Dancers, Dreaming, and Original Joe’s
Maddie Joseph performing at the Star Talent Dance Competition.
Image via: Star Talent Nanaimo (tmmdance.com)
03.14.25| Vol. 56, No. 6 | Article
You’re having the most awkward dinner of your life.
It’s your first year on the VIU Dance Team, but it’s not called that yet. The team is still referred to as VIU Mariners Spirit.
You’re sitting in Original Joe’s across from your three coaches. You’re seated next to another team member who, like you, has been invited to ‘chat’. The air is permeated with a ‘will-they-won’t-they’ sense of mystery.
You’re anticipating something big, but you don’t know when and you don’t know what. They keep asking about how everybody’s day is going. Small talk. All five of you know that this isn’t a random dinner, though. Just get to the point, you think.
~
Maddie Joseph has been dancing since she was two years old. At 15, she received The North Island Festival of Performing Arts’ Helix Dance Award, a scholarship to the Triple Heat Summer Dance Intensive, and her first Diamond placement for a solo, plus she was chosen as an alternate for Provincials. In her senior year of high school, she received several scholarships from competitions. Even the dance world was encouraging her to attend university.
Every dancer knows that their career will be short-lived—if they end up having a dance career in the first place.
With a birthday in December, Maddie entered grade 12 at 16. She, along with the rest of her class, was encouraged to find direction. What do you want to do with your life? It’s not-so-subtly communicated that by the time you reach high school graduation, you should know which path you’re taking.
Many dancers retire their bodysuits and tights the same day they don their cap and gown. It’s an expensive hobby to maintain. Frivolous, even. Without the support of studios or the financial funding of their parents, dancers begin other pursuits.
No sensible high school guidance counselor would advise their students to run head-first into a profession known for its instability. Not unless the student had the ambition driven dreams you see in movies, the unchanging and persistent kind that goes unchallenged.
But when you’re pursuing something like dance, you’re told by everyone around you that it’s temporary. It won’t last. It probably won’t even happen in “the real world”.
Seeing no realistic options to continue doing what she loved, Maddie moved on.
Over the summer after graduation, a shadow had been cast over her childhood. Grief for what had been and wouldn’t be again. Upon her arrival at Vancouver Island University, Maddie found something that wasn’t advertised on the website: a dance team.
Ten years ago, when she was 10 years old, Maddie performed the Nutcracker for the first time. She would go on to play ten of the named roles, including Harlequin, Russian, and Marzipan. That first year, she started as a party guest, switching between Snowflake and Flower. It was a joint production between two different studios, and she was new to both of them. It was an exciting time of new beginnings despite the frightful auditorium filled with strangers.
Auditions for the VIU Dance Team held the same nervous feeling. They took place in the gymnasium with team executives placed around the room, ready to help. Smiling faces, “Mariners Spirit” emblazoned on their chests.
Kind, sure. But they felt like security cameras.
There must have been 50 students in that room. It was overwhelming. It made you feel small, like you couldn’t possibly matter. You were exposed by a harsher, more unforgiving light than the stage. When you’re on the stage as a child, you’re mostly performing for peoples’ parents. You want to impress your teachers, but by that point in the year, you already know if you’ve succeeded or failed in that regard.
In an audition room, every peer is both your potential friend and your immediate rival. You want them to succeed but you also want to supersede them in equal measure. That’s the natural biome of a dancer. Tightly-knit communities made up of sharp-fanged girls.
~
Let’s get to the point. You’re in Original Joe’s, remember? Winter is falling away to spring. You’ve spent $15 on a poutine. You wish you knew what was going on.
Well, after an excruciating wait, you’re given an offer. You don’t have to answer right now… but do you want to be a coach?
Yes.
The answer formed immediately but came officially three weeks later. The idea had already been planted in Maddie’s head by one of the coaches two months before. Subtle hints like getting her to lead warm-ups, give feedback for dances, or telling her they wanted her as an assistant coach the following year. She knew it was a possibility and had been anticipating this question ever since.
The other teammate had a different answer. She adores the community and was awarded the Most Valuable Teammate award in 2023. As a dedicated member of the team, she knew all about the hard work the coaches put in. Being a member of the VIU Dance Team while juggling full-time studies was commitment enough. Being a coach? Yeesh.
They sent their texts together and the coaches received one acceptance.
Maddie received another offer that she quickly accepted as well. After teaching a week-long summer camp with Harbour Dance Studios, she began regularly teaching for them in September—at the same time she started coaching the VIU Dance Team.
