The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Maia
Hello, and welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. Today I am joined by a very special guest. I have Danielle Guillermo on the show to talk to us all about dance media.

What's her history with dance media? How does she process all the media out there in the dance world today? And lots more about her most recent project, Dance News Daily. Now, Danielle does a great job of talking about her history and her journey with dance, but I am going to give you just a little sneak peek of her bio and her vast experience. Danielle Guillermo has been involved in professional dance for over 20 years.

A featured educator-turned-entrepreneur in Dance Teacher magazine, Danielle is recognized for helping dance business owners elevate their marketing and management strategies. But prior to that career pivot, Danielle was an adjunct instructor of dance at Messiah University and director of the Messiah Summer Dance Intensive. She's also been on the faculty at Pennsylvania Regional Ballet, Hershey School of Dance, and the School of Dayton Contemporary Dance Co.

Her choreography has been shown at Symphony Space in New York City, Messiah University, Regional Dance America, and events nationally and abroad. And she was awarded the Monticello Award and Josephine Schwartz Award for choreography and selected for the inaugural Breaking Glass Emerging Female Choreographers Project. As a dancer, Danielle has been a member of Avoda Dance Ensemble, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company Second Company, and was a featured performer, dance captain, and choreographer at Sight & Sound Theatre.

Most recently, as you'll hear more about in just a moment, Danielle launched DanceNewsDaily.com, a leading platform and daily newsletter delivering the latest dance news. Without further ado, let's hear more straight from Danielle. Danielle, thank you so much for being here.

Danielle
Thanks for having me.

Maia
So I really want to hear, before we get a little bit more into some of these other topics of conversation, where you're coming from, what's your dance background, and how did that lead you into dance media and starting Dance News Daily?

Danielle
I got my start training at a pre-professional ballet school, which is the Pennsylvania Regional Ballet. It was formerly Cumberland Dance Company.

When we reached about the age of 12, 13, they let us know it was time for us to start attending pre-professional summer intensives. So I had the opportunity to study at the Ailey School, the Juilliard School Dance Theatre of Harlem. There was even a festival, I don't know if it exists anymore, called New Arts Festival, which was with Parsons and Dayton Contemporary Dance Company.

So I got to have a mix of both ballet and modern dance training in my background. When I graduated, I went to SUNY Purchase College for one year before joining Avoda Dance Ensemble, which was my first professional contract. I was there for one season and then moved to Dayton, Ohio, where I danced for Dayton Contemporary Dance Company's second company for two seasons.

Following that, I came back to Central Pennsylvania, which is where I'm from, and was, how do you say, like scouted. I was found by Sight and Sound Theatre in Lancaster, and I became a featured dancer there, dance captain, and then eventually the choreographer for the premiere of Joseph, which was in 2010. And 2010 was a pretty special year for me because the very first or second day, I know my anniversary, second day of the year, I got married, and then at the end of the year, I had my daughter Olivia.

So that's when my stage career took a pause. So after that, I went into teaching full time back at the Pennsylvania Regional Ballet Hershey School of Dance, and I had already taught at the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company school during my time in the company. And that, of course, led to doing choreography, and I got some really nice opportunities from that, one of which was the Breaking Glass Emerging Female Choreographers Project.

And that gave me a year's mentorship, in addition to showing my work at Symphony Space in New York. The best part about that was having someone guide me through learning how to market myself as a dancer. That was the first time I had to get a website, and you'll hear how that ties in later on in my story.

But after going through that process, let's see, that was 2013. So I want to say a year later, I was contacted by Messiah College, now Messiah University. And I was an adjunct instructor of dance.

I taught dance history, all the levels of ballet, and I also did a semester of advanced modern for them. So that was three and a half years. But during that time, I started to branch out a little bit.

I had, let's call it a project, called Dance Nerd, which was an apparel company. And with Dance Nerd, I also had a blog on that site. I had a blog on my danielleguillermo.com site, and I also had a blog on Dance Nerd.

