Throughout my childhood, I was a competitive dancer. My afternoons, almost every day after school, were spent at my dance school practicing tap, jazz, ballet and hip-hop. I was extremely committed to being a dancer, and although practices were demanding, I enjoyed every minute I spent at dance. However, as I was preparing to enter middle school, I decided that I was going to make a big change. I wanted to try-out for a team sport, which I’d never done before. To do so meant I had to leave my competitive dance team so I’d be able to commit to team practices and games. That meant that I would be attending my last dance competition in April of 2011. Since it would be my final competitive experience, I decided that I was going to do something a bit out of my comfort zone. I wanted to dance a duet with one of my really close friends, Kaitlyn. I had never done a solo or small group performance, and the prospect of doing so was both frightening and exhilarating at the same time. I was nervous at first, but I knew that if I practiced enough I would be okay.
Kaitlyn and I began practicing close to every day- whether it was with our teacher’s guidance or not. It took a ton of effort to learn the whole dance and we did struggle quite a bit with some of the moves. We had to make sure that we were perfectly in sync if we wanted to score well. I had a lot of trouble with the timing because there were numerous moves that I hadn’t learned before and I wasn’t really able to do them fast enough. As the competition was nearing, I was growing more and more nervous. I began to start practicing at home during all of my free time. The dance became all I thought about. When it came time to leave for the competition I was feeling more anxious than ever before.
Finally, the big weekend arrived! I was handed the schedule. I scanned it quickly, and immediately noticed that our duet was scheduled after all of my regular group performances. Of course! I was going to save my best for last!!!
The first day I performed my two group dances. Both of those dances went very well and we received a gold score for each of them. Once we finished with our dances for that day, Kaitlyn and I decided to practice our duet again. However, when we practiced this time, we were way off tempo and I was having trouble remembering some of the parts. I began to worry even more. How could I fix this? The duet had to be perfect for tomorrow! I didn’t wantt to let Kaitlyn down, and I certainly couldn’t imagine the embarrassment I’d feel if I screwed up my dance moves and worse yet, if I fell out of sync with the music! I wasn’t able to sleep much that night because I was doing everything I could to remember the dance.
The next day when I woke up I was so nervous I could barely eat. As I was getting into my costume and putting my makeup on, I was running through the routine in my head. This time I was able to remember all of the steps. Once I was ready, I nervously sat in the audience with the rest of my dance school. I remember that during the competition, there was a moment when a song briefly stopped, and the dance team looked around nervously, wondering what they should do . I remember turning to Kaitlyn and telling her how nervous I was that it would happen to us. Everyone around me assured me that it wouldn’t, and I believed them. It had to be a fluke thing,……right?
Immediately prior to going backstage, we decided that we had to practice…just once more. This time, we had everything down. We knew all of the steps and we were perfectly in time with the music. At this point, I was excited to get on stage. All of our friends even came backstage with us to support us. It finally came time for us to climb up the stairs toward the stage and take our places.
E110 FA19 Class Blog 