080 The Man in the Desert

For our first conversation of season four, Charlie welcomes Steven Melendez, Artistic Director of New York Theater Ballet. Steven shares how his life has come full circle, now leading the organization that shaped the entire course of his life. Charlie and Steven discuss the powerful upcoming documentary Lift directed by David Petersen https://www.liftdocumentary.com/about, the impact of mentoring at risk children, and the resilience and ambition it takes to pursue a professional artistic career. Join Charlie for a wonderful conversation with an inspiring, first rate human being and passionate artist. You can follow CBP on Instagram @creatingbehavior, and Charlie's NYC acting conservatory, the Maggie Flanigan Studio @maggieflaniganstudio. Theme music by  https://www.thelawrencetrailer.com. For written transcripts, to leave a voicemail on SpeakPipe, or contact Charlie for private coaching, check out https://www.creatingbehaviorpodcast.com

Transcript

Charlie Sandlan:

I wonder how many of you, if you think back to your childhood, have that adult, that non-parent, either a coach, a teacher, who impacted you. Who was a source of inspiration or role model, somebody who was able to talk through life's ups and downs and open doors really for you that kind of change the entire trajectory of your life. Those kind of mentors are very rare and they're incredibly special. Today we're going to talk to somebody who does just that.

Steven Melendez, he's the artistic director of New York Theater Ballet. He was a professional dancer for many years at the highest level, worked all over the world, and now he runs the program that changed the course of his life, Project Lift.

We're going to talk about what that is, bringing ballet to home insecure children here in New York City. We're going to talk about what it was like as an Afro-Cuban kid living for a couple of years in a homeless shelter in New York City, how that experience brought him to the top of his profession and now he pays it forward. So put the phone back in your pocket, Creating Behavior starts now.

Well, hello, my fellow daydreamers. Working with Children, I'll tell you, it's certainly something that I have not been called to do. It's not a major part of my life. Trish and I, we don't have any to begin with, and my life has been really working with young adults.

So I think it takes a real special type of person, whether you're a teacher, a coach, to put in the time and the energy to really mentor in a positive way, young kids. But that kind of influence, if you're lucky enough to have that, can change the entire course of your life. But it takes somebody who I think has to be really consistent, really present, not somebody who's there for a hot second and then disappears.

You also have to be, I think, a really good human being who can set some values, who can create a culture, who could be straight forward and no bullshit, because I do think that children are real great bullshit detectives. They know when you're full of shit. So to be able to talk to them in a way that they hear you and it lands on them takes a special personality.

This is Steven, Steven Melendez, who himself was deeply impacted by this program, Project Lift, which is part of New York Theater Ballet. It was founded by Diana Byer back in the late '70s, and really what it does is it brings ballet to home insecure children here in New York City, and that was Steven. Growing up at the age of seven, him and his mom finding themselves in a homeless shelter for a number of years, and all of a sudden this young kid starts to learn about ballet.

Go figure, right? This Afro-Cuban kid ends up becoming one of the best dancers in the world. He gets accepted to the American School of Ballet, which is one of the most prestigious, most difficult programs to get into in the world. It is the top of the profession when it comes to serious training for ballet dancers. And from there, my goodness, he had an extensive artistic and dance career. He worked all over the world. And now it's like full circle, he comes back and he becomes the artistic director, takes over for the woman that changed his life and now he is running Project Lift.

He's a director, he's a teacher, he's a mentor. He is a good example. Really, if nothing else, this man is an incredible example of what hard work, dedication, commitment, accountability, and passion, what it can do for you and how it can change the entire trajectory of your life if you take yourself seriously at some point.

And we're going to talk about all of this. We're going to talk about the documentary, Lift, which is going to come out here in the fall. It's directed by David Petersen and it is about this project. And what is extraordinary about it, it's a wonderful documentary. It took 11 years to shoot, and we follow Steven and a handful of kids that are in Project Lift and kind of what happens to them over more than a decade. It's beautiful. It brought me to life a number of times.

So let's just get to the conversation, shall we? At the top, I just asked one simple question, what does it mean to be a mentor? And this was how we started. Here is Steven Melendez.

Steven Melendez:

Oh, that's heavy. It's a fine balance, I think, between forcing someone else to do what you think you think is the right way to do things and figuring out how to help someone else be the best version of themselves that they can be. And I think that's true just as a teacher.

It's one thing to say everyone has to learn, I don't know, the Pythagorean theorem or something. We all do that the same way. It is what it is. You learn it by root. But it's a different thing to force a student to learn it the way you want them to learn it, and I think mentorship is kind of like that. I think the best relationships in that regard are built, in funny way, on a mutual respect or mutual trust.

We think often that the protege or the young person is looking up to the mentor or the older person. But I think if the mentor isn't seeing something that is remarkable in the young person as well, that they look up to in some way, that it's going to be a very lopsided relationship in the wrong way. It's probably not going to succeed.

Charlie Sandlan:

Well, I teach adults, and so my whole life has been focused around 20s, 30s, 40s, and the students that I end up mentoring have gone through of the childhood trauma. But there's got to be something very particular about a personality to work with children.

