Ashley got to dance biography sample
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Zimbabwe and South Africa
The 2nd part of my picture chronicle
The story one hears so often from expatriates, “I only intended to stay for a few months” applied to me. I ended up working in Africa for ten years. Merle Park suggested I went to run the ballet company in what was then Rhodesia. All I knew about that country was that they had produced some excellent dancers (Merle and Desmond Kelly among them) and that there was some kind of civil war going on. This meant that there were few male dancers available, so I started to devise as many all-female ballets that I could – and I swotted up on Les Sylphides.
A farewell card from my Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet colleagues.
I reckoned I would have to make a dancing come-back (aged 34, I had looked forward to resting my tortured body. No such luck!) It was one of the busiest times of my life. We even managed to put on a full length Cinderella. Canvas was unobtainable, so much of the set was hangings
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Ashley Whitehead (they/them) is an interdisciplinary creator and performer of contemporary dance, clown, and music. Their work includes character development, singing, physical specificity, and humour. Looking for their deepest of delights and struggles, they turn to performing as a way to process their inner world and connect with others, and to intertwine their social and political values. Ashley is also a certified sexual health educator through the Options for Sexual Health Certification program.
Ashley is a third generation European-Canadian, who has the privilege of living, working, and playing on the traditional, unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil- Waututh), and xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations, also known as Vancouver, BC.
Biography:
Within their years of gymnastics, jazz, hip hop, contemporary dance, acting, swing dance, clown training, voice, piano, and song
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"Stern but always kind, strict but generous, wise ...a bit like God"
~ Sandy Denny.
ashley's own biography
- I am born on 26th of January, 1945, in north London.
- Linda Hagger sits on my lap in the playground at infants school. I decide that I like girls.
- I become obsessed with acting out the American civil war with plastic toy soldiers in the rockery of our garden.
- I attend my first professional football match at White Hart Lane. It is Spurs versus Cardiff City.
I am hooked and become a lifelong fan...of Cardiff (just joking !). - I save up my paper round money and go to Krantz in Shaftesbury Avenue to buy an imported button-down collar shirt.
I am the only person in north London with one. - I leave school at the earliest opportunity with next to no qualifications and amazingly get a job right away as a trainee journalist.
- American banjo player Derroll Adams becomes a hero. He has an earring in his left ear.
One hot Summer's day in 1967 my American gi