Everyone please welcome my friend and fellow Wichita State alumni Maddie Mason, to A Broadway Body: Continued Conversations! Maddie is a dance teacher and choreographer based in Oklahoma City, OK. We’d attended university at the same time and danced in many a class together, and I was thrilled to have a conversation with her!

The way Maddie speaks about showing up to the dance spaces she leads is of the utmost importance if we want to shift outdated narratives about dancers’ bodies. Not only is her lens as a dance teacher and choreographer so needed in today’s dance world, she’s also a mom. Hearing her talk about how she shows up around her kids and ensures to not talk down about other people’s bodies in front of them gives me hope for our future generations to come. Maddie is a gem of a person, and I cannot wait for you to hear our discussion around body image and dance!

“ Like you said, in “Cabaret,” the ensemble member was wearing the exact same costume, and they probably created a costume for her, the exact same design as everybody else. Instead of, I don't know how many times it was, “Here's the box. Here's the costumes. Find one that you fit in.” And there was a time in college where I was like, “I don't fit into any of these, so either I have to find a different costume, or I'm not in this piece, or I have to work to fit into a costume.” It’s stuff like that that is treating people with humility. And as an artist, I don't feel like we grew up learning that or feeling like we deserved that. And now that we're grownups, we can change that and make sure we're in spaces where that is not happening, where that's not the culture.”

- Maddie Mason

Megan Gill: Hi, Maddie! Thank you for being with me here today for this conversation. I'm so excited to talk.

Maddie Mason: Thank you for having me, Megan.

Megan Gill: Of course! Do you wanna start by just introducing yourself and sharing a little bit about the work that you do in the world today?

Maddie Mason: Yeah, so my name is Maddie Mason. I am 35 years old. I am originally from Wichita, Kansas. I graduated from college with a BFA in Dance Performance. From there, I worked at the college level, worked with kids in studios. I've done choreography workshops. We've done workshops! But in 2019, my husband and I moved to Vegas, and I taught dance out there at studios until COVID, and then everything changed. But now we live in Oklahoma City. We love it. We're getting settled, and yeah, I'm still teaching dance and kind of freelancing here and there.

Megan Gill: I love that. We love the freelancer life. And we went to school together during the same time. We were both in adjacent programs at our same college. That is where we met in our origin story. So we have a lot of the same community and come from a similar collegiate educational background too.

Maddie Mason: Yes. Yeah, I think we both – I think it was, I don't know, modern or jazz that we were in together, but we had a lot of mutual friends, and so it was I knew you, you knew me, and then we got to dance together.

Megan Gill: Yeah, and I was always that music theater kid that was taking random dance classes that I didn't need to take. Like I think I would just show up and not even be enrolled!

Maddie Mason: You were! You would take everything. You'd be like, okay, hip hop this semester. I'm pretty sure we took tap a couple times together. There were a lot of tap memories there.

Megan Gill: Probably.

Maddie Mason: Oh, yeah. Good times. It feels like a lifetime. It's just wild.

Megan Gill: Good times, it really does. It’s pretty wild.

Maddie Mason: We're all grown up now. All the lessons we’ve learned.

Megan Gill: It's crazy. Okay, so you grew up in the dance world. Have you just been dancing your whole entire life? I know you mentioned that your mom and your aunt were both dancers in the eighties, so I imagine that you just came out of the womb in dance classes.

Maddie Mason: Honestly, yeah. My mom taught with me. My parents opened up the studio in, I think it was ‘86 or ‘87, and my mom taught pregnant with me up until the day before I was born. So I've been there the whole time and it's so cute because I got to do that with my daughter too. So I got to teach with her and my belly up until the day before she was born. So it's kind of a generational thing. But yeah, my daycare, nursery was in the studio in the back room, and it's kind of just I really had no choice. It was just what we did, you know? My mom wasn't gonna pay a babysitter. She was gonna stick me in ballet class.

