Lauren DeVera felt Los Angeles calling in 2010 after she completed her bachelor’s degree in dance. Getting to the city was both a pressure and a dream. Everyone she knew who wanted to dance professionally seemed to be moving out west, and DeVera couldn’t imagine Chantilly, her hometown, offering many comparable opportunities.
But the fallout from the Great Recession of the late aughts was still tangible. The unemployment rate peaked at 9.5 percent the year DeVera graduated, and only in mid-2014 would the U.S. economy recover the 8.7 millions jobs lost. So despite the allure of L.A., DeVera decided to take the more traditional route. She got a full-time job with benefits in the D.C. area.
“It just made sense,” she says.
But her goal was still to get to California, and DeVera kept dancing. She joined a few local dance collectives, including local hip-hop troupe Culture Shock DC, and traveled to San Diego, Atlanta, and Canada for performances.
By 2013, DeVera felt ready to follow her dream. She got into a monthlong dance intensive in L.A., quit her job, and had just a couple weeks to kill before moving. “And in that little time window that I left the full-time job with benefits, I tore my ACL,” she says.
The tear, crutches, and impending surgery meant the hard-core life of L.A. dancing couldn’t happen anymore—at least not anytime soon. DeVera, forced to find a way to earn a living and pay for her care, and fast, decided to stay in the DMV.
To support herself following the injury, she took part-time, nonartistic jobs—a common experience for local freelance artists, injured or not, who often get paid in stipends for short-term projects. In an interview with City Paper, DeVera rattles off all the places she worked over the years: a coffee shop, a church ministry, a credit union, barre and yoga studios, Waxing the City’s front desk.
Meanwhile, as she relied on credit cards to cover her dance-specific physical therapy, she built up her dance resume with work she could do while still recovering. DeVera taught barre classes, directed a local dance team, and hosted community freestyle dance sessions. “[I was] making these ugly flyers on this app and putting it up on Instagram,” she remembers. “Back when Instagram first came out.”
By 2015, these activities—originally meant to fill the time and her resume—had become DeVera’s life.
“As my 20s went on, I went and visited L.A. again to see if this is something that I want to do full time,” DeVera says. “And I just couldn’t do this lifestyle. I can’t do this dancer grind lifestyle.”
Instead, DeVera made her dance home in the D.C. area. Today, her income streams are as varied as her credit union-coffee shop-barre studio days. She launched a podcast in 2020, offers life coaching, hosts guided meditations, and choreographs dances—most recently in November for Dance Place’s These Beating Hearts: Dance for our Ancestors.
DeVera sees her work as multi-passionate entrepreneurship—not side hustling. “I don’t even want to be associated with that word,” she says. Each project is a main event, meaningful and connected to all the others.
“There were many opportunities where I could have said, ‘Forget dance, let me go do the quote unquote adult thing and find a stable 9-to-5 job and just make dance like a hobby,’” DeVera says. “But the calling on my life is so strong that I just knew that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.”
This is part four of our Dancing in the Moonlight series that looks at how local dancers put together various part-time gigs and side hustles in order to support themselves.