Dancing through life

Below are some of our favorite pictures and a video from Anna's dancing through the years along with two college essays that show how this has shaped her into the person she is becoming.  So grateful for the gifts of dance and the life it has brought to our girl. 

7 minutes of pure joy: https://youtu.be/qAB3WbXGgcs

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (150-400 words)

              Five, six, seven, eight. Glissade, jeté, pas de bourrée, assemblé. Then grande allegro: I explode across the stage, leaving all else behind. I melt into the movements, connecting mind and body. With each articulation of my toes, each extension of my legs, my teachers’ voices echo in my head: “Rotate, spiral into the floor, use your core, hips up, remember your gluteus medius, relax your shoulders, engage your back, don’t forget to breathe.”

Beneath my bursts through the air and whirls atop my toes, the hours spent practicing present themselves to the audience peering through the stage lights’ glow. I reflect on fifteen years of corrections, trials, and errors weaving themselves into my cocoon, where I’ve dared myself to fall, to fail, to learn. Countless times I’ve tumbled sideways from a turn. Try again. My ankles have tangled in petit allegro jump sequences. Try again. I’ve lost the fight to balance en pointe. Try again. I’ve let myself cry in the dressing room, holding space for frustrations and discouragement before once more waltzing across the studio. Then new processes emerged: some of undoing, some of patience, many of both. In our world walled by mirrors, my comparison has scoffed at me, “Really? That’s your best? Her leaps, her pointe- all better than you. Why do you even try?” Brick by brick, these whispers rose pillars of doubt, casting shadows over what I believed I was capable of. Yet step by step, the undoing began. I danced solos I never dreamed of, my excitement drowning out that mocking voice. I piquéd, pirouetted, fouettéd, pliéd, and relevéd. I found inspiration and challenge in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s depiction of his creative process as a writer:

“What you are seeing is not some innate thing. What you are seeing is go again, go again, go again…The bleeding on the page. And then bleeding again and again.”

Among incalculable hours I found my own bleeding not in writing, rather in crossing the floor of the studio again and again. Five, six, seven, eight. Piqué, pirouette, fouetté, plié, and relevé. Rotate, spiral into the floor, use your core, hips up, remember your gluteus medius, relax your shoulders, engage your back, don’t forget to breathe. Repeat. Five, six, seven, eight… From all these memories I return to the present moment on stage, where I pour myself into new movements of erupting, resisting, receiving, and offering.

Briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities, jobs or family responsibilities. (50 words)

Five, six, seven, eight. Glissade, jeté, pas de bourrée, assemblé. Then grande allegro: I explode across the stage, leaving all else behind. I melt into the movements, connecting mind and body. Then removing my stiff pointe shoes, I feel the floor again and take from the studio this momentary peace.