And so, I've never known a world without dance, which gives me, I think, an interesting perspective. Instead of people who find their passion for it, I think mine grew, for sure, and there have been so many ups and downs that it's just been an interesting ride from the very beginning.

Megan Gill: Yeah, this thing that you just came into and this way of life that you didn't know any differently. Did it take you time to – did you kind of resist it at points or were there times where you were like, “I don't love this”? Is that what you were talking about?

Maddie Mason: Oh yeah. I think in elementary school was the first time it was all my friends were joining Girl Scouts, and that seemed really fun. But my mom owned a dance studio, so it was like, “Well, after school we pick you up when we go to the studio.”

So I felt like I did miss out on normal kids activities. So I did, in elementary school, see a lot of friends doing different stuff that I did want to maybe get into. But dance was always the main focus, and I don't think it was until maybe eighth grade that it clicked for me and I was like, “Oh, I love this. I wanna do this.” And I've always wanted to be a teacher from the very beginning. I mean, every little girl dreams of being a dancer. And in middle school it was like, “Oh, I wanna be a Britney Spears backup dancer.” And then, you know, it was the first time I think I had gotten a scholarship for the next year, and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I just idolized those teachers and was like I want to make people feel like how they made me feel.

So I think from the beginning and having my mom as a teacher, seeing that side of things just kind of I knew that was the path I wanted to take, but, no, as a kid, it's confusing, and you're like, “How am I gonna get here?”

Megan Gill: Totally. I love that. I'm curious, as someone, obviously when you're a dancer or a dance teacher, you spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, right? So obviously growing up in dance – I also grew up in the dance world, you just learn that looking at yourself in the mirror is a way of life also.

Maddie Mason: Yeah.

Megan Gill: That is how you self-correct. That's how you check your form. It’s such a tool, but I also feel like it this thing that can lead some people to a very dark place when it comes to their body image. I'm curious how growing up in front of the mirror in dance impacted your body image from a young age and how growing up in that space affected you as far as how you saw yourself and related to your body.

Maddie Mason: Yeah, so I always, as a child, never really gave it a thought. My sister has always been bigger than I am. And so, she got a lot of the brunt of when it came to, “Oh, here's what you should eat. Here's what you shouldn't eat.” My mom came from the eighties high-cut leotard Spandex days where it was like we have a cigarette and a Diet Coke for lunch, and that's it.

And so, we grew up – you know, my mom always with the fad diets, at a young age, hearing about all that and looking at how my mom treated that whole world and her own body. I saw it. I think my sister experienced a lot more of that trauma. A lot of it was aimed at her a little more because I had a higher metabolism than she did. We ate the same things, we had the same diet, the same routine. We were just different. And that was hard for my mom too. It was hard for her to have a kid who wasn't just naturally thin from the get go.

And so, my mom also had to work kind of at the body she has in a different way. So she was like, “I did this. When I gained weight as a kid, this is what I did to fix it, and you can fix it too. You just have to not eat this or this.”

So all of that was aimed at my sister, but I was definitely observing it and listening and taking it in. It didn't really hit me, I guess, until I graduated high school because I had danced my whole life growing up. I was always active, always dancing constantly. I didn't give a second thought to my nutrition, really. When I got to high school age, I mean, I could feed myself.

So I gained weight right after high school. I mean, lots of people do. And it was like that summer, right after high school, I'd had a little freedom. I didn't have to dance that summer. It was the first time I think I'd been given a break ever.

Megan Gill: Wow.

Maddie Mason: So I ate, I slept, I drank, and I gained a lot of weight. And for me it was, “Oh no.” I remember it being such a terrifying feeling because growing up, this is the worst thing that could happen to you. How dare you be comfortable and relax. And it was always, “You gotta be on top of it. You gotta be strict.”

So that’s my background there, but then again, I remember hanging out with these two boys that I went to school with and they were saying,