My Experience Of Dance

I was always so unhappy dancing and I was never sure why I was doing it until I quit. Like I said before I was ten years old when I decided to quit dance. I quit dance because I always thought I was unhappy when really, dance was my passion. I told my parent the reason I quit was so I could focus more on school, involve myself in more extracurricular school day and have to walk into a cold and sweaty dance studio. Although I did not do better academically, I have

As a youth, I engaged in many forms of dance expression. I studied tap, jazz, and ballet for fifteen years. During these formative years, I choose to forgo many youth experiences so that I could participate in advance dance programs. The hard work paid off when I received a college scholarship to a performing arts

Dancing has been my passion since the age of three. Wake up, go to school, go to dance, go to sleep. My life was a routine of the same day playing over and over again, and I loved it. My senior year of high school I was accepted into the Commercial Dance program at Relativity School. I felt my dreams become a reality of the perfect future I had always worked towards.

My personal aesthetic in the terms of dance extends far beyond mentioning what I like and what I dislike. It unfolds the layers of my personality, my style, and my past experiences. I tend to think of aesthetics in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. Within a puzzle there are hundreds of important pieces that fit together to make a grand image and each puzzle piece requires a process of development and self-discovery. My aesthetic puzzle pieces include confidence, vulnerability, dynamic, high energy, illusion, and emotional connection. Most of my aesthetic is initiated by personal preference or a significant event in my life, but I will start with the foundation of my dance training first. I was raised in the dance studio where I regularly practiced ballet, jazz, tap, musical theatre, and contemporary. I was blessed to have the opportunity to explore multiple genres of dance at a young age and as a result of this, I began my aesthetic development with a very versatile palette of movements and interpretations.

I have been pouring my heart into six different types of dance, for twelve years now. Starting at the young age of five, dancing was always the one thing that came easily to me.Throughout elementary school, I was constantly bullied and picked on by my classmates. Even at home I was in an unsafe environment. I had to call the police multiple times on my mentally unstable step siblings because they had either hurt my sister, mother and I, or they were going to. Every night I would lie awake, behind my locked bedroom door, frightened that something bad was going to happen once I fell asleep. Growing up in a life of utter chaos caused me to struggle with many insecurities and bashfulness. The one steady thing in my life was dance. Going to dance

I remember the time I started dancing like it was yesterday. I was in 7th grade when I first joined a dance team. Dance became important to my life, due to the fact that when I was younger I would constantly get hurt a lot by being bullied, and also had my parents fight all the time until they reached a point they wanted to get a divorce. I got tired of it , and I started looking for horrible ways to blow away the pain I felt inside, finally I found the appropriate way to do so. Dancing was the perfect way to escape from all the pain that was holding me down. I look back so many times to the day I first did a solo;It felt like the wind was blowing towards my face every pirouette I did. It felt like if I was a bird flying free in the sky. I

Two years into the competitive dance world I felt like a machine.I wanted to have my own style,and to be an artist so I left my home-studio and became an independent dancer.Being an independent dancer gave me the opportunity to find my style and who I actually am.While I was finding my own style, simultaneously my personality shifted from close-minded and analytical to optimistic,quirky and outgoing.I found myself hanging out with my friends more,and trying new things, crafting in particular.Exploring the different realms of dance showed me who I genuinely

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy it so my mother allowed me to quit. Then a few years later when I was in fourth grade I saw that my elementary school had a dance team/drill team and it looked like tons of fun. I then realized that dance seemed like a hobby that I would enjoy. So my mother let me tryout as long as I promised not to quit. Of course I made her that and I auditioned for the next dance season and made it. I was extremely shocked that I had been asked to join the team seeing as I had no previous dance experience. Now ever since that moment dance has been more than just a hobby for me. I continued to dance through the rest of elementary school. However I did discontinue when I reached middle school due to my mother getting divorced and my family and I moving to a different town. I did try tumbling and cheer for a while, but it wasn’t befitting. I recognized I did not have a connection to tumbling and cheer like I did with dance, and that’s when I realized dance was my passion. After I came to this realization I auditioned for my high school dance team and this was the point in my dance career where I became extremely involved and also when I began to take it more seriously. I began to take it more seriously because at this point in my life I was out of shape and my body was not built to be a dancer. This was because during the time my mother had gotten divorced it was a difficult transition and I

