Kit Aylesworth, 25, graduated from American University with a double major in dance and musical theater in May 2020. It was not a promising time for a student who aspired to become a professional dancer. “Dance was basically nonexistent when I graduated,” Aylesworth says.
They had already done the legwork, both literally—American’s dance major requires 12 credit hours of movement-based courses—and figuratively: Aylesworth had been making connections in the D.C. dance community for years. Before COVID hit, they planned to stay in the city after graduation, taking classes and picking up work through their network.
“It was super, super not fun to spend all these four years gearing up for a very specific career that just did not happen when I graduated,” says Aylesworth.
Instead, they spent the rest of 2020 taking online dance classes and doing a five-day virtual dance intensive with the semi-local Orange Grove Dance, a company led by two former George Washington University faculty members.
When the city’s stages reopened in early 2021, Aylesworth set about reconnecting with the network they built during school—an essential part of getting local dance work. They took a part-time job working the box office at Studio Theatre on 14th Street NW, before moving to Silver Spring’s Round House Theatre. Their strategy, like Max Gorman of GRIDLOCK Dance, was: If you can’t be on stage, be near it.
“I’ve been doing a lot of different behind-the-scenes stuff to kind of stay in the world, but not necessarily be dancing,” Aylesworth says. “Because people need the stage managers and the technicians way more than they do the dancers.”
In February 2022, Aylesworth also got a full-time, non-dance job—as many performers do to help pay for life in D.C., which ranks seventh in the U.S. for cities with the highest cost of living—as a bookseller at East City Bookshop. They call it a survival job, albeit one that’s meaningful.
“I am really, really passionate about books and about the work we do at the bookstore,” says Aylesworth. “But it is something that I just need money, so that at night I can moonlight as an artist.”
For now, this balance is workable, and staying in the stage world seems to be paying off. In July, Aylesworth co-choreographed the jukebox musical Head Over Heels at Wildwood Summer Theatre in Montgomery County, which was featured in the Washington Post.
But crisscrossing the city and working six or seven days a week is grueling—especially when trying to sandwich dance classes between work shifts. In some ways, the pandemic still seems to be working itself out for Aylesworth and others who graduated into a COVID-warped landscape, forced to scrap their postgrad plans overnight. For a time, Aylesworth stopped dancing. They had little time between shifts and the more convenient virtual classes felt unfulfilling. The post-pandemic chaos made Aylesworth wonder if dance fit into their life anymore at all. But by September of this year, Aylesworth felt ready to try again.
“This past [September], I actually went back to class for the first time, and it felt so much better,” they say. “It feels different, and it’s not the same as it used to be. But it felt really good to be back.”
This is the fifth and final story in 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.