What is it about children that draws you to want to work with them and help them? Because it takes a tremendous amount of patience, I think.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, it does. But I think children today are not like children were 20 years ago. A nine-year-old now is not the nine-year-old of 20 years ago or 30 years ago.

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah, true.

Steven Melendez:

I think they're more mature. They're really great. There's not another way to say this. They're really great bullshit detectors. They're really good at knowing when you're not being straight with them. And so the way I approach it always is to speak to them the way I speak to anybody else. I don't dumb anything down for them. And they raise to the occasion of understanding and of expectations. And when they don't, they don't feel, in my experience, they don't feel like they failed.

I think they recognize that there's more that they haven't yet learned to be able to understand. And that's distinct from lowering the standard of expectation simply because they're a child. Because what you end up with is if you lower it enough, the child is always successful, which builds confidence, but it also prevents them from learning how to become resilient.

If it's clear to the young person that whatever the shortcoming is isn't about them personally, but it's just the way the world needs to be, then they're going to have hard days and they're going to fail and they're going to feel bad about that. But they're not going to feel bad about that because you as a teacher have done something against them personally, and that's distinct.

It's distinct from saying, "You as a student are not good enough for me as a teacher, and I'm going to berate you and put you down." That's not the same as, "What you have just done is not good enough for the world. I support you. I love you. I care about you. I know you're trying really hard, but it's not going to cut it."

We're on the same team here to make you better as opposed to putting the student against you, having the student perform simply so that they gain your admiration as a teacher or mentor. I think that's a distinction, it's a nuanced distinction, and it does not mean that all of my students, but it's a distinction. It does not mean that they all like me, but I do think they all love me. I think, I don't know. Maybe not, maybe we'll get the angry letters after this.

Charlie Sandlan:

Well, I do think that it's dangerous if as a teacher if you're teaching to be liked. You have to be able to hold a standard and you have to be able to not lower that for anybody, but then also keep it about the work.

Steven Melendez:

A dance teacher has a unique position in the life of a young person. It's very, very common for a dance teacher to be the same teacher for a long time. The child can go from being five-years-old to being 12-years-old and have the same dance teacher every year. And then eventually maybe they graduate to a new school or they move on or they go to a pre-professional level. But then even once they get there, they've got the same teacher again for many, many, many years.

And if you think about all of the other adults or people of influence in a young person's life, you have the parents, of course, and the family. But as we know, there's a difference between hearing your mother or father tell you to do something and hearing somebody else tell you to do something. And then you have the academic teachers.

When they're young, it's only for one year. As you get older, it's just for one period. It's not a consistent force in your life. Or you get other afterschool programs. But even sports, it's only a couple of months of the year. They're not training year round generally, unless you're in some kind of really high level activity. And so the dance instructor becomes... Not a surrogate parent. Parent is the wrong word. But a surrogate role model is another way to put it. And just as you said, when you keep it about the work, if you do it right, takes the personal nature out of it. And I think that's really important.

Charlie Sandlan:

I found very fascinating the fact that you have your dancers read and actor prepares. Why do you do that? The great Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of modern acting. Why do you have your dancers read Stanislavski?

Steven Melendez:

I grew up in the tradition. I'll tell you a little bit of dance's history. I don't know how much the audience knows about this stuff. So classical ballet was around for a long time and for a long time classical ballet was in the world of fairytales. It's the swan that becomes a princess and the nutcracker that fights a rat and all that kind of stuff. And then in the mid-1900s along came a choreographer named Antony Tudor. He was British and he had moved to the US and he became kind of a big deal. And he was the pioneer in what we now historically can look back and say were psychological ballets.

Of course, when he was making them, they were just weird ballets that were very powerful and people loved them, but there wasn't really a category for them. And he very famously explained that he wanted to work with people who happened to be dancers and not dancers who happened to be people. And another way to say that same thing is you can't be Juliet if you've never read Romeo and Juliet, but you also can't be Juliet if you've never been in love, if you've never had heartbreak.

And as we just said a moment ago, so often dancers are really very young professional dancers. They're 23, 24, 25 years old. They're at the prime of their physical career, but often not at the prime of their maturity and their life stage. And so we have to find a way to circumvent the lacking of lived experience so that they can still be the best performers on stage.

If I wait to find a dancer who has had a child and then lost that child in order to put them on stage in the role of a character who's grieving the loss of their baby, of which there are lots of ballets with that theme. I'm going to be really, really limited on the kind of dancer I can put on stage, because a really uncommon thing for someone to also be a professional dancer.

So it's necessary often for dancers to be able to put themselves into positions emotionally that they are unlikely to have any firsthand experience with. And that's distinct from actors. I think actors generally, if you're looking for someone who can portray that, you can go find somebody who's lived that and they can portray it.

Charlie Sandlan:

True. But I think it also has to do with activating the imagination.

Steven Melendez:

Oh, for sure.

Charlie Sandlan:

Because you could put yourself, if you have empathy and you can understand human suffering, you can put yourself in any kind of imaginative situation. Because I have students, my students are the same. They're 20, 21, 22, 25. They don't have a lot of life experience and the training, really, a lot of it has to do with exercising the imagination. What if?