When I stopped teaching at Messiah University, I have to get used to that. I took some time off, I just wanted to kind of take a sabbatical and reassess what I wanted to do next. And I had so many people ask me about the website for Dance Nerd, who did your website, that I realized this might be something I need to invest some time and energy into.

If people are asking me for this, I might want to pay attention. And so for the past five years, I have been involved in brand and web design. It's not only for dancers and dance organizations, but I do specialize in that.

But I've gotten to work with a number of industries, professionals of all fields in brand and web design. So in the end, how did that lead me to Dance News Daily? I always like to do something before my birthday. My birthday's at the end of the year in December, and it's like there's a clock that goes off in November.

What did you do this past year? And this particular past year, 2024, I was hanging out with my husband and he was showing me this thing that he had created with basketball. It was pulling stats. One thing was basketball, one thing was finance.

And I couldn't even really tell you what it was about. I just thought it was very interesting. And I wondered, could I do something like that for dance? We don't have stats, but how can I pull the latest press releases or information from different companies? So we built a little algorithm thing from that, and it worked, but it wasn't actually what I was going for.

And I also found that a lot of dance organizations didn't have the same technology that we found in basketball and in finance. So we kind of went old school and created what you call an aggregation website. So it's pulling from 60 different sources worldwide.

I say worldwide, we're mainly the US, UK, and Australia. And so I feel like everything that I've been doing has really led to the point of Dance News Daily. I've always been an advocate for education, as you can see, through my teaching and just for myself.

That goes as far back to using Dance Magazine to learn about different summer programs. So I've been really pleased to be able to create something that I can share with others, that students can use, that professionals can use, and even people who are retired from the field and want to stay involved can use.

Maia
So good. And I'm so excited and thankful that you created Dance News Daily, such a great resource. We're going to get into that, I think, in a second. But I want to circle back to what you said about back in 2013 when you made your first dance website. So how did that impact your story? What did you learn from that?

Danielle
Sure. The funny thing is, when I was asked, I think that was my very first task. My mentor gave me a list. These are the things that you need to check off to position yourself for the kind of jobs that you want. And so website was first on the list. And I want to say, whatever the cost was, I remember crowdsourcing on Facebook.

Who knows how to make a website? And I got someone and she showed me her portfolio and told me the cost. And I did not have the funds. And when I saw the portfolio, I wasn't particularly impressed to get the funds to do it.

So I thought, I have more time than money. So let me learn. So I learned and I used the same platform that I use today.

I remember starting with WordPress. I think I've tried everything, but I find my home with Squarespace. And today I'm in the Squarespace expert program.

So it was worth sticking with them, but it gave me an authority in the industry. So rather than communicating with people by, yeah, sure, I'll email you or let's stay in touch. There was actually a way for people to stay in touch.

All of a sudden, it wasn't just about me sending applications, trying to get different jobs or different dance opportunities or auditions. People found me instead. So I would get offers in my inbox instead of just having to wait in the same line with everyone else to do things.

Even locally, there were people who had never been in touch with me before, who were doing searches for whatever particular skill I had, whether they wanted me to come teach a class or do choreography, they were coming to me. So it made a huge impact. And I do believe it's part of why I was able to get the position with Messiah College.

When I had my first interview, well, first and only interview with the Dean, they led me into the office and he's, well, he's no longer at the school, but he was professor of music. And he was there in a headset with my website on a huge screen. And he was conducting along with one of my pieces of choreography.

It was a percussion piece in particular. So I kind of knew I had the job because we immediately bonded, but he had an opportunity to see my work before I even set foot in the room. So I'm a huge advocate of having your own website, no matter where you are in the journey.

I offer some tools if you're like where I was, and you don't have it to pay for custom design. But yeah, I definitely think it's worth having and it can change the path of your career. It sounds like and this is not the path that I was planning on talking to you about.

Maia
But it sounds like you really have search engine optimization kind of figured out from the sounds of it. People are coming to you. Is that something that you have learned about and become more educated in along the way as well?

