Hëna Memishi

Observing Hëna in her natural habitat, one can't help but be taken aback by the sheer power she exudes when performing. She is there, in her element. Present and focused. Outside of that space, she is not just any other mid-twenties Melburnian trying to navigate her way through this fun and often trying thing that we call life. She has her head enough in the clouds that she dreams of big things, but simultaneously has her feet so firmly planted on the ground, even when she is manoeuvring her small and petite figure on any stage. If you've ever had the great pleasure of seeing this powerhouse perform, you can't help but be immersed into her world with her. I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down over a coffee with this beautiful thing to discuss passion for her art, dedication to her goals, and just generally what it's like to be a female in this day and age.

Tell me a bit about yourself and what you do.

My name’s Hëna Memishi from Melbourne. I teach dancing, and I’m a dancer/performer. 

And you teach different age groups. How long have you been teaching for?

I’ve been teaching since I was about 14. I started out teaching people that were older than me when I was 14—just going around to remote indigenous communities with my stepdad at the time, teaching workshops with him. So I gained a lot of experience there. I then put it aside for a bit and just focused on my training, rather than just going in there, teaching things that I wasn’t really sure about at the time. And then I started teaching again when I was 18.

I started really small—I never really fully delved in. As a teacher, you need to learn your craft before you start teaching people. This year, being 25, this is the first year where I’m teaching full time. Before that, I was just training and grasping it all. 

One of the ladies that I met when I was 14, Jacinda [Richards], I now work for her organisation and I’m [currently] running it while she’s on maternity leave. She created a non-for-profit grassroots called L2R which basically is a place for newly-arrived and at-risk kids/youth to do free hip hop dancing classes. 

I started out at this school called WELS—Western English Language School. [Jacinda] taught hip hop there as a little activity, and then she found that when they filtered into regular school and had nothing to do after school finished…she created an after-school program at Sunshine Youth Centre and they would just go there after school. And then it just started to grow and grow and grow. I think there’s now like six or seven programs running. 

Some of the kids that started when the program started are now teaching…

Really?!

Yeah! So they have a mentorship program as well so that [the kids] can become teachers. So yeah, now I’m doing that 3 or 4 times a week, and then my other stuff on the side, which is RMIT and at another school, and just wherever!

In regards to the kids that you teach, you were saying that some of them are at risk—is a lot of this, for them, a therapeutic outlet or a way for them to switch off? Obviously they’ve got something in their life which is impacting them, do you find them using this as a way from almost detaching from their realities and just letting go?

Yeah, and I think that’s just arts in general, but dancing with people is like gaining another sense of community. Some of these at-risk kids might be coming from a background of bullying or shit going on at home, but coming into this space removes them from their own reality and makes them more free. I think, even for me, it’s just a meditation going in and dancing. You just forget about everything else that’s going on and express yourself that way. It’s really important for everyone to find that means of escape or what makes you feel sane.

It is hard, though. You know, some teenagers don’t click. I teach at the West English Language School—some kids don’t want a bar of it. But you do find the kids that do, and that’s the most important thing, even if it’s just four kids out of the whole group of 45. As long as someone is getting something out of it, that’s the main point.

The years that we’ve been teaching at the school, not all of them will come to our program, but the ones that do, it’s really good.

Speaking of performing, let’s talk about your performances for a moment. So you’ve performed at a few festivals…

I’ve performed Falls, yeah. And some other shows.

And do acts track you down and say that they want you to be a part of their show, or do you contact them? How does it all work?

It’s really crazy because I’m a hip hop dancer and there’s no hip hop artists in Australia—there’s no actual work for that kind of stuff. The work that I have gotten, though, they’ve just found me rather than me auditioning. 

I think it’s just about putting yourself out there. As much as I hate to, you have to use social media to be like hey, I’m a dancer! Which I’m doing more and more. I still get off [social media], but I have to force myself to use it…I always delete things. I feel like, when I’m dancing, it’s in the moment and then I can’t relive that moment by watching it, it’s just not the same. It’s just a really crazy thing to me…

The idea of putting yourself out there on social media?

Yeah! If I have a dance video and I liked it at the time—it was a great moment, but then I put it out there for everyone to watch back, it’s not the same. 

It’s kinda like going to a festival or a gig and recording bits of the show—or the whole show like some assholes do—and then watching the whole thing back on your phone, or not even watching it back at all. I really don’t get when people do that.

Exactly! And when you do [rewatch it again] it doesn’t feel the same. That’s how I feel with dancing videos! 

It’s not that you don’t want to watch yourself, it’s just that it doesn’t have the same vibe as what it did at the time.