Steven Melendez:

How Interesting you said empathy. I think that's really exactly what it is. An interesting thing about dancing, and maybe it's the same in acting. I find that often the dancers who are least successful are the ones who for themselves feel the character too much. That there's-

Charlie Sandlan:

What do you mean by that? That's interesting.

Steven Melendez:

Well, there's a technique. Well, you're a teacher, you know. There's a technique to how you portray a character, and you can write it. It's the same there's a technique for music. You put dissonant chord, dissonant chord, dissonant chord, major chord. And that's the resolution and you know that that's the technique to create the feeling of satisfaction in the audience for the end of the piece. And you can do the same for dance and acting.

If you want the character to be proud, then 99% of the time they're going to puff their chest out. You're not going to be a proud guy walking around hunched over. Similarly, if you want them to be sad, you're probably going to the head a little bit, tilt the eyes, you're going to look down. These kinds of things are just matters of technique. Some people-

Charlie Sandlan:

That's also very human though, if you think about it. Because how do you even know you're upset or how do you know you're heartbroken, is I think the body knows it first and so it manifests itself physically. When you're heartbroken, everything drops. When you're happy, everything a bliss, and it's just universal.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, yeah. But I think, I guess what I'm saying is I think that there are people that understand that stuff naturally and there are people that don't understand that naturally and it has to be a learned experience. And so what I aim for always is to make sure that whatever the dancer is doing on stage is being done on purpose. Because when something is done on purpose, it's repeatable and if it's repeatable, it's correctable. And this is really-

Charlie Sandlan:

Intention, like moving with intention, ive heard you say. Well, acting is the same way. Acting is doing. It's not feeling and you really have to get up there and do something and if you really do something and it's meaningful to you, you'll have an emotional response to it if you've done the work and you have imagination and insight into the human condition. But it really is intention.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, absolutely.

Charlie Sandlan:

And you know what I find what's interesting? I have a lot of students that have come from the dance world. A fair number, who some have been very successful or some have just, they got injured, or their heart has really been in acting. And it's always a challenge with the dancers because they're so physical. Everything's so bound, so tight, so regulated that the acting work then is about unwinding and letting that channel open so that things can process through them. But one thing they do understand, I appreciate, is artistry and work ethic.

Steven Melendez:

Work ethic.

Charlie Sandlan:

And most students that come, you probably know this for sure, they come and they have no idea what that means and it's our job.

Steven Melendez:

Right, right. Oh, I'm fond of saying these days that, "I just realized we have a different definition of words."

Charlie Sandlan:

That's right. That's right.

Steven Melendez:

This has come up a lot for me. I said, "I needed you to work on this, and you just said you did work on it, but you didn't. We have a different definition of that word."

Charlie Sandlan:

But they didn't, right. And what I say to them is, "You've spent most of your life doing just enough to get by, and now you're going to be held to a different standard, and that's going to rock you a little bit. Because I'm going to tell you that this is lazy. I'm going to tell you that this is horseshit and that it's unacceptable." And for many of them, it's the first time they've ever been called out on it, ever, and it's jolting.

Steven Melendez:

That's especially true for young people these days, and I think we were talking about that a moment ago, of how the way that people teach now is maybe a little bit different than the way it was when you and I were growing up.

As you said, I literally had a chair thrown at me. I don't think that's the right way to have done it. But he didn't throw the chair at me because he was angry. He threw the chair at me because he wanted more and he knew that there was more there. He just went about it maybe a little bit strange way. And the idea now to explain to young people that they're going to be held to a higher standard and that just showing up isn't enough.

Charlie Sandlan:

If you have a room of students and maybe you have three or four that are really exceptionally talented and you go. "Well, there's something really something there." In your experience, what separates the successful from the unsuccessful? Even if they're all exceptionally talented, because you could be talented and not add up to anything or not have a career.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. It's something that I was taught. I was told. I worked in Eastern Europe for some time, for a couple of years. I was living there and working there as a dancer. And the ballet master in that company, he said to me, "Steven, you can only be as good as the best person in the room."

And I thought, "Oh, okay." So what he's telling me is that I don't have any more growth in this environment, in this company. He's telling me that I should go elsewhere. Because I thought I'm the best person in this room. I could do all the steps of... I'm the principal dancer, I should move on.

Only afterward did I realize what he was actually telling me, which is the distinction between the everyone's talented and some of them are successful and some of them are not, was that it's important to be able to learn from anyone at any time. It's one thing to say that overall this person is a better actor or a better dancer or a better singer than you are, but it's not to say that every single thing is better than you are.

Surely there's something. They take correction better. They take their notes better, they hit that one note a little bit differently. They understand this character better than you do. They look with childlike eyes every time they walk into the room and they're open to correction, or whatever the thing is. Find something all the time.

And in dance, a normal dance class, you get to the second half of the dance class is the center work and you go in groups. You have some combination that everybody does with the music and the first group goes and the second group goes and the third group goes and so on. And there are the dancers that go in their group and then go off to the side and stretch or wiggle their toes or kind of check out from the class while everybody else is going. And then the next combination comes up.

