Dancer working in dream job

The 22-year-old came home last month for a holiday and Midweek caught up with him before he left to teach a session at Sharyn Underwood School of Dance.

“Hip-hop today,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll delve into other styles, but it’s mostly hip-hop if I have a choice.

“I train in hip-hop the most, at the moment, that’s where I’m putting a lot of my time.”

Mark learned to dance from the age of 9, under the tutelage of Sharyn Underwood. As a senior, he was part of a group that accompanied Sharyn to Sydney to see opportunities for dancers. The performing arts school called Ettingshausen’s was one of the facilities they saw and at which they spent a full day.

Before his dance exams were over in 2014, he and fellow dancer Kate Van Elswijk (former WHS student) were offered places at the institution, to start in 2015.

Mark did a full year at Ettingshausen’s, graduated with a Certificate IV in Dance and did another year before getting a spot with Grayboy agency.

“At the beginning of the second year I auditioned and got into a show with Phly Crew.” Phly Crew is a Sydney-based comedy dance group and two of the choreographers in that show were Mark’s teachers in his first year.

“They continued to teach me through that second year course . . . when they didn’t have enough in their own company they would outsource to us who had worked with them before. I ended up picking up more and more work with them and then there was an opportunity to go to World of Dance in Melbourne, and they wanted to put together a group. That was a month of rehearsals for this one competition which we ended up winning, and then went to Los Angeles to compete for Australia. Just before we went on stage in LA they asked Hannah [a dancer in a similar situation] and me if we’d like to be a part of the company. Obviously we said yes.”

The process from when Mark first worked with Phly Crew and joined them took two years.

“The jobs I end up doing most frequently are corporate. They’re quite well paid, most of the time, you just rock up, do your thing, go home.

“We’ve got two or three different corporate shows we sell as Phly Crew, and we’re selling one where we do a robotic set for seven minutes — we end up doing one of those every two weeks on average. Things like that come through Phly Crew and the agency. The commercial world is very small and there are heaps of performers trying to break into it.”

Phly Crew has an active core of around 10 to 12 members.

“There are original members who have gone off to all parts of the planet, who don’t train with us any more but still carry the tag.”

At the moment Mark’s goals tie in with those of Phly Crew. “There’s a general steady incline of the company growing and there’s potential for it to be my fulltime job.

“For me, I want to continue to train and build on myself. I can see where I am in relation to others in the industry that I look up to, and there are classes available in Sydney for me to upskill. I want to be the best I can be and enjoy the process of becoming that.”

He says learning from Sharyn Underwood was the best start he could wish for.

“Sharyn teaches an incredibly good foundation for everything. I was able to put my foot into every style and be competent.”

Right now Mark enjoys his dance ‘family” and living and working in Sydney.

By Paul Brooks
Whanganui Midweek 20/3/19