Curtis Williams, 20, is a performer with the Florida Ballet. He has been dancing for the last nine years. He and Mary Beth Beasley, a fellow dancer, created the Coastal Arts Project.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
“I really didn’t start out interested in dancing. I had a role as one of the background kids in the musical ‘Oliver’ and I had to learn to dance for that. Once I started, I found out I loved it.”
A SHOWER OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS
“I was born in upstate New York, but my dad was in the service so we lived all over. When I was eight, we moved to Japan. I loved it. It was a great place. In Japan, there are a lot of cherry trees. When the blossoms fell off it was like a rainstorm of cherry blossoms.”
A GOOD PLACE TO LEARN
“From Japan, my family came directly to Jacksonville. I am the youngest of five kids, and I have 13 nieces and nephews. [Jacksonville] was a great place to get some experience while making the transition from student to professional, but I don’t see myself staying here. There comes a time when one has to experience new things. With all the traveling my family’s done, I’ve learned I really can’t be happy staying in one place. It bores me.”
HIS ‘DREAM CHILD’
“Three years ago Mary Beth Beasley, another dancer with The Florida Ballet, asked me to do ‘The Nutcracker’ in her hometown of Havelock, which is about two hours from Raleigh. I agreed to do it, purely as a voluntary thing. [The performance] went very well and ended up generating a lot of interest. Then we let it lapse until this past year, when she said to me, ‘Suppose we started our own project.’ That was the genesis of the Coastal Arts Project. This July 4, we were the featured performers in the Freedom Festival, a day-long event in Havelock City Park. We performed on an outdoor stage with a beautiful handpainted picture of an American eagle and a flag. It was flanked on both sides by paintings of firefighters and [the wreckage of] the World Trade Center. When we started the performance, there were about 300 people watching. By the time we got to the third piece, everyone in the park was watching.”
THE BENEFITS OF WORKING
WITH A SMALL COMPANY
“One of the good things about working with a small company like The Florida Ballet is that you have an opportunity to form friendships that you might not have in a larger one. There are so many places where people are ready to stab you in the back for a certain part or role. Here, none of us are competing. We’ve even had people who come here to visit, comment on how well we all seem to get along. As bad as I make big companies sound, I think it’s very important to have that experience. You may end up hating it, but it’s important that you experience it for yourself.”
ECLECTIC TASTES
“From Bach to rap, there’s no music that I don’t listen to. The other day I left my CD case out, and someone looked through it and said, ‘That’s got to be [Curtis].’ Any music that I play, beautiful or not, I see movement and I see dancing.”
FAVORITE FOOD?
“I’d have to say, a baguette from Zabar’s in New York, with some very, very good brie. I could eat that all day long.”
HIS ‘SECOND HOME’
“I’ve always been interested in creating things, but I never used to think of myself as a big do-it-yourselfer. Now, Home Depot is like my second home. I like to create things that you might think at first are off the wall, but the longer you look at them, the more interesting they get. I decided I wanted to turn my bedroom into a Japanese temple. I made a canopy bed, with wooden blinds for the top. For the headboard, I used a huge, six-foot fan that we brought back with us from Japan as the headboard. Of course, being a dancer I had to have tulle and chiffon in the corners.”
— by Patti Connor