And then there are the dancers that go in their group and go off to the side and turn around and watch and they watch everybody else and they learn from the other people's corrections. And then they learn from their own corrections that they give the other people that they think, "Oh, that person didn't do that and I'm going to make sure I work on that." And those are the people that are usually more successful.

So you can only be as good as the best person in the room, but what that really means is you need to find the positive qualities of everyone around you and steal. Not an homage, not something delicate. Just steal it.

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah. Or steal it and make it your own.

Steven Melendez:

And make it your own.

Charlie Sandlan:

Which I think is what any artist does. You have to. You have to find inspiration and continually nurture yourself, and I also think you need intellectual curiosity. I don't think this younger generation possesses enough intellectual curiosity to just feed themselves and learn. Even about the history. I have actors that couldn't even talk in an eloquent or coherent way just even about the history of the art form that they want to pursue. [inaudible 00:22:17]-

Steven Melendez:

That's dangerous.

Charlie Sandlan:

Right, exactly. And trying to get them to understand how important it is to continue to feed yourself, because I don't think you can bring more to your art than what resides inside of you.

Steven Melendez:

Right. How interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. In dance, we have this problem where young choreographers and dance makers and dancers don't know the history of dance that came before them and they're intent on creating on their own. And what it turns out they're actually doing is, I'm putting this in air quotes, inventing something that's already been done. We go, "Oh, you took all your clothes off and ran out on stage and you thought that was groundbreaking? Nope, we did that in the '70s. Congratulations, you've gone backward."

Charlie Sandlan:

Right, right. Well, let's segue into this documentary, Lift, directed by David Petersen. It reminded me just conceptually of Richard Linklater's film, Brotherhood. I don't know if you've ever seen Brotherhood.

Steven Melendez:

I haven't.

Charlie Sandlan:

It's a film about a boy growing up and he took 12 years to shoot it and they would pause for years.

Steven Melendez:

Oh, right. I did hear about this. Yeah, yeah.

Charlie Sandlan:

So you see this kid playing the same part all the way up through with his adolescence. It was just a very interesting and original thing. And this is the same idea, this documentary following these kids over, what was it, 11 years?

Steven Melendez:

Yeah.

Charlie Sandlan:

It's an excellent documentary, Steven.

Steven Melendez:

Thank you.

Charlie Sandlan:

It moved me in many ways, brought me to life. And I know that the adjective, I guess it follows you around, is the homeless ballet dancer because you and your mom were homeless when you were young?

Steven Melendez:

Yeah.

Charlie Sandlan:

And I remember you saying early on that it was something that you did not like to talk about or you did not want it to be connected to you because you felt maybe it defined you in a way that was limiting. But now it becomes something else, something that is probably a necessary part of how you talk about yourself now.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, it's empowering, but still not empowering for me. I'm not a big fan of the narrative that I've somehow overcome or anything like that. But the reason why it's empowering is because recognizing now through the film that people are watching it how inspiring it is for other people.

To think that I can have gone through what I went through and there are now going to be tens, hundreds, thousands. I don't know how many people are going to see this film ultimately, millions, maybe, knock on wood. Who will have their lives changed, opinions change, their outlook, their worldviews altered. To understand homelessness a little bit differently, to understand ballet a little bit differently, to understand resilience and the innocence of childhood and the idea of the nuclear family. And in that film, I think fathers are portrayed really in a beautiful way.

There are a lot of things that I think that the film sheds light on that because it's filmed over such a long time, it's really impossible not to recognize that there's truth in there. Sometimes you look at something as a snapshot and in the back of your mind you go, "Oh, on that day that happened." That's not the same as saying that is that way. But to watch something filmed over that long, there's no arguing about some of the conclusions that you come to after watching the film.

Charlie Sandlan:

So what is Lift? What is-

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. So Lift is an outreach program run by New York Theater Ballet. It's the company I'm the artistic director of now. That program was started over 30 years ago, and it's been going since then. And through New York Theater Ballet, children from homeless shelters and children who are home insecure, in public housing or other kinds of places like this, are invited to take ballet classes in the ballet school.

They're given a full scholarship to the school. But the actual list of things that the children are offered is kind of endless. It goes everything from a winter jacket, some kids need, to tutoring, some kids need that. Some kids just need transportation. Some kids need a hot meal. Some kids need a mentor. I was put through private school in New York City on the back of Lift because that's what was best served for me, which if anyone knows the cost of private school in New York City, they can imagine how expensive that was for how many years I was in the program.

So not every child receives the same elements through coming through the Lift program. Instead, every child is met where they are and offered the services that are most necessary for them to become the best version of themselves. We don't define success through the list program as someone becoming a dancer. I became a dancer, but that's not super common. We just define it as a young person becoming a productive young adult. And consequently, we have young people that go off into all kinds of fields, in finance and law and pick your thing.

The program is still running today, and I've just been named the artistic director of New York Theater Ballet after the founder, after 45 years, she retired. And I'm intending to keep Lift, of course, but also to expand it in some new and I think innovative ways and ways that I think I'm uniquely positioned to understand because of my background. I came from the program, I went off to have a career as a dancer, and I've come back to become the artistic director of the same company 30 years later.