Danielle
I have learned a lot. And it does make a difference. Where do I start with that? I know that at the point that I had a website, so that like I said, 2013, there weren't necessarily tons of dancers online. Maybe they were online through social media, sure, but not necessarily having websites.

And so if you looked up my name and my area, I came up first. Even now with Dance News Daily, it's been a hundred editions of Dance News Daily. It's been almost every single day.

But what I'm trying to say is it's at least when I Google and sometimes, you know, the results are different depending on where you're located and other things that you might be looking up. But in my house, from my devices, Dance News Daily is number one. When you Google Dance News, it comes before the New York Times.

It comes before Dance Magazine and a few other dance news sites that are out there. So yes, I do think it's true. I didn't necessarily go after that, but I have taken some coursework in search engine optimization.

Maia
I am so not in that world. I know nothing about it. I just bring that up because I think that what I do and so many dancers do is I want to share this thing, me dancing or something that my company is doing or I'm really excited about.

And we think that just putting this beautiful thing out into the world or the internet is going to land. And you know, for better or for worse, it's not really like that. So you have to have a little bit more of a strategy going into it.

And I also, yeah, I want to address this total market saturation now where everyone's online and you can't even just be the best dancer in the room. You have to also be the best dancer with the biggest following and all of these things. So I guess the first thing that I'll ask you about that and then maybe we can dig a little bit deeper into it is how are you vetting these sources that you filter into Dance News Daily? Because there's so much out there. And every day when I open my email, wow, there's a lot here just in this email. So how are you approaching this giant source material and funneling it into a single daily email?

Danielle
The thing is, when I started Dance News Daily, I assumed there was a ton of information out there. And I quickly learned that there isn't as much as we think.

So I had to really dig. So even though I shared that we're pulling from 60 different sources, that doesn't mean that 60 different sources are writing about dance daily. So there are some main sources that always come through.

You have the New York Times dance section. You have the four or five magazines that come through dance media. The corresponding magazines and news sources in the UK or in Australia.

That was kind of the core of where I started. Then I started to branch out into the dance science and health. People who maybe don't qualify as a formal news source, but are consistently putting out quality information.

They were on my list. Sources that I personally trusted and I have seen the value in their work. That was kind of the next level.

Then it was looking for reviews or people that specialized in dance education. So when you get on Dance News Daily, there's the main feed and that's everything mixed together. But then you can also go by topic.

There's science and health. There is a book page that has all the latest releases. There is the education and then there's professional companies.

They make up the last part. If a professional company has a blog, maybe even their press releases, that's also aggregated. So it's not just people who do a one-off blog or even a company.

If a company is not regularly writing, they're probably not on our radar. It's companies and organizations that are regularly putting out content that are on a professional level. So that way we can ensure that the information that's going out is quality and that it's not, again, as an educator, I want to make sure we have good sources.

That's what I would tell my students. So that's what I demand of myself and the organization. So I think that pretty much covers how we're looking at sources and who we're pulling from.

Maia
Okay. So you're vetting who and where you're pulling from and then there's some automation that happens after that that kind of fills out the feed. Is that how it works?

Danielle
The automation is happening in real time, 24 hours a day. So that's how you're not having to wait for news abroad. You can wake up and there's already articles from the UK. Now within the daily email, you'll see, especially on days where there's only a few of the automated articles that I will do my own personal search to stories that I think are of interest that maybe are a one-off story that don't make the feed.

And they also come from news sites that don't necessarily have a dance department or who aren't writing about dance regularly. And that's how I qualify those articles.

Maia
Okay. Yeah. There's so much value in that because I do learn a lot from Instagram and Facebook, but even if my eyes just linger for like a few seconds, more than usual on a video of an aerial backtalk, then the next day, my whole feed is aerial backtalk, aerial backtalk. And as an educator, then it's so hard to branch out and see what's actually happening in the professional world.

What are the skills that go into that? That doesn't exist in a bubble, but when everything's just filtered through an algorithm, it does. It's like you have your little bubble that's been curated for you. So I love that you have your personal touch and all of that experience in the professional world, shaping that, but still doing it on a very broad scale.

