“From the top! And 5, 6, 7, 8...” The blood, sweat, tears, and more importantly, the passion in the beautiful actions that tells a story through cords and movements.   Deep breaths of exhaustion   among the group that you’re proud to call your team.  There are the days you look at the clock and it’s going by so slow, minutes ticking by as the sweat drips down the edge of your face.  Then there are the days that go by so fast the clock seems to sprint the hours away in a heartbeat.  The parched throat and sticky feeling of drying sweat caused by performing the routine over and over until you just want to drop.  Wanting to stop, but you know to keep going – to just push yourself further.  All the work leading up to the best part of it all; the performance.  The excitement and mixed emotions running through your body and seeing all of the eyes mixed with the smiles of the crowd seated before you.  Having worked so hard for these moments, moments to look back on when you feel like giving up.  These are the moments that help motivate you to push yourself to reach your goals, to endure the pain, to muster the patience, and renew your commitment.   In the end, it’s all worth it.

Pushing yourself further, driving harder, and telling yourself that pain is only a temporary thing.  The work and practice put into a two and half minute dance is tough—a lot tougher than it may seem.  Rehearsing two hours a day, every day of the week, for the first three months, only to increase the commitment to four hours daily down the road.  That’s a lot of hard work and commitment.  The shin splits feel like knives are stabbing through your legs, but yet you still keep your Fouettés stiff and snap your Russian jumps perfectly.  The pain from your shoes rubbing up against painful, bleeding, blisters, but you’re still dancing on that unbreakable floor in those black, torn up jazz shoes.  There are dark black and blue bruises, the size of a baseball, on your knees from quickly dropping down into your splits or doing ground work, but you take a deep breath and push even harder for perfection the next time.   There’s a headache pounding in your head, but you block it out and work through it.  Telling yourself to just keep going; it’s worth it.  The coach saying, “Okay girls, one more time!” although everyone knows it will be at least three more times.  Practice will never make perfect, but you always try to keep improving and push yourself further.

Dance Is not only a sport.  It’s not like basketball, hockey, or any other “normal” sport.  Dance involves much more than those sports do.  Passion is everything in dance.  Although the feeling you have while performing is unexplainable, you have to make the audience feel it too.  You have to be strong, sharp, emotional, and most importantly, you have to act.  Acting is a giant part of dancing; especially performing.  You need to get into the feel of the song—find the emotion in it; the joy, the excitement, the pain, the sadness.  Express all of the emotion into your dancing and in your facial expressions.  Show the energy throughout your entire body; from your toes to your fingertips.  Make yourself feel like you’re living that song, while showing the audience the true emotion.  Reach to the audience, make them feel the deep emotion from the compelling body movements.  Show the passion and love you have for the art.  Dancing is as much about feeling as it is about performing. 

All the pain, time, hard work, and dedication put into practice and improving, is what leads to the best moments.  When it comes to competition, the mixed feelings inside of you feel as if they are bouncing off the walls inside your stomach and the butterflies are going crazy.  The adrenaline rushing through your body; making you feel like you can do anything and everything.  The team gathers in a circle, everyone connected their arms and putting their right pointed foot to the center.  You pray. When it comes to being “on deck,” you’re feeling like you might just throw up.  Your hands are sweaty and tingling, your stomach is fluttering, and you can’t keep your feet still.  As you’re watching the dance on the floor right before you there are so many things running through your mind.  You question if you’re even good enough.  “That dance was so amazing compared to mine,” you think to yourself.  When the announcer calls your team name out onto the floor, the crowd goes wild.  Clapping and cheering welcome you.  Your heart is pounding a thousand beats a minute.  Walking onto the floor has you thinking of every worst-case scenario that could happen. Maybe you will fall doing pirouettes, or go to the wrong position; everybody would see.  It would be so embarrassing.  You think, “what if I fall out of my turns to early, what If I go to the wrong formation, what if my Russian jump is at the wrong time and it’s my fault we get points deducted.”  When you get to your first formation, the crowd goes silent waiting for the music to begin.  Those few seconds of silence, or what feels like minutes, is the time where you get your mind straight.  You think to yourself, “I am good enough.  That last dance was great, but this dance is great too! I’m going to give it all I’ve got: land every jump, stick every move.  I’ve got this.”  The music begins.  Looking up at the hundreds of people in the crowd with flawless, emotional facial expressions glowing on your face.  You come into your own world.  Nobody is there but you and your “family” on the floor with you.  The adrenaline is rushing all throughout your body getting you fully get into your splits, get your kicks high, and strongly land those turns.  The passion in the music and body movements comes alive.  You’re a whole new person telling a story.  You feel the music and show the audience.  You make them feel the passion and the story being told.  When sticking your ending formation, it’s silent.  You then hear the crowd screaming, and you sigh of relief.  The smile on your face could never be bigger.  You can hear your team trying to catch their breath, but still smiling their hearts out to the crowd.  Your heart is pounding so loud and there is no possible way to get that giant grin off your face.  While rushing your walk off, you finally make it off the floor.  All of a sudden the team goes out of control.  The excitement, the adrenalin, the confidence, the feeling of wanting to go out there and relive it all over and over again.  Everyone can feel the happiness.  It’s the most unexplainable, but best feeling you could ever feel.  Screaming to your team that you did it!  You couldn’t be more proud of yourself and your team for doing the best they could.  It’s like finishing your favorite book for the first time.  You wish you could just go back and forget you read it so you can get the experience of reading it all over again.

Dance is a sport and an art.  It's pain and its passion.  It’s a deep communication through the movements of the body.  As the modern dance pioneer, Ruth St. Denis, once said, “Dance is being used as a communication through the body and the soul, to express what is too deep to find for word.”  Dance gives you feelings that nothing else can.  The deep connection and love given from dance is powerful in many ways.  It involves a lot of hard work and dedication – more than some might think.  Though it may cause some people to want to give up because it’s the “easier” thing to do, in the long run, it’s all worth it. When you think back and think about the feeling of performing – there’s nothing that can replace it.  The feeling as if you were gliding through the air with no care in the world.  It’s the best feeling knowing you do the best you can and working hard to improve yourself – to never give up, but to just work even harder.