So I have some ideas about some of the reasons why outreach programs aren't as successful as they can be, and I'd like to address those in the way that I expand the Lift program.

Charlie Sandlan:

The opening of the documentary was very powerful, your return to where you lived with your mom and you had a very profound deep experience, fainting there. I'm just wondering what, was it a panic attack that you had? What was going on there inside of you as you were walking down that hall? I would think just a lot of unconscious stuff just comes pouring up to the surface?

Steven Melendez:

It was the smell.

Charlie Sandlan:

Isn't that interesting. Yep, sense memory.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, it was the smell. I don't know. It's this mix of chemicals and...

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah, cleaning supplies or whatever.

Steven Melendez:

Cleaning supplies, yeah, and it really got me. And the truth is that I realize I hadn't ever actually thought about my past. I like to think, somebody told me recently this and I'm going to steal it. This is definitely something I like. They said, "I live in the future, which is to say I don't spend any time thinking about the past."

Now, maybe because of my background, maybe there's some trauma in there that my brain won't let me think about it. But the truth is that I remember very little from my childhood. There were a couple of days that stick out, a couple of key memories that stick out, but I don't actually have a very clear vivid memory of most of my childhood.

Charlie Sandlan:

Probably survival.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I'm very interested in what comes next. I'm very interested in where we're going next. And as part of the filming of the documentary, I was forced to confront my past. But even more than that, it's a documentary. So every other week, David, the filmmaker, he wanted to interview me. He wanted to have another, "So what do you think about this and tell me about your childhood and tell me about that thing, and what did your mother say?"

And it's one thing for an adult person to choose at some point to recollect and to go back. It's a different thing to have to relive it every month or every two weeks or every year for 11 years, constantly trying to reassess and make sense of it all. So it was, I don't know, maybe filming documentary is a little bit like free therapy or something.

Charlie Sandlan:

I would think so, yeah. Did he approach you about this, the idea, and was the concept from the beginning to take that much time, 11 years, to track these kids?

Steven Melendez:

Not at all. The documentary came about in the most New York way possible. David has a dog and he lives in Brooklyn, and he was walking his dog at a dog park out in Brooklyn somewhere and another person who was at the dog park on that day 11 years ago was Richard Termine.

Richard Termine is a photographer for the New York Times, and he had been shooting New York Theater Ballet on stage for 20 years or more. I don't know how long. And when he heard that David was a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, Richard goes, "Oh, well, have you heard about New York Theater Ballet? They've got this great program for homeless kids. You got to make a documentary about that."

And I'm sure Richard was just saying it off the cuff, trying to make the conversation while the dogs were running in circles. But David remembered it and he called Diana a couple of days later and he arranged to meet with her and he told her that he wanted to pursue this and she said, "Yeah, sure. No problem." Because she didn't think that it... She thought it was going to take three weeks to make a documentary. She had no idea. She'd never made a film before. And the problem was that David didn't actually have any funding set up for it.

He's a big deal. He is a filmmaker. He's Academy nominated. He's a proper filmmaker. But he didn't have any money set up for this project. So for the first many years, it was just him and a student of his, he's a teacher as well, holding the mic boom, and they just followed us around. And I think what he says is he didn't actually know what the story was. And then what he likes to say is he liked to just listen. As he was filming more and more, he started to put together what he thought would work as a narrative for the film. Yeah, it was an interesting process to not have an end point in mind.

Charlie Sandlan:

Did you continually film or did you take breaks and then pick up years later, or was it just continual?

Steven Melendez:

A little bit of both. I think we never went more than, I'd say, six weeks without filming something.

Charlie Sandlan:

So you must have a shitload of footage that just did... It's on the cutting room floor.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, I think he does. He's got hundreds of hours of footage that, and he's got the... So the film itself, the ultimate version of the film has, I think maybe four main characters in it, four main children that are really followed in depth. But he has similar in depth footage following other young kids that are also in the program who just didn't make it through the cut for whatever reason. That their stories weren't as compelling, or more commonly filming them for four years and suddenly they disappear because the transient nature of homelessness. And so then they don't end up being in the final film because there's no ending to their story.

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah. The heart of it is, I think these three kids, Victor and Yolanssie and Sharia, and following these three was just so fascinating and revealing and heartbreaking and uplifting. It provoked so many emotions in me, particularly Yolanssie. And it just seemed to me that you were a very, very, very, and you probably still are, I would... Do you still have a relationship with her?

Steven Melendez:

I don't actually.

Charlie Sandlan:

No? Fascinating. It seems to me you were a very, very important person for her, and I have a feeling you might have saved her life. That conversation you have on the front stoop. She's getting into trouble. She's getting into fights, she's getting suspended, and you have this great analogy about being the man in the desert.

Steven Melendez:

Where the hell that come from? I have no idea.

Charlie Sandlan:

Really, that just came up right there in the moment?

Steven Melendez:

It just came up right in the moment and I was talking and I thought, "Wait, am I saying this? Oh, does this actually make sense? Oh, it does make sense."

Charlie Sandlan:

I'm going to use it.

Steven Melendez:

I'm going to use it, yeah.

