Blog # 58: Dance

It all started when I was just six years old. My mother put me in gymnastics because I was constantly bouncing off the walls. She thought that the exercise from the gymnastic class would wear me out so I wouldn’t be so hyper at home. She obviously didn’t realize that my class was only once a week. The gymnastics class was held in Derby, Kansas on Tuesday evenings called “funtastics.”
I consider gymnastics as a form of dance. There are movements in gymnastics that involve dance-like rhythm, such as when you do a routine. When I became older and significantly became a better gymnast I started to do “show-team”. Show-team was basically an individual made up routine showed in front of an audience to music involving gymnastic moves, such as back flips, back hand springs, aerials, front or back walkovers, and cartwheels, and then the dance-like moves such as elegant arm and leg movements, wrist and ankle pops, running straddle jumps, and down on the floor movements. I really enjoyed doing show team because it was a very competitive sport for me and I won many trophies.
In my small home town of Wellington, Kansas there was absolutely no dance studio for young girls to do ballet, jazz, and tap. When I was about 8 years old our town turned an old shoe and clothing store into our very first dance studio. It was gigantic in size and would accommodate many rooms to dance in. Upstairs in the balcony was a huge room filled with mirrors that held tap and jazz classes. Down stairs underneath the balcony was a huge gymnastics room filled with a tumbling floor, uneven bars, vault, and a trampoline. Another area downstairs was a room for ballet classes that included mirrors and poles. This building was an odd building for a dance studio, but it seemed to work out greatly.
After the dance studio was finally opened my mother decided to put me in jazz dance lessons. There were only about 12 young girls in my class, but that was plenty for me because I had no clue how to “dance” like a real dancer and needed all the individual help as possible. At first, I didn’t really like jazz because I felt like an outcast. All the other girls in my class have taken jazz before elsewhere, but I was obviously a newbie to the sport. I was the only gymnast in my jazz class and every time I had the chance I would try to sneak away downstairs to get on the trampoline and do a bunch of back flips before I got caught because I would rather bounce around than be instructed what dance moves I had to learn. I just learned the basic jazz dance movements because my heart was more towards being a gymnast than being a dancer and I didn’t really focus on becoming a really good jazz dancer.