Yeah, and that kinda puts me off it…

The dancing styles that you do—you do hip hop, you do contemporary…

I mainly do hip hop. There are so many different styles within hip hop—so there’s hip hop, freestyle dance; I also do urban choreography which is way different to hip hop. It’s kind of like classical jazz and lyrical jazz. Urban choreography is a more commercialised version of hip hop dancing. I started off doing urban, and now I’m going back to the roots and really doing my research and history behind the dance, I want to know it all.

So yeah, I do hip hop…house, which is under the umbrella of hip hop dancing, that started out in New York City. I did full time Performing Arts, so I did contemporary, jazz, and all that kind of stuff. I wouldn’t say that I’m really great at all those things but I can do a little bit of them!

It’s just never ending. I feel like the more you know, the less you feel like you know. It’s like, fuck! There’s all this shit to know. So much shit to learn. And it overwhelms you sometimes.

How many hours a week would you say that you dance on average?

I don’t know how many hours, but I try and dance every day—take someones class, or jam at home with my boyfriend, or just put some music on that I like and can just move around to. Some days I won’t really do much and other days I’ll go hard.

I want to go back to the point you made about social media and the idea of detaching from that online reality. Everyone that I’ve spoken to, or just having conversations with mates in general, has felt—at one stage or another—the same need to disconnect. A lot of people have also brought up the anxiety or sense of overwhelming that social media can cause, in particular Instagram. 

Facebook I think is kinda on the way out. Whereas Instagram, you’re just constantly being fed picture after picture after picture. But with particular regard to the idea of having an hiatus from social media, what do you think has provoked it and why do you feel like you have to disconnect from it?

Sometimes I feel like you’ve lost the authenticity of being you because you’re worried about what you’re going to put online. You’re not really in the moment. There are heaps of these class videos from America—people in a classroom dancing, going full out. Most of the time, those people have already learnt the choreography and they’re just going in there to pretend like they’ve just done the class…now there are people who are losing that idea of going into a class and actually learning. They’re more focused on “the show”. That really distracts me and puts me off. And then it all becomes about what you need to show rather than the substance behind it. 

There’s just a lot of shit online. Shit that’s really pointless, and no one’s going to even really remember it. No one’s going to remember each step that you really did.

I just think it’s about being more present. When you’re filming, you can sometimes still not be completely present because you’re thinking about what it’s going to look like on video. But I honestly forget most of the time when I’m doing class to film.

So, when you’re about to dance, recording yourself in order to put it on social media is not your primary focus?

Yeah! It’s always a second thought. But then you kinda have to force yourself to, because then you’re like shit, I’ve got no content to post to promote my class. It’s a business tool. And then I go through phases where I just post dancing stuff that’s business related, and then the next minute I want to take a cute pic of myself and I’ll put that online too. I used to be worse. I used to put shit on my story all the time like today, I’m going here! You can get really carried away into it all, it sucks you in. 

I can definitely empathise with that! I was even joking with a friend the other day and she’s like you put so much shit on your Insta story. In the moment, I’ll want to post something so bad and be like people are definitely going to want to see this! And then after a little while, I just think to myself, why did I need to post that? It’s so unnecessary. But I think that’s really part and parcel with the whole uploading to social media process—everyone goes through those stages of self editing, and whether or not they delete it is up to the person. 

I’ve definitely gotten better. I think that when Instagram first came about, I was so trigger happy with it—I’d upload so many posts each day. Like, people need to see what I’m doing! I’ve definitely gotten more reserved with it. And better at editing photos! But you know, we are living in a digital age. Everything’s online…

Everything is online. And I think that, with our age group, we started out not with it and we were the first ones to have it and transition into it. And it’s great! You can learn so much from it. I wouldn’t be aware of half the stuff I am if it wasn’t for social media. But there is a lot of bullshit as well!

There is good and bad, I guess. People wouldn’t come to my class or know much about my dancing if it wasn’t online. It’s not like I’ve got a huge online following, but it’s always good for reference.

Because you were saying before about using [social media] as a business tool. Do you think that your classes wouldn’t be as well known or successful without the use of social media?

I don’t really have an open class, so it’s not really through Instagram. I probably think that it’s more word of mouth for me, but that’s because I do more community-based work. But if I wasn’t doing community-based work, I’d definitely be using Instagram as a way of getting myself out there. A lot of dancers do that.

A lot of the community stuff I can’t put online…and I have to keep private, but I want to keep private. I don’t want to exploit these kids and be like hey, I’m Hëna. I do this really amazing work with all these newly arrived refugees. That shit’s weird to me. 

You’ve done a bit of travelling with your dancing, I know New York and LA. Did you go over to dance or were you invited over?