For Harbour Dance Studios, Maddie spends four hours minding the store attached to the studio and six hours of admin work per week. With 11 one-hour classes spread over seven days, most of her time is dedicated to teaching or subbing for other teachers.
Basically, she works a lot. Even without being a coach.
When she’s not working, she’s preparing for work.
As grueling as the hours might be, she’s where she wants to be and doing what she wants to do. It’s difficult to complain about something you’re doing when you want it so much.
Anyone who wants to go into a creative career is going to be discouraged from it. It’s unrealistic. If you’ve spent your life dreaming of being a professional dancer, you’ve also spent your life doubting yourself.
Sometimes it takes a push. If a ‘push’ is a respected teacher telling you that you’ve got it, Maddie was getting hit by a truck. Her coaches, teammates, and friends kept bringing her back to this terrifying, ridiculous notion:
Be a coach. Be a teacher. Follow your dreams.
There was only one thing to do. Go for it.
No one on the team is paid to be there. Last year, Maddie was a full-time university student. This year, her life is dedicated to dance. Coaching the VIU Dance Team. Teaching at Harbour Dance Studios. She’s chasing what she actually wants in life instead of sinking thousands of dollars into a potential career that she doesn’t want.
The difference in workload is about the same, she says, but doing this means she’s enjoying herself more. The VIU Dance Team has three two-hour dance practices scheduled every week, plus a couple of events each month that the team attends. Residence move-in. Frosh. Hockey games.
VIU’s Dance Team in the Studio
Coach meetings can last whole days. This year, there’s two coaches and two assistant coaches to help lead the team. They decide which competitions the team will attend and which dances they’ll perform.
The expense of putting a group dance into competition climbs with the number of dancers involved in the piece. Mainly the expenses of travel and figuring out how everyone will get there. If the competition is on the mainland, there’s potential accommodations that will need to be booked. That means finding a hotel or Airbnb that can fit over 20 team members for the duration of the competition. Some dance competitions span four days.
For Maddie, teaching at Harbour Dance Studios and coaching the VIU Dance Team are very different, varying in levels of stress due to the annual requirements. With Harbour, each of her classes has the specific goal of learning one group dance per year and meeting once a week. With the VIU Dance Team, seven distinct dances are taught over three sessions per week.
That leaves you with barely enough time to go from sweatpants and bedhead in the studio to costumed and confident on the stage.
The most valuable quality in a coach isn’t the ability to dance or to book a hotel. It’s the ability to forge a community. The VIU Dance Team has undergone a lot of changes, and not only in name. When Maddie joined, it was a pseudo-cheer team that was getting cyberbullied on Instagram. Mostly for existing.
It wasn’t just Maddie who wanted something different.
The team came together to build something more positive than the previous years. “Anyone can do the job,” Maddie says.
She enjoys the administrative parts of being a coach: sending emails, signing up for dance competitions, organizing rides for trips to Vancouver. But opening your laptop isn’t a special talent. To be a coach is more than just getting the team from point a to point b; it’s about curating a space where people want to be in the room.
That only happens with someone who’s easy to work with.
Most of the dancers in studios are kids looking up to seasoned teachers. On the VIU Dance Team, it’s a bunch of university students looking to their four coaches, all under the age of 25. That’s the hardest part of the role to navigate. Not the long hours or the lack of pay, but the line between friend and coach.
Maddie and the other coaches make the decisions, but not every teammate will agree with each choice. When tensions get high, especially during competition season, every move can start looking like a personal slight. It never is. “I’m also on this team,” Maddie says with a shrug. Decisions are always made with the team’s best interests in mind, even if it’s not the most pleasant one.
In previous years, to avoid class schedule conflicts, practices started late in the evening. This year, they’re at quarter past six in the morning.
Early. Nearly intolerable.
But it is tolerable, thanks to the people on the team and the coaches. You’re in that room because you want to be. It’s supposed to be fun. The four team-bonding events that are spread out across the school year are a reminder of that. Previously, they’ve been graciously hosted by whoever on the team has the biggest house. More recently, VRCORE has been kind enough to lend their space to the team to play VR, watch movies, or squish in around tables and paint flowers.
Maddie dances onstage with the VIU Dance Team, which is a privilege that she doesn’t have with Harbour as a teacher.
At competitions, categories are decided first by style (tap, jazz, ballet, modern, contemporary), then by the number of dancers (large group, small group, duet/trio, solo), and lastly by the average age of the group.
