Hayley Bone, a second-year student from Dartmouth, NS, brings a unique perspective to the classroom, shaped by her career as a professional dancer. While the worlds of dance and law may seem miles apart, she has discovered some unexpected connections between the two. Bone recently sat down with Nexus to share her journey—from her early passion for ballet to her time on the professional stage, what ultimately drew her to UNB Law, and her aspirations for the future.
Well, I grew up dancing. It was one of my biggest passions, and I always wanted to pursue a dance career. After I finished high school, I completed a dance teacher training program. It was a post-secondary diploma program in classical ballet and dance pedagogy at the Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts. Throughout my childhood years, I was fortunate to train at a high level in Nova Scotia. After completing the program, I started working as an independent dance artist in Halifax and I started teaching. That was an excellent experience. Dance felt like it was something that I needed to do, and that it was something I would always wonder about if I didn't.
I started when I was three, so I don’t think I had a big say in it at the time [laughs]. I just love how it feels, how movement feels. Dance has this great balance of creativity and expression, but also discipline. When I first started, I was doing all kinds of different styles and doing things that were maybe a little bit more commercial. I was going to competitions, and it was a little bit more about flashy choreography and performing, which was amazing. I love performing, it’s such a rush and so fun.
Around the age of twelve, I started to really focus on ballet specifically. There was a teacher that I was working with who stripped things down. It wasn’t about the rhinestones and costumes and production value, it was about the technique, the solid foundation, and the discipline of it. It was so challenging, and I honestly loved developing that sense of discipline. It was rewarding to do something so technically challenging and to improve. That experience really made me fall in love with ballet.
It was amazing. I feel fortunate to have had access to such high-quality performance opportunities. I think it's so important to be exposed to a professional-level production, where students get to work with and learn from professional dancers. There is so much value in getting to see everything that goes into a production of that magnitude beyond just the dancers on the stage—the rehearsal directors, production managers, stage managers, the props and costume designers.
Getting to perform soloist roles was incredible. That experience helped fuel my love of performing, and it definitely helped me grow a lot as an artist. It's a milestone in my training for sure. I think the best part was working with Symphony Nova Scotia. Every night on stage there was an orchestra pit with a full symphony playing live. When I was a younger member of the cast, I would only dance every other show. For the shows that I wasn't dancing in, I would sit in the front row of the theater and just watch the symphony. I could feel the music going right through me. Musicality is such a big part of ballet and dance; getting to work with live musicians of that caliber was incredible.
I love performing, and I know that that's not the case for everyone. It's like an energy exchange. You’re putting yourself out there and showing your craft. You get a lot of energy back from the audience and it just feels electrifying and empowering. The Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax, where The Nutcracker that I performed in takes place, is a big venue. Getting the chance to do a solo as a teenage girl and being able to hold the attention of hundreds of people was terrifying and challenging but I think it also really instilled a level of confidence in me. Now, in law school, I feel like I'm just performing in a different way. I'm taking my trial advocacy course with Professor Lockyer this term. I'm really interested in litigation because it feels like a branch of performance.
I was fortunate to be exposed to a few different methodologies. I think it's the same as with anything, being exposed to different ways of doing something only makes you stronger. The first ballet that I did was Russian ballet, known as Vaganova. That was my first love. Then I did a little bit of British style, the Royal Academy of Dance. Later in my career, I trained under the Cecchetti method, which comes from Italy. I ended up choosing this style when I pursued my teaching qualifications. If Vaganova was my first love, then Cecchetti is the style I got married to [laughs]. Everything always informs everything else. It just gives me a richer understanding of the specifics of a style to know how it differs.
I started going to these summer intensives when I was around twelve or thirteen. I was traveling alone and spending summers away from home for training. It was scary and challenging, but it helped me grow a lot as a person. It gave me a sort of breadth of exposure and experience in terms of training and getting to learn from some incredible teachers and other dancers. That was when I got my first taste of spending time in Toronto for any extended period and that informed me way down the line when I decided to apply for summer law jobs. It helped me to know that the city was somewhere I would like to be and where I could see myself living.
Yes, that actually sort of marks a transition from working as a dance artist and educator into academia and then law school. The Ways We Move is a docuseries produced by Nova Scotia’s Skye Larke Productions and distributed by Eastlink. By nature of the small size of the Halifax dance community, a producer heard my name and reached out to see if I would be interested in developing a show about dance. We did three seasons, each with six episodes. I dance on the show and interview different dancers, movement artists, and educators across the province. They teach me about their style, discipline, and career. It was a great experience. I got to wear so many different hats.
My teaching practice was developed right alongside my dance career. I received fantastic teacher training from the Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts, and I received an Associate teacher’s certification from Cecchetti Canada. I taught dance in Halifax for many years and eventually took some time away from that when I was finishing my undergrad and writing my thesis. This year, I got back into teaching, ballet classes here in Fredericton. It's something that is really fulfilling and I find it to be not dissimilar from performing. It's the same energy exchange, you put yourself out there and what's really amazing is the energy that you get back from your students. I think it is most rewarding when I see that something works or sticks for a student. That’s my favorite part.
During law school, teaching dance has been a great—I don't want to say escape—but I guess kind of. It’s nice to have parts of yourself that aren't only focused on law. It's nice to have something that is different and totally energizing. I'll put in a long day of schoolwork and then I'll go and teach ballet for two hours and I feel like I just got a full night's rest. I would love to be able to keep teaching and to keep interacting with dance as I move into my legal career.
There are really challenging aspects of a career in the arts. I started to crave a bit more career stability, so I went to Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. I really didn’t know what I was looking for out of the experience; I just thought it would be good to have an undergraduate degree. I was nervous about going from the dance studio to the University classroom. Mount Saint Vincent was amazing; it was an excellent learning environment. I decided to major in English literature, and I did a minor in French. I loved my English classes so much that the department encouraged me to do the honours program, so I wrote an honours thesis on Shakespearean comedy and queer theory. Law school was not always the plan, but it was something that I think always made a lot of sense. I was one of those kids that people said should be a lawyer because I was argumentative and outspoken. After my undergrad, I wanted to continue being academically stimulated and challenged, but I also wanted to find some career stability and feel like my work was being valued. So, I turned my mind to law.
Honestly, it has just entirely exceeded my expectations. I'm a people person and the people here just can't be beat. That sense of community and an administration and faculty that genuinely care about your individual success. I chose UNB Law for the same reasons I loved my undergrad experience at Mount Saint Vincent—the intimate learning environment and the sense of community. It has allowed me to really thrive academically.
Well, I’m going back to Toronto, where I first went for dance! I've accepted a summer position at Davies, which is very exciting. I feel so fortunate to have had so much support from the career services office, the faculty, and Dean Marin during the Toronto recruit. One of the reasons why I am so happy to go to Davies for the summer is the firm’s emphasis on a generalist approach early in lawyers’ careers. I love that because I the idea of confining myself to doing one thing is scary. I've always worn a lot of hats and had a lot of different things going on so the fact that they embrace and encourage that generalist approach and being skilled and competent in more than one thing really resonated with me. As far as dance goes, I think it will always be there in some capacity. It feels hard to extricate it from who I am.
