Searching For Each Other

Interview with Caroline Sharkey

“It’s cool if I eat, right?” Caroline munches on their lunch, “I’ve got to run to another meeting right after this.” 

After making them jump, swing, and frolic around an old dusty warehouse for an hour while I tried to capture their lightning energy on camera… it’s the least I could do.

Caroline is young. Exceptionally so, if you consider that fact that they have numerous renown performances under their belt, are already an Associate Director at Control Group Productions, (a 15-year old Denver performance company) and has already made giant steps towards realizing their dream of transforming Denver into a dance hub.

Undergrowth is the manifestation of that ambition, a “townhall series and resource center for Denver dancers”. Perhaps best known, to dancers like me, as the organization that created a series of affordable professional-level contemporary dance classes. For such a robust city, such classes are shockingly scarce and difficult to come by, leaving most dancers with a choice between an all-level weekend classes alongside hobbyists… or forgo training altogether.

“It’s hard to be an Artist here” Caroline confessed at one point in our interview. 

“Do you think its harder to be an artist in Denver than in other cities?” I asked.

“For me… yes,” They nervously giggle, “Mainly because my favorite thing about dancing is, honestly, training. And doing crazy training. I LOVE to be super physically challenged and pushed. There’s not much of that here, so that’s something that I crave and miss all the time.”

Caroline arrived in Denver at the same time, and for the same reason, as many professional contemporary dancers. The pandemic and subsequent shutdown of performance venues and in-person classes meant that there was no reason for many dancers to stay in expensive cities like New York, Los Angelos and Chicago. Whether because of family or better living conditions, many fled to places like Denver. 

 “It kinda felt like all these really talented folks showed up at the same time, but we were searching in the dark for each other… It felt nice to gather all that energy together and gather all these people who were excited to dance with each other… together. I just want more of that. I think that thats what like fuels me and excites me.”

That was the impulse that gave birth to Undergrowth. 

“I wanted to meet people and see what they were thinking. I started reaching out to a ton of folks and hearing what they needed in the dance scene, what was going on, what their issues were, what they were super proud about [etc…].”

Inspired by, “other platforms and other people such as like ‘Whistle while you work’ and ‘I have a lot of friends’ Caroline, as a dance contractor, wanted to create a platform that would help other dance contractors fight for higher pay, better work conditions and generally outrageous requests. 

How many of us dancers have shown up to an audition and had an experience like theirs where the producers turn to you and say, “We want you to be in this music video as part of your audition… and we're not going to pay you.”

Caroline’s answer? “We need to ask for better”.

“So I got some money from the COVID Relief Grant in 2021. I reached out to Leah Woods, Vivian Kim and C.C. Jones, and we planned a townhall series together.

The goal of these townhalls meetings was to, “remind each other that we're not alone” and begin to condense down (1) “what do we need to work on?” (2) “How do we fix these problems as a group?” And (3) “what next?”

The townhalls occurred during the summer of 2022. Throughout the Fall Caroline organized a weekly series of contemporary classes with a rotation of teachers from the Denver dance community. By the time I interviewed them in January 2023, though, things were starting to slow down.

Caroline began bumping into the problem so many people trying to create something new have… fear of the unfamiliar. People gravitate towards things that are familiar, and are scared to try something new. 

“The reason that its called Undergrowth is because I want it to represent the people who aren’t dancing for Cleo’s or for Boulder Ballet or even Hannah Kahn. The people who are making their own sh*t. The stuff that, when you turn over a rotten log there’s a whole colony of life. That was where the name came from. I really wanted to serve those people. So I want to keep on giving those people a platform, not just the names that people know.”

Unfortunately what Caroline found was that prominent names brought people to class, and as they started bringing in lesser and lesser known dancers to teach, “People stopped showing up”. 

“I think a lot of the momentum has been lost honestly because I was burnt out. I got super burnt out.”

Caroline has taken some time away to recoup and rethink. Not just the when and how of classes, but the role and goal of Undergrowth, “We're mostly spending our time surviving,” Caroline pointed out, “So [contributing to Undergrowth] in as big or small a dose as you can is what I think is needed in order to continue on and actually make change.” 

To that end they, “decided to make it like a volunteer organization, or board, for the Denver dance scene.” With different committees tackling specific tasks like finding space, creating resource lists, and building an audience, “this is the point we're at now. I have no idea if it's going to succeed or not,  but it’s worth a shot.”

Some of of the major strengths of a place like New York or Chicago, are the community organizations that have helped unify and support individual artists. They help artists find each other and collaborate together, create places to post and find work, class, space and see what other people are creating. These online resources are the backbone of major artistic communities, but as Caroline’s experience has shown — it is a complicated and exhausting endeavor to undertake. 

But, as they pointed out, if we ever want to make Denver a hub for dance, its the kind of work we have to do. And, “if we can be a blueprint,” for other small cities to do the same, “how sick would that be?”