180: Katie Marquis

Nostalgia Interviews with Chris Deacy

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet Katie Marquis. Katie runs Dance Warehouse, a dance school in Canterbury where she was once a pupil. We find out how Katie has realized the three dreams she set herself as a child, and how she is very focused and determined as a person and we talk about the inevitability of the route she has taken.
Katie is originally from Canterbury but her family moved to the Netherlands when she was two. She went to the Royal School of Ballet when she was aged sixteen and later performed with a touring ballet company where she met her husband.
When she was growing up, Katie didn’t really have much time for anything outside of school and ballet, but throughout her life has often had the radio on in the background – and we find out what her guilty pleasure is on a Friday night!
We talk about the importance of time management and organization, how digital technology has made some facets easier, as well as about the role of fate and destiny and the way we inhabit different personae in our lives.
Katie has a 105-year-old grandmother who has seen immense changes over the course of her life, and we talk about the photos that she has of when her husband went off to fight in the Second World War.
We talk about how today life has become very instant, thanks for example to Reality TV shows, and the importance of having realistic expectations and how the journey and not just the destination is important.
We discuss the way that we often learn from our pupils, and Katie speaks about how her own dance pupils have brought her into the 21st century with various new ideas and images.
We find out how the pandemic impacted on Katie’s teaching, including the challenge of teaching on Zoom and dancing in confined spaces, and how it has in some ways done her some favours.
Then, towards the end of the interview, we discover what advice her adult self would give to her younger self, and what ambitions Katie has to encourage the younger generation back into the arts. Then, at the end, we find out whether Katie thinks of herself as being a looking back or a looking forward type of person.