difficult to succeed in this world and it is only by working everyday despite fatigue and mental exhaustion that you can make it through. My parents also taught me discipline, they were very supportive but also expected a lot from me from a young ages because of all the sacrifices they were doing to pursue my dream. I myself had to learn to sacrifice some little pleasures to focus on my dancing. Finally, I am a very curious person so now that I live in NY, I also do other styles of dances such as ballroom styles and Latin styles. I think it’s great that I get interested in so many different art forms because it makes me grow as an artist and develop my creativity in different ways. I would tell people that just started a new project or have dreams they want to pursue to never stop working on it, never give up and always be open to new experiences and ideas.
Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?
Definitely my parents and my grandma. They are all very big on discipline and work ethic. At school, I always had to have the best grades and the best behavior otherwise I would get in a lot of trouble. Because of that, I was always the best student in my class. That helped me a lot during my dance education. But despite being hard on me, they were always very supportive, always bringing me to every dance competition, performances or intensives when I was a kid. Always there for me when I was going through difficult times but also always pushing me to keep going. I will never be able to thank them enough, I am who I am because of them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.faustinelavie.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/faustinelavie/
Image Credits
Paul DuBois BeccaVision Deto Ahn
