A Quote by Essence Atkins

I attended Professional Children's School in Manhattan because my ballet and modern dance schedules were intensive and had started to interfere with regular school hours.
It was in Shizuoka, where my home was. I first attended this school when I was five years old. I also attended a regular elementary school, and I was taking piano lessons with a local teacher. I began to study composition at the Yamaha school. And I continued to study there until the age of 15.
I joined the Royal Ballet School when I was 13. Before then, I'd done ballet twice a week after school. The rest of my class had started aged 11, so I'd missed two years and was really far behind.
I got the part [in Into the Forest], I started taking ballet again to try to regain my strength back. I actually love that it was changed to Crystal Pite's modern dance. And I wouldn't even really call it modern dance because it feels like it's in its own genre.
When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls' school. I had three children and waited until all three were in school before I started writing.
I actually quit ballet when I was offered a job, an apprenticeship at North Carolina Dance Theater Company, run by John Pierre Bonnefoux and Patricia McBride, who are my idols. Everything sort of went perfectly. I was 16, and I was about to drop out of high school and become a professional ballet dancer.
I grew up going to see my sister dance, both at the ballet and later as a modern dancer, and have always been a big fan of the ballet. So I have had a long relationship with dance.
After my primary school education, I started gathering little children by visiting parents to ask if they wanted somebody to care for their kids by teaching them the Bible. I have never attended any seminary school or Bible college in my life.
My schedule won't allow me to go to regular school, but I did love public school, and I did experience my first year of middle school in a regular school.
I was probably around 14 or 15 when I became really conscious of those girls who were going on to the Royal Ballet school, and that I was not Royal Ballet school material, not by a long stretch.
The Professional Children's School, it's for professional kids, so if you wanted to ditch, you could just write, Audition on a note and leave. I didn't really like school all that much.
I actually came to New York when I was 12 and did ballet school for a little while. I was being groomed to be professional, and a lot of the professors and teachers there were drawn to me and thought that I could become a professional ballerina.
I used to be on dance team in high school; it was called drill team in Texas. And when I started doing theater sophomore year, I had to make a decision which thing I was gonna follow. It was a big shift because I sort of had all these friends on dance squad, and when I started to do theater, my whole identity shifted.
I've never had to make weight for any sport before. Because, get this, I was not allowed to do any sports in school because I was a professional athlete. I was doing wrestling at the age of 15, so the school districts and the board of directors said that because I was a professional athlete that I couldn't do anything.
[Manhattan School Of Music] were kind of just getting the jazz program up and going when I first started there. I was 17 in September of 1984 when I started there.
I left Norway after high school and moved to Manhattan and went to film school in Manhattan. That's when I really found out that this was my calling and what I wanted to do.
My mother attended the local church, Saint Nicolas, and consequently, I attended that church and its Sunday School. My only prizes from the Sunday School were 'for attendance,' so I presume my atheism, which developed when I left home to attend university, although latent, was discernible.
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