I want to talk to you about how I made my decision to quit dancing and to actually have a 2nd career, so to say.
It was a process that took almost 3 years and I remember that I wanted to stop dancing already before, several times.
I had times where I had really horrible jobs in bad productions that made me feel like an amateur and I was actually ready to quit.
In these last few years I discovered regularly that I was standing on stage, but I wasn’t that excited about it anymore. For my sake I also could have been at home, instead of on stage in the spotlight.
So I started to think about quitting, but I always found out that I was ready to quit with my mind, but I wasn’t ready yet to quit with my heart/feelings.

Here are some examples of what kind of jobs I had to take just to be able to pay my rent, etc.:
* I once took a job to introduce the new Ford Fiesta and I had to “dance” several choreographies in shopping malls through out Holland and Belgium. People would walk through the choreography with their shopping carts, as if nothing happened. Thank God that I was doing this job with a friend of mine, otherwhise I would have gone insane!
*I was part of a company in Germany that organised and produced so called fashion shows, but these shows were really, really bad. The rehearsals weren’t paid for and we only got money for the shows. Choreographies totally sucked!
*I was part of a huge New Years Eve event in Graz, Austria and I really wondered why the hell they hired me, because I was in only 2 choreograhies and in one choreography no one could even see me, due to huge feather-costumes for the girls.
I was standing all the way in the back and I was covered by one of those huge girl-costumes.
*I also did a lot of youth projects in which I had to perform in small town-halls or even in gymnastic-halls with no dance floor and no real stage. We performed for schools and the children were not even watching us. They were too bussy with throwing popcorn to eachother and on to the “stage”.
*SETRA is a huge brand for buses and together with lots of other dancers and actors I was hired to perform a kind of musical for the companies biggest clients. The pay was great and the choreographer was an ex-dancer of Stuttgart-Ballet, but what we had to do was completely kitsch. I had a duet with an actress/singer (she was well known because for her role in Sesame Street) and this was the most corny choreography that I ever had to dance. We had a ball though, because we were all proffessional dancers/performers and we didn’t take it too seriously.

To come back to my decision-process, the last few years in Berlin were very good years for me.
I was dancing with well known choreographers and I was part of many productions that were very successfull and believe it or not, those jobs were also well paid!
The fact that I danced so many different things (from Lido in Paris to real conceptual dance in Berlin and everything that is between those two extremes) AND the fact that I reached the top the last few years, made my decision easier in a way. And on top of that I allways had a few gaps in the last years, having no job and therefore no income.

I was thinking about quitting a lot, but I still always wanted to work for a huge company which was based in Berlin. I remember sending my CV to get invited for auditions, but I never heard something back. And 3 years later I was taking a class somewhere in Berlin and somebody hooked me up with this famous company and I got a replacement-job for a few performances.
A few years later I was part of the original cast for one of their big projects, here in Berlin.
I felt so dammned privileged and I was so extremely happy that I was working for my dream company, finally! I remember me saying that this was the top and that I needed to quit before I would pass the top and go down hill again.

As soon as I realised that it probably wouldn’t get any better dance-wise, I applied for a job as a flight attendant for one of the biggest airlines in Europe. As a kid I always wanted to be a flight attendant, so that’s why I had that in mind already.
It took a long time before I was invited for a job interview and I actually thought they weren’t interested in me at all. At the same time I was desperately organising private auditions for choreographers/theatres in Germany, since I wasn’t sure whether the airline would take me or not.
And then, three months after my first application for flight attendant, the airline company called and I was invited for a telephone interview and after that I was invited for an assessment day.
It was like an audition; there were several rounds and there was an elimination after each round.
But finally I was taken!
So far for my process in deciding when to stop dancing and how to continue without dance.