Best Dance Research Job Application Covering Note

Last Day of Summer Dance Party, (c) Carole Edrich 2014

I was recently commissioned to write a small gift book on the Joy of Dance for Summersdale. As it’s a gift book it covers the whole range of dance rather than deals with it in depth, and includes fun trivia, dance history, a review of dance forms, lots of quotes, interesting facts and a deadline I couldn’t hope to meet if I didn’t know so much about dance. I’m able to use lots of the things I’ve learned through dance photography, through having had dance as an integral part of my life and through researching articles for magazines like Dance Today for well over a decade. There are gaps in my knowledge nonetheless; I’ve never been interested in really traditional ballet and since I’ve made it a point only to write about what I have experienced am limited to just under 75 different forms.

Since I accepted the contract scant days after agreeing to other aggressive deadlines, the best way to produce work of sufficient quality for Summersdale is to outsource the research to a person or people I trust. As I’m embedded in the dance world, instead of advertising through conventional means I posted a facebook update asking if anyone felt like doing the research. One old friend has volunteered to do some of it, and of course I’ll take him up. But as I’m using the experience I gain to create optimal processes for a future project I need someone else to do a lot of the work.

Last Day of Summer Dance Party, (c) Carole Edrich 2014

There were a number of dancers interested, but this is what made the person I chose stand out for the role; “I mentioned your book in a conversation with my mother over the weekend. She gave me an example of why I would qualify for the position (she said the following in all seriousness!!!!) When I was about 9-10 yrs old I wrote a letter to the publishing company of an old ballet book I owned. You know the kind, big hard-back- lots of black and whites with a few hand-coloured photographs, out of print too. I wrote to correct them on misnaming a Canadian ballet dancer in one of the photographs. To be fair, I knew this because I had a Canadian ballet teacher at the time and the dancer happened to be her brother! However, I did receive a letter of apology from the publisher promising to correct the error if they did ever print the book in the future.”

Enough said! You’ll most likely be reading about how we get on.