I started my dance journey as a “competition kid.” Like, I learned very advanced movements before I learned foundational moves. I had no idea about the structure of a traditional dance technique class.
I just knew that when we walked into dance on the first day of the year, our dance teacher Corky (in all seriousness, that was his name) would tell us what songs we would be dancing to that year and we would get to work learning choreography. Not a warmup was had.
Needless to say, we didn’t win a lot of competitions. But, the entire focus of the year was on winning (so much so that we didn’t have enough time in our busy rehearsal schedule to, ahem, learn actual technique). My entire dance team went through cycle after cycle of high expectations, high stress, and (most often) significant disappointment. We were focused on winning and we weren’t good enough to win (because we were so focused on winning).
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