Charlie Sandlan:

I'm going to use it. Absolutely. It's an incredible analogy. So what is the analogy? What did you say?

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, so the analogy is, so Yolanssie is not doing well. She's really getting into a lot of trouble. And the analogy is that I'm the man in the desert. If she gets off a plane in the middle of the desert and someone says to her that at night she's going to need a winter jacket because it gets really cold when the sun goes down, would she believe that or would she think to herself, "Well, it's really hot right now. There's no way it's going to get that cold at night?"

And so what I explain is I am the man in the desert who's been there for a really long time, and I'm telling her it gets really cold at night and she's going to need a winter jacket. And it's analogous to me telling her that she has to do better in school and she has to stop getting into fights and she has to stop hanging around with the wrong people.

Charlie Sandlan:

[inaudible 00:35:47]-

Steven Melendez:

And she has to stop getting suspended.

Charlie Sandlan:

... You were pretty straight. You couldn't have been more honest and direct. And what I thought was really beautiful, just about the way you handled it, is you were just talking to her like a rational thinking adult. Even though she's a kid, but she can think for herself. And the way you just talk to her and the way you mentored her through that, being brutally honest about what life's going to be like. You're going to pick a fight with somebody who's stronger than you. He's going to pull out a gun. You're going to end up pregnant and or dead.

And when he cuts to her, you can tell that that landed on her and that she heard you in some way. And I just thought it was a very powerful moment between an adult and a child in a way that was, you could tell a moment for her.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. It's the kind of moment that can't be had, I don't think, by a parent.

Charlie Sandlan:

No. They certainly won't receive it in the same way. And a lot of kids don't have that.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. I will tell you this, at the Tribeca premiere, Yolanssie, she came with her newborn child.

Charlie Sandlan:

Wow. Man. Well, I hope she makes it to law school. I know that's a dream.

Steven Melendez:

I hope so too. Yeah.

Charlie Sandlan:

That was an incredible story. And watching Victor, this kid who you could tell you saw something in him from the moment you started working with him. That this kid's got something special, he could have a career.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. So Diana, she's the founder of Lift, and I inherited a lot of children from her for the short time that I was the director there and she's really the one who found him... No, well, not found him. It's not the right word. She's the one who nurtured his talent.

Charlie Sandlan:

Interesting way to say it, yeah.

Steven Melendez:

And perhaps is the only one who could have nurtured his talent, given that he was unlikely to be introduced to dance at all if not for the Lift program. And I had a unique relationship with him being a Hispanic man, that's different from a white woman, and so I served maybe as a role model. And at that time as a role model, whether I liked it or not, which is something that I'm always grappling with and I think a lot of people are grappling with.

Charlie Sandlan:

What do you mean by that?

Steven Melendez:

Well in industries where the minority is really evident, you become a sort of defacto stand-in for everyone else of your type. Right?

Charlie Sandlan:

Right.

Steven Melendez:

So and I have-

Charlie Sandlan:

And I'm sure that's what Misty goes through. I mean, that is-

Steven Melendez:

That is exactly what Misty goes through.

Charlie Sandlan:

Right?

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, yeah. And it's unfortunate there isn't enough... The dataset isn't wide enough for people who don't know to understand what average is. So they see what they can see, which is one person or two people, and naturally they assume, well, that must be the way it is. And the reality is it's not.

I'm always interested when I'm introduced to new people whether they perceive me as being Black or they perceive me as being Hispanic. For those of the people on the podcast who can't see me, I have a pretty significant Afro. I have the features of a Black man, but my skin is very, very fair and-

Charlie Sandlan:

What was that like growing up with fair kin. I know that that has its own issue in the Black community, its own thing.

Steven Melendez:

It was a problem, and I don't fit in anywhere, really, is the result. In the Black community, they call me passing. If I had a hat on, if nobody saw my hair... Well, they'd know I have big lips and a big nose. But if nobody really looked at me, if they just saw me walking by. For example, a security guard who is looking only quickly down the aisle and they see just my hands or my neck, they don't stop for me. But if they see me dead on, then maybe they do. So there's an example.

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah. Well, no, back to Victor. It was funny because this kid, you could just tell he wasn't too serious at first and not really, kind of the work ethic wasn't there. And there's that great little scene with Diana where I guess he was late and there's a pretty straightforward talk about burning bridges and what it means to be a professional. And it seems to me that that's a fork in the road for a lot of people. You're either going to make that adjustment and you're going to shift, or you're going to end up doing something else because the commitment's too much.

Steven Melendez:

Right. And that's the-

Charlie Sandlan:

Or they'll fire you or they'll kick you out or they'll drop you or whatever.

Steven Melendez:

Right. That's the moment when he got on the same page as everyone else in the dance industry about the definition of the word work. Yeah.

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah. I don't know, did you think that that... Did you know that that would happen for him? Or did you have a period where you're like, "This kid's just not going to cut it?"