So we're not just getting a tiny little sliver of information. So that wasn't a question. That was just me giving you a compliment.

Danielle
That's fine. I love it.

Maia
So what are some trends that you're seeing in the professional dance world specifically that you think dance educators should be aware of?

Danielle
When I took a look back, sort of in anticipation of that question, I looked back through because with the daily digest, the daily email that goes out to subscribers, I can see the articles that they're interested in.

So I know that some readers just open and skim the headlines and that's completely fine. Again, that's why there's such a broad range because not everything is for everybody. Some people are more interested in dance business information.

Others are more interested in science and medicine. Of course, we don't have a ton of those articles because it takes more time to produce those. Some people are really interested in hearing who is the latest star at New York City Ballet and other people want to know how to become a better teacher.

But the articles that I see universally, at least right now with the subscriber base, and I'm still getting to know my audience, but I think the stories that move people the most are human interest stories. They're not necessarily about how to get a higher arabesque. They're about the 75-year-old dance studio owner who is retiring and how in the world did she keep her studio open so many years.

They're the stories about how dance is being used to make people's lives better in a care facility or to address PTSD or even just in pop culture. After the Super Bowl, there was lots of interest in the articles that came out after that. So while there's a fair amount of people who are just looking for certain types of stories, I think the universal stories are individual stories or how they help us as humans, how dance helps us as humans, I should say.

Maia
So as a dance teacher, already I'm like, there's such a good teaching moment there that our students so often get caught up in like, my arabesque, I wish it was higher, that type of thing. And we can talk about the human element of dance and the importance of the story that you're creating through the moves, not so much the moves themselves. I'm curious to hear also maybe your personal takeaways from what people seem to be consuming in the dance world. And then also as a dance educator, how would you use Dance News Daily specifically, or just in general, encourage your students to consume dance media in a way that's going to help them with whatever their pursuits in dance may be?

Danielle
Well, one of my thoughts when I started creating Dance News Daily was about how it was a particular modern class. I had this Monday modern class, 6.30 till 9. So sometimes it was a two and a half hour class. Sometimes it was an hour and a half class and rehearsal.

And sometimes we were like, how are we going to do this today? And I always started with the same question. What did you learn about dance this weekend? And the first couple of weeks, everybody just stared at me. And yes, it was a pre-professional school, but their focus was more like, I needed that weekend.

I didn't want to think about dance. And I understand that there's certainly a place for rest, but this isn't strenuous. It's not strenuous to read.

It's about keeping yourself informed. It's about keeping yourself up to date. And one other thing that I would add into that is, it's about taking ownership of your career.

I find, and maybe times have changed a bit since I was full-time in the studio, but a lot of times dancers became very, very dependent on their teachers. Every word that came out of their mouth, and it's good to be impactful. Teachers, we know that we have a special place in a child's life, but sometimes that dependency was almost dangerous.

Wherever they say I can dance, that's where I'm going to dance. Whatever they think I should do, that's what I'm going to do. And it's fine to have a mentor.

It's fine to have guidance, but you as a student and the parents who are guiding the students, you need to know some information for yourself. And so that's another reason why I encourage the dancers to learn on their own. So eventually it became like, okay, I have to get more specific with them.

What did you watch? What did you watch and not in a TikTok video? Did you even go on YouTube? And we can move back a little further before everybody was on YouTube. What DVD, what dance DVD did you watch this weekend? What book did you read? What article did you learn from? And bring that to the table. And then when they did, we would have something to talk about beyond dance, beyond the technical aspect of dance.

And sometimes we use that to inspire those slow Mondays where you think, okay, we've got a long time. We could just keep going. You can just keep plowing through, or you can stop and say, I watched Sylvie Guillaume over the weekend.

I watched an old video of Judith Jameson. Today, I'm going to embody that. I'm going to embody her movement in my dancing.

I'm going to approach it from this perspective. And so that's really, that's how I would encourage teachers to use it. You can have them visit the site on their own.

