Personal Narrative: A Dance

I walked on stage, my head pounding and my knees shaking. I looked to the audience, but bright, glaring lights blocked their faces. As the music started playing, I forced a smile onto my face. I can usually smile naturally, but tonight was different.

I stood staring at my mom with a blank expression as she applied foundation on my face followed by powder and blush and a number of other various cosmetics that I had lost count of. Makeup, hair, costume, all of those were on the back of my mind as the thought of performing in front of three hundred people clouded my thoughts. All around me were muffled sounds of other dancers frantically running around trying to get ready in time, mothers yelling at their daughter's, music blaring from various speakers, doors opening and closing, metal hitting the tile floors as tappers practiced down the hall, but all I could hear was the thundering sound of my heart beat in my chest. My body started quivering slightly. The nerves were setting in. I don’t

I was incredibly excited. School was starting tomorrow. The first few days were just icebreakers, learning everyone’s names, blah blah blah. Then the real learning began. Of course, teachers started to write our lessons on the board. I started to notice a few changes in what I was seeing. The words they were writing were just...black lines! I didn’t pay much attention to it, I just asked my friends what the board said. As the year went on, it affected me more and more, especially in math. I saw a 2 as a 6, and and an A as an 8.

Over my years of school, one big influence on me has always been sports. Ever since a young age, I have always enjoyed playing and watching sports. In my four years in high school, I have fell in love with the sport of lacrosse.

I woke up and took one bite out of my pop tart but that one bite was all I could eat. My legs were shaking, and my heart was pounding. My dad told me, “It is a true honor to even make it this far so go out there and have some fun.” Once I heard this statement, I knew I was ready to go. I arrived at school and boarded the bus. The car ride was an hour and fifteen minutes of hearing the squeaking of the wheel on the bus. My teammates were getting their heads ready for the big game.

In 2025, I will be twenty-nine years old and hopefully married. I will be married to my significant other of ten years Earnest Palmer III, who is a dentist. I would have been recently graduating with a bachelor’s in Culinary Arts and trying to plan to open my own restaurant, BubbaD’s Eateries. Knowing my big headed husband of mine, I probably had a baby then and trying to have another baby. Hopefully, by then Earnest will get rid of the idea naming our son, King. We will be living in the suburbs near New York City but working in the city. Being a woman with great memory, I probably wrote a memoir about my crazy life and trying to sell it to a publisher. If none of the publishers wants to publish my memoir, I will probably sell it the Lifetime

“Casey, your group needs to do the stunt one more time!” coach said imprudently. It happened March 26, 2015; it was at the end of a two hour practice. During the summer months in South Georgia, it is utterly hot and humid, especially in our cheer gym (a warehouse with no air conditioner); it only has two heavy-duty fans and a roll-up door. With this in mind, my group became slightly irritated. Everyone was exhausted; nevertheless we still had to do the stunt anyway.

These past two years have been crammed with so much new knowledge and understanding of dance that I could never be taught at a studio, for example, I have been told many times about my neck being pushed forward if I can recall I was called “turtleneck” but that's beside the point just knowing that I started to notice other things that aren’t correct with myself and I have been able to start fixing it which improved the quality of my dancing tremendously.

I have danced for the past 9 years and have and still love every minute of it. For how much i have learned over the past 9 years i have also learned a lot in this class. So far my favorite has been the hip hop combo that my group did. It has been my favorite because I really liked the music, choreography and style: and I don’t really enjoy hip hop that much so I was surprised that I really enjoyed that combo. I also like the 3 days of fitness, because it motivated me in so way to try my best and I feel that I improved the workouts that we did over the 3 days. The bones and muscles were cool to learn about because I think that it is important to know which muscle/bone is where and if you get injured you have a better idea of what you injured

Prior to this workshop I knew that people could learn in the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning methods but these classes showed me new ways to employ these styles of learning.

From preschool to my sophomore year of high school, I was a student at Conservatory of Dance in Wilton, Connecticut. It was a place I spent more time than my own home. During the summer of 2014, I attended the Nutmeg Conservatory for the Arts for a four week summer intensive. I had one of the most positive experiences, which ended up being life changing for me, not only was the ballet training of a higher caliber than what I was used to and, each teacher differed in their own way and brought new and different aspects of ballet to light. After the four weeks, I was

For the end of Ballet techniques, alignment, Jazz and Dance Theater I learned how much the way we use each muzzle perfectionazis the move or technique of a dance, I also learned a lot of history of Jazz which I never knew that it was history. I used to dance in a competitive dance academy in Argentina, and I absolutely loved the choreographies but after moving back to Spain it was really hard to find a dance teacher that I was able to adapt and enjoy but in this dance class I definitely love every choreography. Most of the techniques used to learn new dance moves work for me, as long as I enjoy the class, I get interested and I think it’s really fun.

I hereby tender my request for my listener account to be deleted, immutably. Not deactivated, not put on hold, not suspended. I am well aware of my options, and trust me when I say that it is only after careful consideration and painstaking deliberation, that I arrive at this conclusion. Long, dreary nights spent agonising over which one is the right one ; which is the best possible outcome, under these set of circumstances? At this juncture in my life, what do I have to do, what do I need to do, what should I do? So many options, so many variables, so much room for error … a careless oversight, a lapse in judgement, a fatal miscalculation … that is all it would take to spell disaster. I would never forgive myself.

I sat in the doctor's office. Sitting. Waiting. The room felt so empty and quiet. My mom and I sat there. Waiting. I felt as though we had been waiting for hours. Eventually, the doctor walked through the door. I was hoping he would say my tests came back and showed improvement. I had been diagnosed with a stress fracture the previous year. We thought maybe it was something bigger. As it turns out, we were right. He sat down as we anticipated his words. We sat anxiously in our seats. “I’m so sorry… I must have missed it. The tests came back… you have a tumor”.

There are certain things in life that can be equated to dancing with the devil; in my case, I mean, most literally, dancing. The first time I set foot in the basement of the salsa club Ceviche, I was only twelve years old. My parents and I had been taking lessons at the ballroom dance studio Cheek2Cheek for the past year or two. An instructor from the studio also taught group lessons at this dance club and upon learning this, my parents decided to check it out, and they brought me along. Back then, the place was less than impressive: the dance floor area was small, dismal carpeting lined the outer ring, the walls and ceiling were dingy and stained and the people looked nothing like the stunning individuals seen on “Dancing with the Stars.”. I did not know it then, but Ceviche was to be a place where I would feel incredibly drawn; this venue was destined to be a whole new world that would allow me to discover a part of myself I had not known before.