Liz Bayley

QUALIFICATIONS

UNITED KINGDON ALLIANCE
OF DANCE - LICENCIATE

Salsa & Merengue
Latin American, Ballroom
 
 
Advanced:
 
RAD, BBO Ballet, ISTD Modern

A-Level Contemporary

Adage and partner work
Irish Dance
 

I was in the garden aged 3 with my neighbour. She was 8 years older than myself and a ‘real ballerina’ in my eyes, as she’d been doing ballet classes for a few years. She started teaching me 'spring points' and a 'pas de cheval'. My Mum saw my enthusiasm and sent me to my first ballet class (pre primary) that week. The Class was over booked but the teacher said ‘bring her along and we’ll see how she does’. After 30 minutes of ‘good toes, bad toes’, the teacher’s helper was sent out with a message for my Mum (the helper was a senior pupil who went-on to dance with the Royal Ballet as the Fairy God Mother in Cinderella, which I watched with great pride). ‘Definitely bring her next week – she’s in’

Well, from my first class, I loved it!! It was so much freer than Ballet, I felt like I was liberated from the strictness that I’d always felt in my Ballet classes. It only took a couple of years to reach and pass my Advanced ISTD at which point I had another big dance decision to make. Meanwhile, I was at college, taking 3 A-levels, one of which was Dance. My teacher kept pushing me to apply for stage schools and was very disappointed when I chose the ‘sensible’ route yet again and decided to study Psychology (BA) at University. My life suddenly didn’t include dance anymore. That summer, waiting for University to start, I cried more than once, thinking about what I might have thrown away.

A year into my new life as a student, my twin brother took me to see ‘Saturday Night Fever’ in London. After not having danced for 15 months, all those passionate feelings about being a performer rushed back! I thought that the 'Latin Couple' in the dance competition were just incredible. ‘I want to do that’! I yelled, as we left the theatre. Even if I never reached the stage in the West End, I wanted to see how far I could get. Even if I didn’t make it at all – it would be fine, so long as tried – so long as I wouldn’t say one day ‘what if…’? I decided to finish my degree, but start dancing again.

The only problem was that, with limited student funds, where was I going to get the money to pay for dance classes? My fantastic brother said there and then that he would pay, just let him know how much it would be. I was saved!

The dancing not only made me feel wonderful, but it got me through my finals. It was a great way to release the tension of studying so hard for such important exams. Towards the end of my 3-year course, I started going to auditions (just for practise, as I promised that if I got any jobs I wouldn’t take them because I had to finish my degree). The first audition I went to was for a Cruise Ship – there were hundreds of girls – I was terrified! As it happened, the third audition I went to, I got! That was it, now I knew I could do it!

During one of my contracts at this time, the company was rehearsing when one of the boys came over and just started dancing Salsa with me. One of my friends had told this guy that I knew how to Salsa. He was one of the best partners I’d ever danced with. He led so well and was a beautiful dancer. He was from Venezuela. His name was Doni.

That was the beginning of a very special relationship. 5 months later, we were engaged. We went from contract to contract together, but we both always agreed on one thing about being a professional dancer. It never seems to be as much fun as when you’re in a class. Suddenly, your hobby, the thing that you used to do for fun, has become something you start to resent. This is partly because you inevitably get stuck performing the same choreography every night for a really long time.

Dancing wasn't so much fun anymore, it was work. At Moulin Rouge for example, it was the same show twice a night, for a year. One night we worked out that that was 12 shows a week, 48 shows a month, which is just under 600 performances of the same show in one year!!! I won’t even tell you how many kicks on the right leg that equalled, because of the ‘Can-Can’ (it was 11,560)! Basically, we’d had enough of dancing other peoples’ choreography, mostly behind a singer or a principal, battling with various injuries, every single day.

Doni had told me about his life before he started dancing on the Ship where we met. He described how he’d danced folk-lore and salsa on television in Venezuela and how he was a member of the all men Salsa group, the ‘Latin Jazz Dancers’. They travelled all around the U.S and South America presenting the group’s original choreography at World Salsa congresses. After seeing lots of videos of the Congresses, I decided that this was for me! It sounded great. I’d never had the chance to perform salsa professionally, only teach. Doni said that we could definitely have potential to dance at these Congresses as a couple, but we’d have to work for it. So we started choreographing.