profile: clara eaton

Fourth-year Performance Dance student Clara Eaton started dancing at the age of two. Not long after, she was taking dance classes and practicing at the studio six days a week. Eaton wasn't a natural-born dancer – she remembers wondering at the age of seven why everyone but her was winning awards. Fast forward to today, and Eaton's numerous trophies and medals sit in the front window of her mother's house in Brantford, Ont.

Eaton took on the role of a choreographer at the Academy of Dance in Brantford during the gap year she took before starting university. Having grown up at the studio, shifting gears from student to choreographer was almost second nature to Eaton. During her first year teaching, she was responsible for choreographing 11 solo acts, a couple of duets and trios and a junior group of 12 dancers, which she admits was challenging.

Eaton took a break from competing and teaching full-time when she moved to Toronto for her first year at Ryerson but stayed true to her passion of competitive dance by joining Ryerson Dance Pak in 2013. As Ryerson's official competitive dance team, the student group led her to her current gig as a teacher at Turning Point Academy in Toronto, a dance studio quite larger than the Brantford studio ― which she still continues to teach drop-in classes at. Eaton is one of 35 teachers at the academy, which teaches thousands of youth. "I started teaching the recreational kids in my second year and I've stayed there ever since, and now I'm teaching the competition kids and choreographing their competitive numbers from groups to solos," she says.

For Eaton, working with young dancers is fun. At Turning Point Academy she worked with youth between the ages of five and seventeen. She has also had opportunities to teach kids at Dance Masters of America conventions in the U.S. Eaton teaches young dancers aged six to ten: ballet, tap and jazz classes in a three hour session, which is usually followed up with a fun combination dance to a popular song by an artist like Meghan Trainor.

Her rigorous schedule at Ryerson has limited the amount of time she can dedicate to teaching. Her weekly five day routine stretches from sunrise to sunset, beginning with two or three dance classes, followed by academic classes like anatomy, production or singing in the evening, and dance rehearsal in upper years for up to two hours. "Usually we finish at ten p.m. each night and then we get up and do it all over again," she says.

Oct. 7, 2016, was the day many Ryerson students were celebrating the beginning of fall reading week, but the same can't be said for fourth-year performance dance students. It was their final night at 44 Gerrard St., Ryerson's theatre building, before Ryerson's School of Performance would relocate to the basement of the Student Learning Centre. Eaton recalls laying on the floor of the building's dance studio alongside her peers, talking about their toughest days at school and the days they hadn't wanted to step foot into the building. But frankly that night, not one of them wanted to leave.

The 22-year-old is a big fan of collaborations and she says she's gotten to know students in different disciplines because of Ryerson's tight-knit community. "I've done a lot of solo video collaborations with a few different film students. I've done dance photography and headshots with photography students and I've collaborated with business students making my business cards," she explains.

In October of last year, Eaton worked on the short dance film "Let It All Go," in collaboration with her friend Luke Villemaire, a film student at Ryerson whom she met through the Ryerson housing department where she's been working for the past three years. The two minute film begins as Eaton enters an empty dance studio and lays on the floor before bolting upright after Birdy sings the line, "I've been sleepless at night,"  from the song "Let It All Go" by her and Rhodes. What follows are a series of movements, slower when the melody demands and quicker when the chorus arrives, that capture the mood and vulnerability of the song. Directed by Villemaire and choreographed and performed by Eaton, the project was put together in a few hours because of the immediate resources available at Ryerson.

Working together also let the two teach each other a few things about their specialities. "I learn a lot about how to be in front of a camera, what works, what doesn't and how to edit together because what looks good to him from a film point of view might not look good in my eyes from a dance point of view," Eaton says.

When Eaton had to direct and choreograph her first film for a film class last year, she felt more confident with the medium, having worked with directors like Villemaire in the past. In her film titled, "UNTOUCHED," a young woman dances in a busy public space. Eaton wanted to explore the idea of doing something that is socially acceptable in one place and not in another. "I wanted to see what would happen if we took something that was totally normal to us that we see every single day and we put it in a place where it wouldn't necessarily be on a regular basis," she says.

Some people in the film don't acknowledge the dancing, while others drop their belongings and watch the performance. When asked, the dancer said she felt more comfortable dancing in public where there is no judgement unlike in a studio where expectations are imposed on dancers.

Eaton recently shot a music video with Toronto rock band Uforia for the song Wake Me, in which she plays a girl haunted by a demon in her dreams. The scenes in the video cut back and forth from Eaton alone to Eaton with the torturing demon. The video itself isn't a dance video, Eaton says, rather it's movements inspired by emotion. "There was no memorizing of steps involved, it was more like let's just show up and do it."

Channeling abstract movements wasn't new ground for Eaton; she has trained at Ryerson with creative movement and creative process classes. "It's not necessarily choreography or steps we're learning. It's, say, how your body would naturally react if your body was shocked," she says.

During the summer of 2016, Eaton went to New York City with Seventeen Magazine where hearing trend forecasters talk about a new wave of gender-neutral fashion inspired her final fourth-year project. The project's title, "XX(XY)" derives from the male and female chromosomes. "It's about being gender-neutral and kind of un-gendering yourself to go with what your true identity is," she says.

For the project, Eaton will put on a ten minute dance show for the annual New Voices Festival, a festival showcasing new works by graduating students within the Ryerson Theatre School, at the Ryerson Theatre in the beginning of April. She will be producing original choreography and organizing everything from lighting to stage management and photography. Eaton's enlisted fourth-year fashion design student Laura Hosenberger to design an entire gender-neutral collection for the performance. Through the show she hopes to explore the meaning of dancing as a girl and dancing as a guy, and ultimately how that defines movement quality.

During the same trip to New York, her new insight into apparel consumption encouraged Eaton to apply to be a brand ambassador for Balance Lifestyle & Co., a non-profit organization with an ethical apparel line. Eaton is now a brand ambassador for two brands, the other being Dancewear Centre, a dance apparel and shoe company which she has also on occasion modelled for.

Eaton is no stranger to posing in front of a camera. She has done athletic, dance and portrait shoots with Sony, Portraits NYC and multiple freelance photographers in New York. "In New York it's kind of similar to what we do at Ryerson: you get the pictures for yourself and they get it for their portfolio so everyone wins," she says.

Last summer, Eaton got a chance to shoot with Kevin Richardson, a photographer based in New York City and creator of the soon-to-be published photography project Dance As Art. At her shoot, Eaton had a chance to connect with inspiring dancers including, a girl who was both a bodybuilder and dancer and a ballerina from Toronto who eventually moved to Hungary to work for the Hungarian National Ballet Company.

When Eaton hears people say that a dance degree is limiting career-wise, she isn't worried. "I have a million options....I can tour the world, I can dance on a cruise ship, I can be on Broadway."