I think it's all pretty PG. Or, you know, if you have younger students, you would want to pull something for them, share it with them, talk about it with them and use it to inspire your class. Maybe it's about an aspect of dance science.

You know, maybe it is about getting the Arabesque one day. Maybe another day, it's about how in the world did this particular dancer overcome these things to get to where they want to go. But either way, no matter which end of the spectrum you land on, there's something to take from others that's not always physical.

We can start with the mind and then embody it.

Maia
Oh, yes. I love that.

Yeah. I think modern, as I teach modern as well, you teach modern. I think that's a great example of one of those areas where you can explain to your dancers what modern dance is.

And that's always really important to me because I feel like contemporary and modern and lyrical, it gets super muddy. And I'm like, we learn modern, this is what modern is. But I can say that all day.

And until they actually see where modern came from, and what modern dance companies look like today, and what the steps were along the way that kind of transformed it and are continuing to transform it, and it might look different in the future, but it's still modern because of these things. You have to see it and you have to delve into the pioneers of it to get that. So yeah, you're not going to find it on Instagram, really.

Danielle
Not so much. Another way that teachers can use it, I forgot to mention that there is a resource section. It's fairly new, but it has a section about Alvin Ailey from, I think the series is called Portraits of Ailey.

It's an eight-part series that was created for the classroom. You could take a section of it. I want to say at most it's about eight minutes long.

Each section is about eight minutes long and there's questions for feedback. That would be a great way to get started. There's also a section that I used to use at the college called Ballet Evolved.

It comes from the Royal Ballet and it starts at the very beginnings of ballet with both lecture and demonstration with dancers from the Royal Ballet. It's a 15-part series, goes through the names of the dance greats in ballet over the centuries into present time. Then there's also just resources about point readiness.

That's another great place for teachers to check out on Dance News Daily.

Maia
Fantastic. This question might seem really silly because we've said Dance News Daily so many times throughout this interview, but I do always ask, how can people connect with you? Maybe they're like, what is Dance News Daily, which we didn't really get into to start out.

Danielle
That's a good point.

Maia
My bad. That's on me. Maybe tell us a little bit more about where people can find you and Dance News Daily.

Danielle
Sure. I know we started with my story and using web design to propel my career forward. I continue to write about dance occasionally and offer branding and web design services at danielleguillermo.com. Dance News Daily is at dancenewsdaily.com. It is a website that pulls or aggregates news from over 60 different sources worldwide. There's also a daily newsletter that you can subscribe to for free on the website. You get a daily email with a snapshot or a summary of the latest headlines between 9 and 10 a.m. Eastern time every morning, seven days a week.

Maia
Perfect.

Danielle
Always in your inbox.

Maia
You got the elevator pitch down pat. Awesome. Then I feel like this last question also might be super overwhelming for someone that consumes as much dance media as you do, but do you have a favorite quote related to dance that you would share with us?

Danielle
I do. I have so many. You're right. I have a lot. I love dance. you know, this is a second home, of sorts; dance is a home for me. So it was hard; it's hard to choose, but I think back to Sunday afternoons being at my house.

Every Sunday afternoon. I couldn't even tell you what ages I was doing this, but let's say from maybe 10 years old thorugh graduation, I was always something on Sunday afternoons, something dance related on VHS all the way through. I had two favorites; one was ABT now which I think, I won't even say what year that came out, but I was always watching Paloma Harerra and Angel Corella do Don Q.

That section; that was one of my favorite parts of the piece. There was a Nacho Duato section. But I would watch that over and over again. But the other one was an evening with Alvin Ailey. It has 4 different pieces that are interspersed with an interview with Alvin Ailey.

And so, my quote, although I could take many many many from that video is what he said about, "Dance is for everybody. I believe that dance came from the people, and it should always be delivered back to the people." I think that's something that I've always kept in mind as a choreographer in my approach to teaching.

And as a colleague and friend of mine would always say at Messiah University - he would say, he would tell the students, Greg Hurley, that dance is service. And I think that helps to keep one grounded, that what we do is not just about us. It's about the people. And we're giving it back to the people.