Daily Inspiration: Meet Casey Noblett

Today we’d like to introduce you to Casey Noblett.

Hi Casey, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I grew up dancing at my mom’s small-town studio, The Dancers’ Workshop in Roxboro, NC. When I was nine she took her dancers to an open master class at Duke with her idol, Jacques d’Amboise. I was the tiny kid in huge glasses, but somehow he noticed me and asked me to perform in his residency show in Durham which then led to an invitation to study in New York City with his company, the National Dance Institute. Every summer my mom Toni and my little brother Cassidy and I would go live in NYC and train with some of the best dancers in the industry. It was our first real view that dance can be a career and not just a dream.

Cassidy and I performed at incredible venues like Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center Honors and the White House. It definitely hooked both of us and we knew we would put in the work to make this our reality.

After studying at UNCSA and then New World School of the Arts in Miami I headed to Tokyo, Japan to perform with Tokyo Disneyland, then back to Miami to work on multiple Latin television networks, and then ended up in Atlanta, GA as a dancer and captain of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks dance team.

Because my mom was a teacher I always said I would NEVER teach, but along the way, I was asked to teach dance master classes to studios and companies. From there I realized I had an entire network of performer friends (including my family of course) that were specialized in all genres of dance. I started N-House Productions in 2001 and we were one of the first in-studio dance conventions in the US, which means I would bring in teachers from NYC and LA to dance studios rather than making them trek to the big cities.

Soon I realized how much I actually loved teaching and I transitioned into it full-time. My mom had always brought in famous teachers from NYC to her studio and I wanted to make this high-level training accessible to dancers everywhere, no matter their location or financial status and that is what we built NHP on.

As N-House Productions grew I knew my next step was to create a more intense program for those talented and focused dancers that also wanted to make dance their career but may not know how to go about it. My original NHP crew, including my now very successful little brother, piloted the Commercial Dance Intensive at UNCSA, my alma mater, in 2015 and we opened with 35 dancers that summer and 125 on the waitlist! It was incredible and we knew there was something special happening. After three awesome years there, we broke off to expand and added a winter event and a summer overnight on both the east and west coasts.

CDI at its core was imagined as a place where my colleagues and I could help train the next generation of dancers in more than just technique. There are so many things that go into being successful and no one teaches it! So we collectively decided to create a curriculum based on all the things no one told us that we had to learn the hard way. Things like how to read a contract, file taxes, personal branding, vocabulary that is used on a TV set, how to get an agent, how much it actually costs to live in NYC or LA, how to decide on a college, how to survive the no’s (and there are a lot of them) and also running them through mock auditions so they are ready for the real ones!

My brother Cassidy is our creative director and with him in the lead, we shoot a full music video with an artist each summer so that the dancers not only get to build their resumes but also be on set. We just finished up our 7th one in Temecula, CA last week. Adam Cates, who has been with me since the very beginning, wrote a book called “The Business of Show” which we use as a textbook for working in the dance industry. Before COVID, our Winter participants would get to perform on the court of an NBA or College basketball game and now some of them are actually on college dance teams and pro-dancers!

Also funny to note, my dad (the dentist and only non-dancer in the family) now participates in our parent seminar helping other “civilians” navigate the crazy world of dance and support their kids in an industry they know nothing about. He now wants his own podcast 🙂

We are currently in our 8th summer of CDI and COVID forced us to transition to a more retreat-style event which actually gives us more one-on-one time with our dancers to hone in on their individual goals and help them make those happen. It is so exciting to watch our alumni join the workforce and get into their dream dance schools, and have full makeovers to become who they truly want to be. I have an incredible team of teachers who leave their egos at the door and focus on making this generation more confident and prepared to be in the dance industry no matter where they started.

And N-House Productions is still going strong over 20 years later! We have a new name, Commercial Dance Intensive On Location and it is run by a former student and assistant of NHP, Gia Mongell. I loved to be able to pass the torch onto someone who grew up in it!

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Is there a smooth road to success? Ha! I feel like the greatest achievements were born from the biggest failures.

We have def had some incredible success but COVID really threw us for a loop. In the years after UNCSA, we hosted CDI at colleges on both the east and west coasts. When the pandemic started in March of 2020 we were two months out from our big event at UC Santa Barbara. All colleges stopped hosting events and closed their doors. We had to make a huge decision to find a way to do this or cancel all together. I remember my husband saying “well you can either cancel or be the last man standing this summer”. So last man standing I was!