I was never really much of a dancer. At a young age, my movements were always stiff and slow and never matched the beat. It was hard enough that I could not dance, it was even harder on me when people pointed out that flaw, despite what people thought, I kept dancing because it became my thing.

I took several beginning classes. I took classes with seven and eight-year-olds. For months, I dedicated hours of my day to dance. I’d dance from three to eight and on some occasion six to eight. Day and night I took classes and kept improving. My teacher Ms. Kim noticed and pulled me aside one day, “I don’t think you should be in this class anymore,” she said. “You need to be in a higher level class. Something more challenging.” I was in complete shock. I knew I was getting better; however, I never thought I’d progress that fast. I left dancing with the little kids and started taking classes with people my age and older. People who have been dancing since they were

One of the biggest differences between all of us is our level of experience in dance. About half of the girls have been dancing since they were three years old and then there are the rest of the girls like me who began to dance in high school. When I first started dancing with my high school dance team, I felt like I was the worst dancer on the team. Everytime I looked at the girl next to me execute a flawless leap or turn without flailing all over the place, I could feel my self-esteem shatter into several tiny little pieces. I started to dread going to dance practice, which was everyday for at least two hours after school. This was only during football season, where we would perform at halftime. During our annual

Being the youngest of three I grew up influenced by my older sisters and my parents supported me for everything and anything we did. Just like my sisters I had attended a dance school to learn the basic amount of moves to not embarrass myself at a party but the price of three children at the academy was just too much so we parted ways. We then

The dance community that surrounds me has been the most impactful in my life. My mother first signed me up for dance classes when I was only four years old, and now almost fifteen years later I am still dancing. I started out at a dance studio in Gresham, Oregon, where I then danced for ten years. I took classes, performed, and started competing against other dancers and studios around when I was nine years old. It didn’t hit me that I enjoyed performing until I started dancing in more and more shows. Dance was a struggle for many years at this specific studio. There was a lot of moves that I couldn’t do, and I got left behind, as the other dancers my age improved and became more flexible. I felt like I owed the teachers, staff, and other

Dance has been apart of my life ever since I can remember. When I was young, before I officially started my dance training, I was always up on my feet and moving. No matter what hobby I took interest in (whether it was cheerleading, musical theatre, or jump rope), I would always find a way to choreograph little routines a show them to my friends and family. Even when my parents tried to put me in sports, I would do cartwheels and dance on the playing fields, completely oblivious to what was going on during the games. When I look back at how I started my dance training, I just smile and laugh because I was so naïve and unaware that it would become such a huge part of my life. In 5th grade I was put into my first dance class as a hobby. It happened because I watched the Disney Channel movie High School Musical and immediately fell in love with it. I showed the movie to my parents and told them, “This is what I want to do.” At the time I thought I excelled in both signing and acting and that all I needed were dance classes. So in 4th grade I was put into my first dance class and I began to scratch the surface of the basics of dance. What I didn’t know then is that dance would slowly but surely influence my entire life and

My name is Kayla, I am currently an 8th grader at Silver Hills Middle School in Westminster. Dance has been a big part of my life, even though I only started studio dancing 2 or 3 years ago. Before that, I looked up how-to videos and learned off of there. Studio dancing gave me a whole new perspective of what dance is, it’s a way of expressing myself and expressing my emotions. I remember the first time dancing at EVQ, it was an entire new environment where the dance instructors there treat their teen students as adults instead of children. Of course, this frightened me since it was all new and I didn’t know anybody there, everyone was ridiculously nice and I made new friends the second week I was