Dance student at midlife

Who

Carolyn Campbell, 46

Where

Stratford, P.E.I.

What she was

Senior analyst, Veterans Affairs

What she is

Dance student/aspiring performer

It was late September 2008 and Carolyn Campbell couldn’t sleep.

As she tossed and turned in the bedroom of the tiny basement apartment she’d rented in Toronto just weeks before, she could have blamed her wakefulness on noisy neighbours. But what was really keeping her up was worry: worry that she’d have to drop out of the full-time dance program she’d worked so hard to enter.

She was an unlikely student. At 45, she was more than twice as old  as most of her classmates at George Brown College. Before enrolling, she had been a career bureaucrat with Veterans Affairs, “a nice safe job with a good pension,” says Campbell, who has a business degree and a comfortable P.E.I. home she’d supervised building. She was the responsible one, the kind of person who’d never start anything without knowing exactly what she was going to do and how. Yet here she was, studying dance at an age when most dancers are hanging up their pointe shoes.

And it was those very shoes that were the problem. The last time Campbell had worn them, she was an adolescent studying ballet. And while she’d been talented enough to be invited to the National Ballet summer school, she hadn’t gone — held back, she thinks now, by fear of being away from home. Not long afterwards, she stopped dancing altogether. “The creative part of me went under,” she says. She spent her twenties jumping from job to job, settled into her government job in her thirties, went back to school and got a business degree. Then she hit 40 — and thought there had to be something more.

I need to work on my self-confidence, she mused. On a whim, she signed up for a dance class. And another. And then a weekend workshop. And a summer retreat. “I couldn’t get enough of it,” she says.  “And I just thought, If I’m going to do this, I’m going to give it my all.” Jazz, modern, tap, ballet, even hip hop — if it involved movement, she was willing to give it a try. Not that everyone was willing to let her: One teacher turned her away because she was “too old and might make the younger students uncomfortable,” Campbell laughs now. “That’s when I realized that classes that said ‘14 and up’ didn’t necessarily go up as far as me!” Following a George Brown-sponsored workshopin Halifax, she asked the instructor whether someone her age could apply to the full-time dance program in Toronto. The answer? Yes.