I booked big Air B-n-Bs in random towns that were secluded and held my breath for the 8 days the dancers were with us in Ojai, CA and masked up the whole time. My faculty was literally in gloves making breakfast for these kids! The day we were leaving Ojai, two weeks before my Atlanta east coast event with 30 + dancers I lost our big retreat house. I rebooked a new one. Lost that one. Two days later booked a THIRD one. Lost that one. Lots of sleepless nights and then I somehow someway found a huge cabin in Pigeon Forge, TN that was not only available but that would give us a discount. (I had lost thousands on the houses that canceled). It turned out to be an incredible location for our event and created a new and better retreat layout for our summer training.

COVID is still creating stress for every event we hold as our main priority is to keep dancers and our faculty safe but we feel that this generation needs some positive vibes and support right now so it is worth the effort. It is really hard though to have both faculty and dancers cancel right before our events (no fault of their own) and it leaves us scrambling every time to make it happen. I am definitely missing the days where a delayed flight was my biggest stressor.

Another huge thing that happened a few years back was that we were invited into a major college dance program to hold a CDI On Location. We had a great weekend of training with their dance dept who took pics and videos and asked tons of questions about how to incorporate more commercial dance into their curriculum. They advertised our partnership before and during the event.

One month after we left they put out a press release announcing their brand new summer program “The Commercial Dance Intensive (CDI)”. This was shocking and a huge blow to us that they would use the brand we had spent so long building and try to claim it as their own. After letters, emails, and lawyers they still refused to change the name and used their unlimited resources as a major university to hammer in that we did not own CDI and that they were welcome to it. We started a social media campaign entitled “two feet one sound” to unify the dance community against such actions and lack of ethics. Our goal was that we need to stick together and not try to tear each other down.

We applied twice for a copyright of the name but because they had used it in promotional materials, it was decided that the name was too common as it was being used in multiple places. Thousands of dollars spent, tears shed, plates thrown and we finally bowed out and decided our money and energy was best spent on our dancers and not on this fight. They are still using our name today and we get emails confusing us. It was a rough time for us and the hardest thing is that the trust we had in our clients was broken.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I will tell you what I am most proud of and how I feel I am able to pay it forward for all the gifts and opportunities I was given.

Since a psychology class in college, I have had this printout of the starfish story on my work bulletin board. It goes like this:

“An old man was walking along the beach picking up starfish on the shore and throwing them back into the ocean. A young man walked by and asked, ‘Old man, why do you day after day walk along and throw these starfish back into the ocean? There are hundreds of them, you will never make a difference.’ The old man reached down, picked up a starfish and said “It makes a difference to this one.”

One night years ago I was in my office and I found a photo of me as a nine years old backstage at Duke for my first performance with Jacques d’Amboise. In that moment I had this overwhelming realization that I was his starfish! He plucked me out of NC and gave me the opportunity of a lifetime.

I walked up to bed with such a warm feeling and clarity of what I had been given. I went to the sink to brush my teeth and you will not believe it-stuck in my sink stopper was a yellow plastic starfish!!! I had never seen this in my house before. I of course started crying and realized the universe was telling me it was my turn to pick out starfish and that it’s not about getting to everyone. My purpose was to make a difference, one at a time, just as Jacques had done for my brother and me.

To support and connect to our dancers after they leave CDI, my brother created the #armyoflove. Once you have attended one of our events you are officially in it and you get a luggage tag so that other dancers can see. This means that for the rest of your life, dance or not, we will be there for you as a faculty and a community. None of us got to where we are alone and we want to support these kids in any way we can to ensure their success.

How do you define success?
Success for me is getting to do what I love, with the people I love and knowing at the end of the day that I am making a difference. All my life I dreamed of dance as my career and I made that happen. Now, to be able to help the next generation of young dancers live their dreams – that is what makes me continue to do what I do. But if anyone wants to hand over a bag of money I can use for scholarships, that wouldn’t hurt either LOL!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.commercialdanceintensive.com
• Instagram: @commercialdanceintensive
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CommercialDanceIntensive/videos

Image Credits
Nick Isabella Photography MK Cranford Photography