If a dance teacher were to join a younger crew, it would push the dancers into a higher age category than they would naturally perform in.
“
A teacher’s role is to find each dancer’s strengths and refine them, hone skills that still require sharpening, and instill confidence and a love for the art.
A teacher’s role is to find each dancer’s strengths and refine them, hone skills that still require sharpening, and instill confidence and a love for the art.
”
Maddie recalls one of her own teachers, freshly graduated from the Dance Arts Institute—at that time, The School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Twelve-year-old Maddie stepped into her Port Alberni studio with floor to ceiling mirrors, barres lining the wall, and zigzagging wooden floors. Her outside shoes were tucked away, her hair was up, and her ballet slippers still needed their ties to be stashed out of sight. Her teacher stepped into that same room as a teacher for the first time, and both of them started something new.
“Over the years, we all grew into ourselves as dancers,” Maddie says. “At the same time, she was growing into herself as a teacher.”
That’s Maddie, now. After a full day of teaching dance, she gets into her car and pulls out of the staff parking lot. She drives past never-ending construction in downtown Nanaimo, and her mind helplessly drifts to the surreal reality that she gets to play a part in so many childhoods. She knows first-hand the impact that a great dance teacher can have: “All of them were huge influences for me.”
Not just for dance, but for her personhood, too. Those long days in the studio teach a lot more than how to do a pirouette. There are lessons in punctuality, loyalty, and respect.
It’s strange to be on the other side of things, to be the teacher growing with her students. It’s important to be a responsible mentor, but it’s also important to leave time for games like freeze dance, wax museum, or across-the-floor charades. On holidays, like Halloween or Christmas, students often get to make up their own dances. As stressful as classes or approaching performances can be, it all comes back to one question.
Why are you in the room?
You don’t have to be. The experience should be rewarding. When the mirror becomes a fractured enemy instead of a reliable friend, it might be better if you pick somewhere else to be. Cheaper, anyway.
As a dance teacher at Harbour, Maddie gets paid. As a coach, she gets zilch. The money to send the team to competitions, buy costumes, and rent theatre space to perform their own shows comes from fundraising. Each member pays an annual fee of $60 to help the team continue running, but that only makes up a small fraction of the amount of money necessary for the year.
Besides hosting one Country Night per semester at the VIU Students’ Union Pub, there’s bottle drives, chocolate fundraisers, and drop-in dance classes.
In terms of next year, she’s planning on coaching again. Other than that? As long as she can keep finding ways to continue dancing, she’ll be happy. Laughing, Maddie says she fears that she hasn’t changed much from when she was a kid. “I still like to dance.”
The part that most people know about the dance world is the stage. The lights go down in the theatre. Dancers huddle in the wings, careful not to be seen by the audience. Hiding with you are the heavy flood lights that hurt like hell if you mistakenly kick one.
Behind you are the next group’s dancers. The group after that is waiting just outside the stage doors. Those two minutes onstage are the culmination of the year’s hard work.
“
Months spent in the studio with your teammates, sweating and tired, for two minutes on the stage. That kind of pride can’t be replicated. That kind of satisfaction has no equivalent.
Months spent in the studio with your teammates, sweating and tired, for two minutes on the stage. That kind of pride can’t be replicated. That kind of satisfaction has no equivalent.
”
It’s a hard thing to give up. Some will sacrifice it to pursue other things. But for others, those two minutes are worth a lifetime.
The music fades away and a symphony of clapping hands replaces it. Your ears ring as you escape into the curtain. You’re grateful for the audience, but their admiration isn’t what you’re soaking in—although, that’s not so bad either.
The real high comes from the performance. The other bodies onstage. The community, the sweat, the knowledge that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. Whether the choreography is your own or someone else’s, every dancers’ legs, hands, and fingers come together to shape the piece and make it whole.
You hurry through the door and race into the changing room. You have another dance to perform.
Sometimes, an opportunity will outstretch its hand and ask you to go on a journey. Other times, you need to carve that opportunity out yourself. If you’re willing to take it, a dream can start anywhere. Even at Original Joe’s.
about the author
Bailey Bellosillo
Bailey is a fifth-year Creative Writing major at VIU. She was a Poetry Editor for the Portal 2025 issue, for which she was the cover artist and a non-fiction contributor. She was both dancer and photographer for the VIU Dance Team in 2025, for which she also designed and produced a physical yearbook. She is co-Art Director, Website Designer, and Gustafson Feature Writer for Portal 2026.