Steven Melendez:

You know what? I didn't. I always thought he was going to be fine. I didn't realize. He was very young. I didn't realize. I thought that he had more chances ahead of him. But he started getting work really young. He was really very talented, and he was so ambitious. He's still so ambitious. So he punched above his age class often, and so the expectation was different. He was held to the expectations of a much older professional person, even when he was-

Charlie Sandlan:

Well, ambition is a very good word. It's a powerful word and you really got to have that.

Steven Melendez:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Charlie Sandlan:

You really got to have that on top of work ethic, on top. Maybe it feeds off each other. If you have the ambition, you're going to have the work ethic and maybe you can't have one without the other, or the discipline.

Steven Melendez:

Perhaps. Yeah. There's an interesting thing. I think that in order to... I think the thing that the children in the Lift program are offered and that Victor was offered and that he and all of the worlds came crashing together at that moment when he lost that first job, was the idea of self-respect.

That when we talk about other people, it's really common to say you have to earn respect from others. But we don't really talk about self-respect in the same way. The reality is that we have to earn our own self-respect just as we earn the respect of others.

Charlie Sandlan:

100%.

Steven Melendez:

And there are young people who through circumstances of life around them are never given the opportunity to earn their own. They're not challenged with something that they can overcome and then that they do overcome, and then that they are appreciated for having overcome. You need all three of them. You need to be presented with the challenge. The challenge needs to be achievable. And then after they achieve it, somebody else needs to go, "Hey, by the way, you just did that and that was great." And in that moment they-

Charlie Sandlan:

I tell my students all the time, "No one's going to take you seriously if you don't take yourself seriously first. No one's going to treat you like an artist if you don't treat yourself like an artist first."

Steven Melendez:

Exactly.

Charlie Sandlan:

And some students understand that and see that and some don't. And then some, it's different. It's one thing to say. "Oh, I love acting or I love dance." And it's another thing, "Well, I want to be a dancer or I want to be an actor, and there's a big-

Steven Melendez:

There's a gulf in there.

Charlie Sandlan:

... gulf between the two. And you just might be somebody that loves acting or you just might love ballet, but you're not.

Steven Melendez:

Right. And explaining that to someone is really difficult. Explaining it to a child is really difficult.

Charlie Sandlan:

Do you have this conversation with kids?

Steven Melendez:

I do. I get young kids that are maybe 12 or 13 years old and they come into the office and they say, "Oh, I love dance. I love dance. I want to do this." And I've got to and be honest with them and I say, "Look, you're at the age now where if you're going to do it, you have to do it. That means you're going to be here five, six days a week. You're going to be here three hours a night and-"

Charlie Sandlan:

13 is late, late in the game. It's late.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah, it's very late in the game. And everything that you think you've been doing, we're going to redefine those words. And there's no guarantee at the other side of this. And all the sacrifices you're going to make by trying to pursue this are going to come back to bite you in the butt later if you choose to do something else.

That means, it's not to say that you're not going to be great in school, but it is to say that you could reallocate these hours in the ballet studio to studying math instead and increase your chances of going to Harvard or Princeton or whatever. There are plenty of dancers who can do both, but it's a lot of work to do that. And so I have these conversations with young kids where I go, "Are you sure you want to put on point shoes? Because point shoes is a whole new level. Are you sure you want to pursue dance as an extracurricular when you're 15, 16, 17? Because that means you're not going to be a-"

Charlie Sandlan:

But isn't the initial impulse, "Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah, I do, Steven?"

Steven Melendez:

It is. It is the initial impulse, but it's my job to make sure that the expectation is really clear. I speak with the parents as well often and I give them... I never ask them to make a decision on the spot. But the sacrifices necessary to pursue dance as a career as a young person are really significant, really significant.

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah. I tell my students, these are adults, but I say, "It's going to cost you everything and you might not necessarily understand what that means right now, but it'll cost you a lot. It'll cost you a tremendous amount."

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. But we're in a tricky place because it's unlikely that the child has anyone else in their life who can give them another perspective. Their parents are probably, I don't know, whatever they are, they're mechanics or lawyers or whatever they are. They didn't have that same kind of inflection point to make a decision. So they have only the word of their teacher to go on.

Charlie Sandlan:

Well, speaking of parents, I thought one of the other more powerful moments that moved me. Man, really, I don't know, something that triggered something in me was the scene where you invited the parents and you were collaborating with them. These dads and moms who have, you could just tell very, very hard lives to survive and to keep food on the table. And to just have a chunk of time here in the middle of the day to do something creative. Talk about outside their comfort zone. But to see them participate and to see them create and to see the way you talk to them and allow them to contribute was I think one of the more beautiful parts of the entire film.

Steven Melendez:

Well, thank you.

Charlie Sandlan:

Seeing these dads in particular really step outside their comfort zone.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. So what you're talking about here is the way that I think the Lift program can be most impactfully expanded. I think that we spend a lot of time and effort, and perhaps it's similar in acting for young people, and we spend a lot of time and effort talking about outreach work, growing our circle, growing our community. And we spend that energy on the children. We invite children to free performances, or we give children scholarships to the school, or we make appealing programs for children.