I went over to go dance. I’ve gone to New York three times, but I’ve gone to LA four times. But that’s been to learn the history and be around it all. I’ve been dancing in Melbourne my whole life, and there’s only a certain point where you can get to in terms of knowledge. I take it on my own initiative to go learn.

All my close friends have all gone over there—they’ve all gotten their visas. I was on that path too, until I realised what I really wanted to invest my time in. As I was saying before, there’s no industry for dancers in Australia. Music theatre, you get good money for, or the random hot, skinny girl will get gigs. But when it comes to actual quality dancers, they don’t get any work. 

I get approached to be in dance videos all the time, but then when I ask what their budget is and they say $50, I’m like bro, I’m not going to dance in your video clip for $50. This is my job. It’s not just a matter of getting together and dancing. You have to get the song, choreograph, get a rehearsal, do this, do that. This is my job. I’ve gone overseas—I’ve gone to Japan as well, I’ve invested so much money and done performing arts. I take class throughout the week. I’ve invested thousands and thousands of dollars and gotten hardly any of that back. So it’s like, I’ve invested all this time and money into this and people want to offer me fifty bucks, or $100 for eight hours. 

I just say no all the time now. Maybe at the start when I was younger and I wanted to make to see what it was like and put my name out there. But I can’t be fucked, I’d rather just not put my name out there at all. 

You sound, I don’t know if settled is the right word, but definitely happy and content with what you’re doing and where you’re going. So you’re not just going to do something for the sake of doing it. 

Nah. Unless it was a close homie and I wanted to help them out. 

Steering away from dancing, I want to touch on a very particular subject of being a female in this day and age. I’m interested in the conversation of how people, especially females, feel in their day to day life, especially people around our age group. Recently, there have been some horrendous tragedies, such as in the cases of Laa Chol and Eurydice Dixon. Females going about their day to day lives and having them cut short. 

As a female, mid-twenties, in Melbourne, do you feel safe?

Honestly, I think about that a lot. Especially teaching out west—and I don’t drive either, so I’m always on the train. I’m not saying that Sunshine is the roughest place in the world, but it is one of the rougher areas of Melbourne.

I purposely wear certain clothes and avoid particular situations to make myself look unknown to people. I’ve been approached so many times and hassled around that area a lot, and I get the kids that I teach to drop me off at the station…because I don’t want to walk from the youth centre to the station. That’s fucked up to me. I don’t want to have that fear…It’s not even that far [from the centre to the station], it’s like 500 metres. 

In the day time, it’s not that bad. I still feel like I’m avoiding eye contact with people and acting like I’m literally on a mission. But this is at night especially, it’s just really weird.

The other day, I was just walking through QV—and you know how everyone’s just walking around, doing their own thing. No one’s really there to say hello. Growing up in Castlemaine, you say hello to everyone, because you essentially know everyone. But in Melbourne, no one does that! And there’s a good and bad side to that. Sometimes I like being a nothing amongst these people, but [on this particular occassion] this girl just started talking to me. At first I was like what’s going on? And she was [asking me how my day was] and just started talking to me by making eye contact with me and having a cute conversation. No one does that anymore. We’re instilled with that idea of everyone’s out to get you. Everyone has that fear. But after I had that conversation, it made me realise that maybe we need to be a bit more warm to each other. 

But, at the same time, there are things in the way of us being able to do that. And yes, she was a female so I felt comfortable straight away. But if a guy was like hey, how’s your day? I’d be fucking outta there! 

You’d be like I’VE GOT A BOYFRIEND!

I’ve got a boyfriend! I’m married! I’ve got kids! It’s a really crazy thing. I’ve been taught to be like that since I was a little kid.

Do you ever have that internal conversation of never judge a book by its cover, but then also I want to make sure that I’m safe?  

If say, hypothetically, you were to be walking alone in the city at night and you saw a male approaching you. Do you ever have that feeling of, I dunno, maybe he just wants to bum a ciggie?

Yeah, I mean I’m not really out there to be warm and friendly, but I probably will listen to what they have to say then just carry on. I get approached a lot being around the trains.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I think what I really want to say is that, making the time for things that you love is the most important thing. Life’s too short to fill it up with stupid bullshit. Make the time for things that you love, and if you’re not sure of what you love, then just try a whole bunch of different shit. That’s something that I really, truly believe—make that time.

People always say to me, oh Hëna, you’re so lucky to do dancing as a job! But I didn’t just fall into this, it’s because I pushed myself to do it. They can do it too but they’ve just chosen not to. It’s not like I’m out here with money falling off trees, I haven’t chosen the money path. I’ve chosen what I love to do. Everyone has the choice.