The dance school here is very quixotic. The director is from a fine troupe in Chicago, I’ve no doubt she had a good little career, but they just jump right into these elaborate, professional productions like in the heyday of her memory, I’m sure; massively expensive costumes, sets that are………. um…… attempting a certain grandeur…. But the years she’s been here, I don’t think she pays attention to the teaching or the teachers. The older girls, late high school, are just getting started on things my tiny, humble, North Georgia, one-badass-woman-run dance company was perfecting and winning major competitions with at like….. nine years old. The littles (mid-elementary to middle school-ish) here, they just seem to flop and flail. It looks as though none of them have learned the basics. The fundamental drills, the 5 positions, barre work, the EPIC, impossible to overstate, DIRE importance of things like turnout, point-and-flex, and hand positions. Things that one (I, at least, and my company I grew up with and out of before I split for solo work) generally starts at 2 years old, and are the unshakable foundation of any and all dance you do the rest of your life, whether you make it your career, a sometime hobby, no matter the style, even if you just grow a fabulous ass and start to get distracted by theatre but your dance training immensely affects that part of your life, so you are better at it than you’d have been otherwise, and even when you get old and fat and nobody loves you, you STILL have your dancer’s muscles under the floof, you still have the thigh strength, the fucked up ankles, and the unmistakable carriage of a dancer if anyone cares to look beyond the fatass-ness and ridiculous retired-goth mermaid princess clothes and tattoos and piercings and rainbow shaved head. It’s all still there. Because I had proper instruction from 2 years old on. It just makes me sad sometimes, seeing their potential being squandered because a genuinely fine dancer wants to relive her past, rather than training these girls for their future.
Let’s dance put on your red shoes,
and dance the blues
If you say run, I’ll run with you
If you say hide, we’ll hideBecause my love for you
Would break my heart in two
If you should fall Into my armsAnd tremble like a flower
Let’s dance to the song they’re playin’ on the radio
x-heesy