Page 46 - AVN Men 2019

“I can do this!
I can totally do this!”
There are two sounds that Carter Dane would rather forget: horses, and The
Nutcracker. Both are tied to bad memories, each related to falls that broke his tib-
ias. The first came when he was growing up on his family’s dairy farm in the Eastern
Townships of Quebec.
“My parents had horses, but I fell off one when I was 8—and not just fell off, but
the horse reared, when it goes up on his hind legs,” he says, mimicking the sound
that terrified him and broke his left tibia. “So I’m not a huge fan of horses.”
Nearly a decade later, Dane finished high school and moved to Montreal. In col-
lege, he got into theater and then capitalized on his gymnastics experience to train
for ballet. “I was in this acting program and I wanted to find a way to mix art and
physical activity. I was very in tune with my body, and I just like expressing myself
with it.”
One of his movement teachers told him about a respected program. They took
Dane in, and after a few years of training he joined the main Montreal company …
then got injured.
“Again, it was my tibia,” he laughs. “An open fracture of my right tibia. I did a
grand jeté, like a split jump, and on the landing, I landed on another person’s cape
… he moved and I moved. My knee went one way, and my ankle when the other
way. So that was the end of that. I still like Christmas … but I don’t like The Nut-
cracker anymore.”
But if it weren’t for that injury, who knows if Dane’s life would have followed the
same path.
“After my injury in ballet, I pretty much stopped most performing arts … I had to
find a new way to figure myself out,” he says. “I had also realized that I had a little
bit of an eating disorder, being in that kind of environment. I remember reflecting on
it all when I was by myself, by the water. I just started asking myself if I was actually
happy … like, even if I healed, did I actually want to go back to ballet? And I real-
ized that I wasn’t actually happy. It was something I liked to do for fun at first, not
professionally where you had to deal with all the pressure that goes with it. So that’s
why I decided to work on that problem—the understanding of what I really wanted
out of life, and who I really was.”
Fast forward to Dane’s 24th birthday.
“I went to a strip show, and I was like, ‘I can do this! I can totally do this!’ Like,
the entire night, I was just saying that. And my friends would pull up a site, and you
know how at the bottom it says ‘Become a model’? They were like, ‘Oh yeah? You
say you can do stuff like that? Go ahead and do it!’ And that’s how it started. It was
me being drunk and thinking I could do anything.”
4 6 A V N M E N . C O M | C A R T E R D A N E