When not performing in the Maine State Ballet, Elizabeth Chadbourne spends time on the Boston campus studying to become a physical therapist.
This summer, Elizabeth Chadbourne learned to juggle two roles.
As the Swan Queen in the Maine State Ballet’s production of “Swan Lake,” Chadbourne had to embody the dual roles of docile Odette, or the White Swan, and her malicious counterpart, the Black Swan, Odile.
Luckily, her time as a student at Northeastern University and living on the Boston campus helped prepare her for this, especially when it came to portraying the more audacious and sneaky Odile.
“Having to act both of those roles in like an hour and a half span was very difficult and very challenging,” says Chadbourne, a rising junior. “I figured that (Odette) would be an easier one for me to grasp on to because I’m also very soft-spoken, but I found that being the Black Swan was more enjoyable, and it came a lot more naturally to me than I thought it would.”
Portraying the darker role required a bold presence on stage. The performance surprised even those who knew her.
“(Odile) is so confident. You have to be looking directly into the audience, and make eye contact with people the whole time and act like you’re taking charge,” Chadbourne says. “I figured that would be much more difficult for me, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. A lot of people were like, ‘Where did that come from?’”
Looking back, she believes a major life change helped unlock something within her.
“I think, honestly, a lot of the confidence to do that role came from going away and living in Boston for two years, because that requires a lot of confidence,” she says. “I hadn’t really realized there was this side of me that had more confidence and was more willing to take command of the situation.”
Outside this summer’s production of “Swan Lake,” Chadbourne plays dual roles in real life as well. When she’s not performing as a soloist for the Maine State Ballet during the holidays or summertime, you can find her studying up around the Boston campus as a health sciences student at Northeastern.
Before coming to Northeastern, Chadbourne’s entire life was ballet, starting from the time she was in kindergarten and began taking classes at the Maine State Ballet. She continued taking classes through her sophomore year of high school. It was then that she pivoted from the school side of the ballet to joining the company side as a dancer.
This role is for serious dancers who want to devote more of their time to ballet and offers the chance to be part of the company’s professional productions.
“Having that throughout high school was a really interesting outlet … and it really benefited me, just in the people I met and the opportunities that I was given,” Chadbourne says. “It allows you to find yourself a little bit more, be creative and grow your confidence, because you’re dancing in front of a bunch of people. … Being able to do all of that and have all those opportunities set me up really nicely to have the confidence to do other things.”
Chadbourne worked her way up from apprentice to corps de ballet to becoming a soloist, taking on roles like Clara in “The Nutcracker” and Gretel in “Hansel and Gretel.”
While she loved dance, Chadbourne eventually realized she didn’t want to pursue it as a career and decided to branch out and look into going to college to study something different.
“I toured a lot of places and a lot of schools in Boston, but none of them really felt like what I wanted,” Chadbourne says. “Then I toured Northeastern. I don’t know what it was about it, but it was that feeling like I need to go there, like I need to be there. And it kind of became ‘OK, how do I get there?’”
She also knew she wanted to keep dancing with Maine State Ballet, so she worked out an arrangement with the company that has allowed her to return for summer shows and their annual production of “The Nutcracker,” where she played the challenging role of the Marzipan Shepherdess.
“I remember my last ballet performance with them before I left for freshman year, was ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ and there’s this one really beautiful scene that they do where Hansel and Gretel get lost in the forest and they go to sleep, and angels watch over them and make sure they stay safe,” Chadbourne says. “It’s such a beautiful piece. The last performance we did, I was just bawling on stage. And I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m ready to leave.’ So I had a chat with the director, and I was like, ‘Do you think we could make it work?’”
Coming to Northeastern, Chadbourne found more of the courage and daringness she later used when dancing as the Black Swan. She joined Northeastern University Dance Company, a student dance group, and performed in a show with them. She tried out some contemporary dance pieces. Through this, she met her roommate.
She also explored a new career path. Chadbourne spent a lot of time in physical therapy as a dancer and decided this was something she wanted to pursue herself. She did a co-op with the outpatient PT clinic Boston Sports Medicine where she worked with athletes and geriatric patients. When the clinic had an influx of dancers come in, she got to use her own experience to help with the patients.
“They leaned on me a little bit … to explain how we are always in turnout, and how that could affect our musculature, and an imbalance between back muscles and core muscles and glute muscles,” she says. “We had some patients who had just gotten on point, which is always a super exciting landmark in a dancer’s journey, but it also can be really trying on the feet and ankles. And so I was able to educate the physical therapist on what it means to be on point and what you have to do to make sure that you can safely be on point. Getting to draw off of their much more complex understanding of human anatomy and physiology, and then kind of adding my expertise on dancing in the mix was super, super cool.”
This co-op helped Chadbourne this summer when she made her annual return to Maine State Ballet and taught classes on top of performing. Her experience working in physical therapy helped her understand why her young students struggled with certain moves.
“Teaching was definitely a really cool way to integrate what I learned in co-op into the dance sphere,” she says.
Chadbourne hopes to continue maintaining the dual role of student and dancer, and to pursue her dream of dance while going to grad school to become a physical therapist, using her experience to help other young ballerinas.
“I can’t really picture my life without dance,” she says. “I think it creates a really nice balance of the day to day. So I think that’ll always be something that I’m trying to maintain. And being in college and away from my typical dance community has definitely shown me that I can do it. But a lot of dancers that I know want to go into (physical therapy) and I think dancers have a leg up, in a sense, because we do have such an understanding of our bodies, and we do usually need PT. We understand a lot of injuries and how joints work, and how to use certain muscles to get on our balance, or get our leg higher. Experience definitely does help.”