The Embodiment
Project.
Two years
before I came to college, I was telling myself and everyone who would listen
that I wanted to dance. Ever since the small amount of dancing I did in color
guard junior and senior year, I was hooked: I wanted to dance. Most people I
told this reminded me of my brief stint of dance classes when I was four and
five… I hated it. Even at four, while the rest of my classmates were thrilled,
I didn’t understand the point of dancing on stage dressed up as Baby Bop from
Barney, or tap dancing nuns, or Pocahontas. It didn’t have meaning for me, and
I could never remember anything I was supposed to be doing onstage, so
basically I just stood there under the
stage lights tried to do what everyone else did. But years later, at seventeen
years old, I knew there was something more to dance that I wanted to explore.
Two years ago
I got my chance when the college offered its first-ever dance classes. I can
still remember the first day of ballet so clearly… I woke up two hours early
and was outside Sean’s door, dressed for class, twenty minutes before we needed
to leave for class. (Welcome to ball-et!) I could hardly contain my excitement.
I had been waiting for this opportunity for four years, and had spent the
entire summer eagerly waiting for the first day of class. I had dreams of
ending up in beautiful pink pointe shoes several years into the future, and
however impractical this dream seemed to me, (and believe me, it did…) I simply
didn’t care. I was ready to learn everything I possibly could about this thing
called dance that I had been waiting so long to explore.
I remember the
first time we did balancés, and how this was the first movement that I really
connected with. I loved how flowy and light they felt, like I was gliding
across the floor. I would spend each of our movement meditation/mission moments
doing balancés over and over, loving how graceful they felt. I think this was
the first moment I felt like a dancer.
The next
semester brought with it new adventures in the form of an abandoned honors
thesis, tap dance, show dance, and Oklahoma!, as dance challenged and changed
me in ways I could never have dreamed. My entire audition process for Oklahoma!
was mainly centered around intense stage fright, particularly of singing by
myself onstage. But the dance audition put me back onstage in a place I was
comfortable- moving, expressing without words, through rond de jambs and my
favorite balancés. While the role of ballet Laurey, from understudy to the real
thing when I was presented with it, felt completely out of my league, it turned
out to be exactly what I needed at that time. A chance to stretch my ideas of
what I was capable of, to connect with the theatre and dance families that I
was already close to on a whole different level, to experience the magic of
connecting with an audience, and to build the strength I needed to make real
decisions in my life about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. It was
here, in this process, in the crazy months of stretching beyond my limits, in trying,
failing, and trying again to learn things I never dreamed I would be doing, in
learning to work with every single person onstage and offstage and relying on
one another, and in gaining a very slight understanding of how dance connects
us to one another and helps us to express volumes without a word, that I found
the courage to apply to Teach for America.
The summer
after my first year of dance brought the magic of modern dance through classes
at the Chi-MAC studio, which took everything I knew about dance at that point,
turned it upside down, and made me fall even more in love with it. I loved the
free, flowing, catch-and-release movements we learned in my very first class
with KC, (I still remember the sequence we did), and how there was no expectation
for me to do anything exactly “right”. The essence of the movement was in my
expression of it, and I was free to explore within the movements. And just when
I thought dance had completely blown my mind, I the semester began, and with
it, dance appreciation.
Here a small
group of us, guided by Jess, were able to discuss and explore this thing we
call “dance”, and what it means to us, art, society, and the world. I began to
make connections between two of my passions: teaching and dance. I could see movement
as expression used constantly by the students in the autistic support classroom
where I was teaching, and was inspired by my students’ abilities to use
movement to express what they had no words for. This was the link I had been
trying to find, a way to connect the two biggest parts of my life and use each
to inform the other. Fueled by this inspiration, I followed through with the
decision I had made in the spring and applied to Teach for America, confident
that my interest and intent to connect the arts and education to bring learning
to life for my students would help me to meet the challenges of the adventure I
was hoping to embark upon.
As a class, we then examined and brainstormed
ways to break barriers through dance, and created the college dance, a dance we
planned to spread campus-wide in order to unite our entire student body through
one song and one dance. At the same time, as we headed into choreographing for
the winter dance concert, I found myself needing dance to help me to break barriers
of my own. After coming out of a less than healthy relationship, I turned to
dance to explore and deal with things I simply did not have words for. Working
collaboratively, Jess, Tommy and I were able to choreograph a piece that did
exactly that, with movements that allowed me to both process everything that
had happened, and begin to move forward. Here, I learned the power of using
movement as a means of processing things we cannot verbalize.
Spring
semester brought even more exciting adventures, all beginning on the same day.
Our hard fought for pointe technique class began, on the exact day that brought
news of my acceptance into Teach for America with a placement in the
Mississippi Delta. And so, as I began to process this new path I was about to take,
I attended class with my dance family as we all began this new journey of
dancing en pointe, working (and occasionally commiserating) together and
strengthening our bodies for the coming challenges that would accompany those
beautiful pink shoes I had been dreaming of since my very first ballet class on
campus. I will probably never forget the day I drove to Philly for my first
pointe shoe fitting with Jennifer and Jess, or how excited I was the first time
I walked over to the bar and rolled up to full pointe. This was what I had been
dreaming of since day I walked into my first dance class, and probably even
before. And even though I would wake up each morning after class the night
before with feet that seemed to ask “what on Earth could you possibly be
thinking?!”, I was (and am) completely in love with my beautiful pink shoes and
everything about dancing in them.
My last dance
concert on campus meant working on two pieces that I had been looking forward
to for quite awhile: a trio with Kate and Kristine, and an eight minute
instrumental duet with Sean. Both pieces, though completely different, along
with a piece Jess choreographed for our pointe class that told the story of our
class, and our now well-known One Tribe dance, felt like a perfect reflection
of everything I had learned over the past two years. The beautiful, graceful
technique of ballet, paired with the determination, concentration, and
attention to detail required by pointe; our growing abilities to express
emotions, thoughts, and ideas through movement and connect to each other and an
audience with those movements; dance as process; dance as exploration; dance as
celebration; dance as reflection, dance as connection. I could not have
imagined a more perfect expression of such a life-changing journey that is only
just beginning, or a more incredible group of people to share it with than my
dance family, a group of people with some of the biggest hearts and kindest
souls I have ever encountered.
On my very
last day on campus senior year, I walked all around campus, taking the usual
path I had taken so many times over the past four years. I found myself in the
grotto, the place where I had played piano for numerous outdoor masses over the
past few years. I knelt down on the ground in front of the gate that stands in
front of the altar, intending to say a prayer asking for the courage to follow
the path I have been shown, the one leading me halfway across the country away
from everyone I love and everything familiar, to a classroom full of kids who
need a teacher. Instead, however, I found myself putting on an instrumental
song that came into my head, and dancing the words that I simply could not
form. In my last few hours as an undergraduate student on the campus that has
grown so dear to my heart, and before embarking upon a journey full of
uncertainty, I learned about another form of dance: dance as prayer.
Looking back,
I know I have only just begun to learn about and explore dance, but I am so
grateful for the incredible journey it has taken me on over the past two years,
and for all that it has taught me. I am also incredibly excited to continue
this trek, and to continue to learn and grow through this thing called dance
that has become such a huge part of me. Here we go!
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