But for certain children from certain communities, from certain backgrounds, the idea, the very idea of dance, being a dancer, going to the theater as a piece of family dynamics is totally counterculture. It doesn't make any sense. And then for others, it's totally normal. For the people that grew up going to the opera and the ballet, the idea that they come home and they say to their parents, "I want to be an opera singer." The parents go, "Okay, yeah, sure, that's a thing. It's going to be hard, but it's a thing."

But for families from where I came from, you go home and you say, "I want a ballet dancer." And they go. "What, did you say baseball player? I don't understand. What are you talking about?"

Working with the adults in these communities, the parents in this case, as you saw in the film, and educating them. But not educating like talking down to them, just opening their eyes to this whole other world that they weren't a part of and that their child is now starting to become a part of is really important.

And it's really important because what it means is it reduces a little bit of the friction when the child comes home and they have a great day at the ballet studio and they want to talk about what they've just learned. And instead of being shut down immediately because the parent says, "Okay, but what about your homework? But what about whatever?" The parents can engage with them because they recognize the value of what a life spent in the dance studio can be for a young person.

I got into the School of American Ballet, School of American Ballet is the largest, greatest ballet school on the planet, probably the best funded certainly, in New York. And when I came home to tell my family that I had gotten into this great school, the first thing that my uncle did was he sat me down on the stoop outside and he said, "Don't let them turn you into one of them."

What he meant was, don't become a gay boy. And it wasn't, "Oh, congratulations. You..." Basically, it's harder to get into SAB than it's to get into Harvard. It's really exclusive, high level, and that didn't seem to register.

The disconnect culturally to the world that I was a part of as a young person was really, really vast. And so what it meant was, as a child, I had one leg in each world. I had one leg in the classical dance world, in the theater world and the world of the opera houses and the big fancy things. And then I had one leg in the world at home with my family where we lived growing up with the people in the neighborhood, doing barbecues and watching baseball games.

And I, as a child, was forced to straddle those two worlds. And I'm pretty stubborn, so I made it through. But there are a lot of kids who are unable to, at least what it feels like, they're unable to turn their back on their family to enter this other new space. And so then they quit. They give up. And so for all of the outreach work that we do as an industry to attract new young people into our form, we're being fought against by these cultures and communities that don't understand what it is or appreciate what it is.

Charlie Sandlan:

Did you ever have a moment where you really contemplated this isn't for me, I'm going to go home?

Steven Melendez:

All the time. I thought that this morning when I woke up. All the time.

Charlie Sandlan:

Why am I doing this? Like, what the fuck am I doing?

Steven Melendez:

Why am I doing this? Yeah. It's so in the moments when you're on... Let me tell you this, the thing that I miss the most, and I am retired now from the stage, the thing that I miss the most is the applause. After I'd stopped performing. It had been maybe, I don't know, six weeks or something, and I came home and I said to my partner, my girlfriend, I just said, "No one has clapped for me in a long time."

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah. No, it's a drug. It is.

Steven Melendez:

It is.

Charlie Sandlan:

The theater, the ballet, just being on that stage. It's a communal, ritualistic event that is just shared in this moment of time with these people and there's nothing like it.

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. It's ephemeral. It's transient. It's live.

Charlie Sandlan:

Yeah. Well. All right. I can't believe we've already been an hour here. So we'll just wrap it up. I don't want to keep you, although I could talk to you much longer.

What would you say to young people out there right now, children, young adults, who want to pursue an artistic life, a serious artistic life? When you look back on yourself at a young age, what do they need to consider and understand about what it means to live a professional creative life?

Steven Melendez:

Yeah. I think the first most important thing is to surround oneself with the right people. I think that's true whether you want to be an artist or not, but it's especially true if you intend to be an artist. You must be surrounded by other artists. You must be surrounded by people who understand the world that you want to be a part of and whom you look up to.

I think the next most important thing is to invest time in understanding the culture and the history of that art and all of the other art. They're all connected. It's really important. And actually these two things work in compliment with each other. If you surround yourself with people that care about this, it's likely that the conversations you have around the coffee table are going to be about this.

And I think the last thing, or the third thing, the third most important thing is to be ready to have your entire worldview flipped inside out. That we might all start as children, as creative souls or as artists. But the actual work of becoming an artist, the work of investing oneself in a life like this is unlike the work necessary to do any other thing, as far as I know. And so it is very unlikely that whatever one has been doing up until the point where they say, "Okay, I'm going to become an artist now," has set them up to be successful.

Charlie Sandlan:

Well, my fellow daydreamers, thank you for sticking around and keeping that phone in your pocket. Please keep your eyes out for the documentary, Lift. You will not be disappointed. You can also follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you got a few seconds, go to iTunes, leave a review of the show. I'd really appreciate that. And if you'd like to leave me a message or ask me a question, go to creatingbehaviorpodcast.com. Go to the contact page, hit that red button, I use SpeakPipe.

You can also go to https://www.maggieflaniganstudio.com if you are interested in training with me in New York City. My next first year class begins September 8th. And you can follow us on Instagram @maggieflaniganstudio, @creatingbehavior.

Lawrence Trailer, thank you for the music, my man. My friends, keep plugging away. Try to make a difference in someone's life. Play full out with yourself, and don't ever settle for your second best. My name is Charlie Sandlan. Peace.