Mentors Without Borders: Three Fulbright Journeys
Many people know that to be a professional or pre-professional dancer you need the utmost dedication. Dancing can call for late nights in the studio or long days on the road and, at times, can even require a certain level of single-mindedness and, yes, sacrifice.
However, what many people don’t realize about dance, is that it does not necessarily require a dancer to be fully-consumed to the exclusion of all else all of the time. Dancers can dream of traveling the world or want to learn about classical literature or art history or political science.
At Second Act, we encourage members to explore these other parts of their identities as they begin to determine what life after the stage looks like. To achieve this, Second Act engages remarkable mentors that provide coaching and guidance to mentees, utilizing their own lived experiences to demonstrate how to channel the lessons learned as a dancer into new opportunities.
For three of our incredible mentors–Talia Kurlansky, Trevor Menders, and Mary Anna Ball–receiving a Fulbright grant was instrumental in the exploration of their passions.
After fifteen years of intensive ballet training, including studying pre-professionally in New York City at Manhattan Youth Ballet and Ballet Academy East, Talia pursued her academic studies at Bates College, where she earned a Bachelor’s of Arts, with a double major in Political Science and Dance, and a minor in Asian Studies, knowing early on that she wanted to live abroad. This north star became a reality when she was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Taiwan in 2022.
As a Fulbrighter, Talia was placed in Kaohsiung, in a large city in the south of Taiwan, to teach English across two public elementary schools. While abroad, Talia had a goal of becoming as immersed in the culture as possible. She achieved this by taking weekly Mandarin classes, volunteering at local libraries and community events, and travelling with other Fulbright recipients to various regions in the country.
The transition to living in a different country across the world can be challenging, but Talia’s foundation in dance provided her with the discipline and ambition to be bold and welcome the unfamiliar as a learning experience.
“Ballet instilled in me a sense of determination, and even when, invariably, there is disappointment, I choose to see the situation as an opportunity for growth. Dancers are some of the most hardworking, passionate, and intelligent people I know, and it is the dance community that I constantly find myself a part of, regardless of what else I may be pursuing,” said Talia.
This inevitable integration of dance took shape through Talia’s teaching and personal learning experiences, including exploring performances of lion dances during Lunar New Year and Cloud Gate Dance Theater at the National Theater in Taipei.
Now, Talia works at The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an international non-profit organization, where she supports efforts to secure material compensation and vital services for Holocaust survivors worldwide. Working across regions, including the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Central and South America, and the United States, Talia’s passion for connecting across borders continues.
Trevor Menders echoes Talia’s sentiment of ballet’s ability to instill determination.
He says, “Dance gives you a vocabulary and a goal of performance mastery with the onus of improvement on you as a practitioner. Similarly, Fulbright inserts you at the ground level of learning to live in a fully new country, requiring of you a vocabulary—a literal language fluency in this case—and offers the goal of mastering of cultural competency, again with your own investment as the only mechanic by which to achieve it.”
As a two time Fulbright scholar, Trevor studied in Japan on two occasions, first as a guest researcher at Tokyo University of the Arts and second to carry out his doctoral dissertation at Osaka University. His research interests were sharpened during the first Fulbright, settling on a central research question of “in the premodern Japanese context, how did dance and painting interact?” In his second Fulbright, Trevor investigated “how depictions of bugaku, Japan's courtly dance idiom, communicated different political factions' pursuit of cultural legitimacy in the seventeenth century.”
Trevor’s distinctive central research question proved novel to many of his colleagues throughout his Fulbright, as the examination dance as an entry to Japanese art history was seen as an American approach to a non-American field.
The obvious tie to Trevor’s dance roots is an inspiring example of the influence a dance education can have on future paths. Trevor trained with the City Ballet of San Diego and attended various summer programs before he became a member of City Ballet II and a trainee to the main company. These years of training have not left him, but rather serve as his foundation for future endeavors.
In fact, Trevor’s research continues today at Harvard University where he is a doctoral candidate of the History of Art and Architecture
Mary Anna Ball used her grant in a bit of a different way.
As a soloist with the Charleston Ballet in Charleston, West Virginia, dancing is still part of Mary Anna’s day-to-day life. As such, her Fulbright experience was not about breadth but about depth, digging into the scholarship of dance as a way to gain more appreciation for it.
In 2020, Mary Anna was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the Roehampton Dance Studies program at the University of Roehampton in the United Kingdom, allowing her to formally study dance from an academic perspective. With few programs as robust or specialized in the United States, Fulbright provided a unique opportunity. At the end of her Fullbright, Mary Anna graduated with distinction with her M.A. in Dance Philosophy & History, her dissertation on classical reception in Giselle marrying her dance proficiency with her research interests.
Adding to the depth of her experience was the diversity of the program in which many of the students were contemporary, modern, or West African dancers. As a ballet dancer, she was able to bring a distinct sensibility and viewpoint to the conversation.
“I feel much more comfortable and confident in my performance because I understand the intellectual side behind the narrative, aesthetic, movement, history, and so much more,” says Mary Anna.
While this understanding permeates Mary Anna’s dancing each day with the Charleston Ballet, it is not the only takeaway.
Mary Anna’s passion for scholarship has led her to pursuing a PhD in Classics at Bryn Mawr College where her research interests include the body in classical literature, narrative and poetics, and classical reception, particularly in classical ballet.
On the whole, if you were to connect each mentor’s Fulbright experience to their foundations in dance, two trends emerge.
As Trevor and Mary Anna’s experiences show, dance can be a fruitful scholarly topic applied across disciplines and mediums. For Trevor this was the intersection of traditional dance and cultural legitimacy in Japan, while Mary Anna interests lie in the body as portrayed through classical literature. Their studies highlight dance’s rich ability to be studied and examined, not just enjoyed as entertainment on a stage.
The second trend emerges not from the art form itself but what it can teach its students: independence, maturity, communication, a desire for growth and betterment–all lessons dancers learn from a young age.
As Talia put it, “Growing up training at pre-professional ballet schools teaches you discipline and ambition. Ballet also teaches you to value culture and creativity. My years of ballet have directly affected my ability to communicate with others, even when speaking different languages.”
The application to Fulbright, and to life, is so valuable. And while Fulbright may not be the path for everyone, for Talia, Trevor and Mary Anna, it was an important step in their journeys.
Reflecting just three experiences, these mentors are just an example of the outstanding network of mentors, advocates, and supporters in the Second Act community, all of which are eager to share their experiences to help their peers as they explore new opportunities and times of transition.
For more information about Second Act’s mentorship program, please visit: https://www.secondactnetwork.org/mentorship-program.
For more information about Fulbright grants, please visit: https://us.fulbrightonline.org/.
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