When I sit down with Portland dancer and choreographer Nancy Ellis, I already know we have something in common. Though we’ve never met before, we went to the same small women’s college in western Massachusetts 16 years apart, and the first thing we talk about over coffee at Heart on East Burnside is our ballet classes.
“I take at BodyVox and the Portland Ballet,” says Ellis. “There’s this core group of people who come all the time, and it’s a really nice community to be part of, because they’re all older women, mostly, and I just feel like older women are where it’s at. I have the most to learn from them. I like the community of it and it does… speak to the work that I’m making.”
Ellis’ new dance performance, Nous, On Va Danser, opens this weekend at New Expressive Works on Southeast Belmont. She’s also back in school finishing prerequisites for a physical therapy program—she’s just come from a biology quiz—and she’s a single mom. She’s in the midst of a transitional phase of life for a dancer; after graduating from Smith College, she spent her 20s as a working dancer in New York, balancing a “survival job” in arts fundraising and marketing with performances and rehearsals, but found that her lifestyle didn’t jibe with starting a family.