In this episode, host Megan sits down with Olia Polyakova — Ukrainian-born, London-based movement artist — recorded live in Mauritius, where the two former London Contemporary Dance School classmates have been spending time together. The conversation is warm, candid, and deeply personal, touching on what it really means to build a life around dance.

Olia opens up about why she chose to spend holiday time in the studio, and how dancing without stakes or agenda feels less like work and more like taking a shower — something purely for yourself. She traces her path back to growing up in Ukraine, where the only visible models for a dance career were ballerinas or teachers, and how she chose dance anyway — not because she had a plan, but because she simply couldn't imagine anything else.

The conversation moves into the honest reality of freelancing: what a bad week looks like (bar work, job hunting, silence) versus a good one (extras work on set, life modelling, studio sessions, photo shoots, club dancing). For Olia, variety isn't stressful — the absence of work is. The two also dig into training, and Olia is refreshingly candid about needing to trick herself into going to class, whether through networking instincts or sheer necessity. Neither of them find showing up easy, and the difference between training inside a structured program versus navigating it alone as a freelancer is a thread that runs throughout.

On the creative side, Olia shares how her solo work lives in detailed improvised scores rather than fixed choreography, and how tangible objects — rope, clay — tend to anchor a piece before the meaning fully arrives. Visual and conceptual elements, she explains, emerge from opposite directions and meet somewhere in the middle.

It's a genuine, unfiltered conversation about the unglamorous grind and the quiet joys of a life built around movement.