Jon Ole Olstad: On Vulnerability, Late Starts & Why Life Is a Cliché Worth Dancing |
Jon Ole Olstad Walked Into His First Ballet Class Not Knowing What a Tendu Was. He Never Left.
Jon Ole Olstad didn't find dance until he was sixteen, standing in a studio full of girls in ballet shoes, mimicking steps he didn't know the names of, certain he had no chance. He was accepted anyway. What followed — Nederlands Dans Theater 1, Batsheva, a first prize at Stuttgart, teaching at Juilliard and Alvin Ailey — is less a career than a sustained act of will. We spoke to him about vulnerability, the double pirouette he still can't clean, and why another person's success is never your failure.
There is a moment Jon Ole Olstad describes from his first ever ballet audition that tells you almost everything about how he moves through the world. The exercise was simple: step, step, chassé, grand jeté. He couldn't manage the chassé. He stood in that studio three hours from home, surrounded by dancers who had been training since childhood, and he did the only thing he could — he tried as hard as he possibly could and faked the rest.
He got in. Not because of what he could do. Because of what the teachers saw in how hard he wanted to.
"From that moment I worked twice as hard as everybody else. I was the first one in the studio and the last one to leave."
It is the kind of story that sounds like mythology until you understand that Olstad has turned it into a philosophy — about late starters, about slow developers, about what it actually means to own your own dancing rather than inherit someone else's idea of what it should look like. He has carried that audition with him through every studio, every stage, every class he has taught at Juilliard, Alvin Ailey, NYU Tisch, the Millenium Dance Complex. It is not background. It is the argument.
His career, once it started, moved with the kind of momentum that belies the late beginning. Nederlands Dans Theater 1 under Paul Lightfoot, working alongside Crystal Pite, Hofesh Shechter, Jiri Kylian, Marco Goecke. The Kamuyot tour with Batsheva. First prize — both dancer and choreographer — at Stuttgart International Solo Tanz Festival. The production prize from Ballet Basel at the International Hannover Choreography Competition.
And yet the thing Olstad reaches for when asked about responses to his work is not the prizes or the stages. It is a solo called and we already knew the names — a piece about love, loss, and the yearning for acceptance that he performed at NDT1. He walked onstage in everyday clothes with full lights on the house as well as the stage, and asked the audience questions. Have you ever been in love? Raise your hand if you're sitting next to your partner. Raise your hand if you've been through a divorce.
"I got close encounters with the audience and many meetings after — people who wanted to tell me their own personal story about life, love and loss."
This is what Olstad means when he talks about vulnerability as fuel. Not exposure for its own sake, but a particular act of trust — putting something true into the room and seeing who it finds. He is aware that some people read his work as being on the verge of cliché. He is entirely untroubled by this.
"I honestly believe life is a cliché. We want to see love; we want to be loved. I want to feel something so powerfully that the people who are watching feel the repercussions of what I am feeling."
The influences he names reveal the same instinct. His jazz teacher from college, Siv Gaustad, remains his biggest inspiration today. Crystal Pite, Kylian, Pina Bausch — choreographers who all, in their different ways, refuse to let technique become a hiding place. What consistently moves him, as a watcher and as a teacher, is the dancer who doesn't make excuses. Who lets risk outweigh perfection. Who shows up earliest, not because they're the most talented, but because they refuse to take anything for granted.
"I get inspired by stories that people tell me that show their deepest vulnerability and shame."
It is, again, not the conventional answer. The conventional answer is a list of great companies and celebrated names. Olstad gives you the unnamed student who arrived first, struggled longest, and refused to quit.
He is honest, too, about his own limitations — in a way that most dancers at his level rarely are. Fifteen years in, he still struggles with a clean double pirouette. He would never attempt a double tour in the air. For a long time he felt sad about this, the gaps left by a training that was always more mimicry than method. He has made his peace with it because he understands the trade.
"I think doing a schooling like that would have hindered me in finding my own voice in dance and my own way of moving. You have to nurture your individuality, you just have to know where to put it in."
This is the synthesis: the late start not as disadvantage but as protection. An escape from the grooves worn into the bodies of those who trained young, who learned early what dance was supposed to look like, and spent years trying to unlearn it.
There is one line Olstad offers, almost in passing, that deserves to land as something larger.
"Another person's success does not mean your failure."
In a world that runs almost entirely on comparison — follower counts, company hirings, competition results — it is a radical thing to say and mean. He means it. You can tell because he says it in the same breath as telling people not to give up after three months in New York, not to expect anything to come for free, not to stop enjoying their passion even on the heaviest days.
Dance is his home, his biggest love, his most vulnerable place, his therapist, his place of creativity and development. He said it at the start. He has spent an entire career proving it.
Jon Ole Olstad is a dancer, choreographer and educator whose work has been presented internationally across Europe and the Americas. He is a certified GYROKINESIS® trainer and has taught at institutions including Juilliard, Alvin Ailey, and NYU Tisch. Discover more artists chosen for how they inspire, not just their visibility, at Antakly Projects.