Part 1: Aftereffects

Unpacking My Relationship with Dance (a series)

Hello blog (and my few blog readers).

It's been a few months since my last post, and I'm thinking about making this a more personal website instead of just a healthy recipes/fitness kinda page. Right now, anyway, I need somewhere to dump the raw, unfiltered thoughts that are ruining my ability to focus.

I had four shows this past weekend – my final four with Morningstar Dance Academy. It was a crazy two days, spending over 12 hours at the theatre, but I loved every second of it. In the next coming weeks (or months, depending on how busy I am with college apps), I hope to reflect more on my graduation performances and my general relationship with dance in a series I'm calling, "Unpacking My Relationship with Dance". For today's post, I just need to get some thoughts out of my head so I can finally take notes on the two Econ chapters I have yet to read.

Swanhilda (me) and Franz (Chun Wai Chan) attempting to catch a butterfly

Uncertainty is my most prominent feeling right now. Before Swanhilda's variation in Act 1, I was rather nervous (if only for the turns). I don't know why I'm so terrified of doing turns onstage, since it's what I'm most comfortable doing in the studio. Even now, when I can do seven pirouettes over and over, I still manage to screw up a triple onstage. After getting through it though, I felt so much more at ease.

Saturday's performance of Coppelia was one of the only times when I've truly enjoyed being onstage. When I was younger, I always wanted to finish my piece so I could leave the stage, but the yearning to stay onstage and dance a little longer was completely foreign, at least until that day.

I've always been rather shy (extremely shy, as a child), so I was never comfortable with acting. Evidently, something's changed. Act 1 was so, so, so fun because of all the acting I had to do! This is probably the change that's making me so uncertain right now. It's incredible to see how much progress I've made with self-expression and being comfortable onstage, and I wonder how much more I can improve with more years of dancing and experience. I've always found it ironic that such an introverted, timid person chose to be a dancer and a performer, but the side of me that shied away from those parts of dance seems to be melting away.

I feel like all the years I've spent being nervous onstage, the effect on my performances and on my mental state – they deserve to be made up somehow. It's shocking that I danced in the Opera House at the Beijing Performing Arts Center, and my primary emotion was nervousness. The elation I felt after these recent shows in spite of the pain in my toes or my muscle fatigue; how amplified would it have been then if I'd focused more on the experience and less on nailing each turn (which I definitely did not do)!

Opera House

Outside of the Beijing Performing Arts Center

Anyways, this is all to say that I've changed and matured much later that most, but these changes are causing me to question decisions I made a long time ago. We hear stories of dancers knowing they were meant to dance professionally since they were five or twelve, but a sixteen (almost seventeen!) year-old senior in high school making that decision is pretty rare. Hoping to make more sense of the jumble of emotions inside my head by reflecting and recording it on here, so feel free to read along.

With love always,

Ellie