This piece is for all the dancers out there who love working hard on their dancing and are constantly pushing themselves to their limits and beyond. Some of you love the dance journey so much that you made dance your career. Others, like me, followed your passion aside of your career, but still took on the greater challenges that dance had to offer. Dance makes us come alive like nothing else, in between the sweat, tears, sore muscles, and literal blood.
Of course, all work and no play makes for a dull dancer, and dance at its core is joy and fun! We don’t always get to focus on that aspect when we are seriously training for a stage performance or a competition. Drilling choreography or technique for hours doesn’t scream fun and entertainment. All of that hard work feels worth it though, when you start to feel the changes in your dancing.
I find it immensely satisfying to work hard to improve my craft and then feel the resulting freedom in my movement when I dance. I enjoy meeting the challenges and overcoming the obstacles that pop up along my dance journey. As a pro-am ballroom dancer, I even found myself becoming less interested in social dancing or showcases, where you could mess up and no one really cared, after experiencing competitions where all of the hard work came together to create something beautiful and hopefully near-perfect. I wanted it all to matter and have consequence.
Regardless, I believe it’s important to refocus on the fun of dance regularly. The pressure and abuse we put on our bodies and minds to achieve our dancing goals has to be offset by lighthearted moments, laughter at our mistakes, and breaks to be a little silly. Otherwise, we burn out, and like any great dance performance, we do it full out.
Refocus on the joy and fun of dance is exactly what I had the chance to do at the beginning of November. I performed in my first dance showcase in four years! My dance partner and I danced a West Coast Swing routine to “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa. The goal was to have fun, and that’s exactly what we did. The routine didn’t go exactly as rehearsed (when does it ever?), but we still had a blast dancing together.
Performing for the sheer fun of it is something I haven’t gotten to do in a long time. In my years of competing in pro-am ballroom, I always tried to stay connected with the joy I got from dancing, but sometimes other desires overshadowed it.
People, including me, say you shouldn’t care about your competition results and you should focus on the joy of performing, but I’ll be honest: I cared about doing well at events! It wasn’t 100% about the results. I wanted to be a high quality performer who could catch an audience’s attention and take them on a journey. I wanted to feel like I performed better than at the last competition. I wanted to look like I belonged out there, like I owned my place on that dance floor. And yes, I wanted the judges to notice all of that and award me a good score.
Those goals meant repetitive practice drills, meticulous critiquing by my coaches, and a constant push out of my comfort zone. That work was challenging and sometimes not fun at all. Still, my teacher and I could usually inject some humor into whatever work we were doing. It helped relieve my tension and frustration over messing something up YET AGAIN. Even if the dance training itself wasn’t fun, fun could be sprinkled in to make it easier to get through.
When my friend first asked me about learning West Coast Swing together, with both us learning the lead and follow roles, a big part of the appeal for me was it presented a new dance challenge. I hadn’t trained much in West Coast Swing and I hadn’t trained at all in the lead half of the dance. Exploring another style of dance is a chance to take on a new adventure. Taking that new adventure with a friend guarantees a fun journey.
During the few months leading up to the showcase performance, we took lessons and met up to practice, and made sure fun was there every time. When we decided we were apologizing to each other too much for mistakes, we decided to say “I’m sparkly” instead. I got into the habit of kicking up a leg every time we switched roles to remind myself which foot to start on, and it became a running joke. Sometimes I think we got too goofy for our teacher and he didn’t know what to do with us.
We of course wanted our dancing to look good and be entertaining for the audience, so we put in a lot of effort to learn and understand our steps, the lead/follow connection, etc. It was just done to a soundtrack of laughter (and 90s hip hop).
When the day of the performance came, the goal was to perform for the fun of it. We had done all we could do to prepare a quality show for the people who came to see us, so it was time to be in the moment and dance!
Did you catch where things went slightly awry? Hint: we danced the same sequence, first with me leading and then my friend leading, except for one move. This one move was incredibly vexing in lessons and practice, so it’s no surprise that it was the one mishap in our performance. Proud to say we didn’t miss a beat though! Considering it was my partner’s very first performance, we totally crushed it.
If you haven’t done any dancing lately that made you whoop or laugh out loud in the middle of it because you were having too much fun to stay quiet, I highly recommend you take a dance break right after you finish reading this! Dance silly on purpose for once.
As dancers, we take our craft very seriously, but that means we can’t take ourselves too seriously. We need to be able to laugh at ourselves, and maybe once in awhile perform just for the fun!
P.S. – Holiday pricing starts soon at my Ko-Fi shop. Keep an eye on The Girl with the Tree Tattoo social media pages for the announcement.
P.P.S. – There is only ONE Whole Dance Journey journal left!
The Girl with the Tree Tattoo 