My Dance Experience Paper

Now that I've turned in my paper for my Global Modern Dance class, I thought I'd post it here. The assignment was:

Write a personal narrative about your most memorable dance experience. Provide contextual and personal detail. Two double spaced pages. Submit two copies - one with your name, one without.

When we got to class, we put the one with no name on a chair and gave the professor the one with our name. One by one, we stood up and took a paper from the chair (not our own) and read it to the class. Here's my paper:

DNCE 320
Personal Narrative Essay
January 26, 2010

I do not have very much dance experience. In fact, if the people I went to High School with knew that I was taking a Dance class, they would probably laugh. I was known as a klutz, someone who was always stumbling over my own feet, who would always bump into things, spill my drinks, and break anything delicate that I happened to be carrying.

I did have one Tap Dance lesson when I was 5 years old, but the only thing I remember about it is that we learned how to do a Shuf-fle step. Then there was the semester of Ballet I took when I first went away to college. I took it to fulfill a Physical Education requirement, but I felt incredibly self-conscious in the black leotard and pink tights and shoes, and made excuses not to go to class. I eventually received a WF – not a very illustrious accomplishment.

And so it was that the very next semester I found myself at the New Music and Art Festival at the Midwest Center for Contemporary Music and Art at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. One of the composers on the Music Faculty was having a piece premiered at the Festival and his wife – one of the Dance Faculty – was presenting a new dance to the piece. She asked for student volunteers to be her “back-up dancers” (I’m sure she used a more technically-correct term, but I can’t remember what it was). My best friend talked me into volunteering with her. We were told to wear jeans and a white t-shirt and show up at the hall an hour before the show for rehearsal.

That, in and of itself, was very stressful for me. Not only was I crazy enough to volunteer to dance – in public! – but we were only going to have one rehearsal an hour before the show?!? I tend toward the Obsessive-Compulsive side of things (I like to say that I’m not OCD, I’m CDO – that’s like OCD, but the letters are in alphabetical order like they’re supposed to be!), so the thought of not having several rehearsals to make sure I knew exactly what to do and when to do it was extremely frightening! This was waaaaay outside my comfort zone!

I don’t remember much about the rehearsal, but I do remember the performance fairly vividly. The music was typical for Contemporary Classical Music of the time – full of “pops and squeaks,” electronic noises, “bips and boops,” and lots of dissonance. As the first clicks and whirrs of the music started, the lights dimmed low and the group of us volunteers entered like a giant white worm, each of us hanging onto the person in front of us, as we crept and crawled across the stage. The lights changed to blue as the primary dancer entered – though truthfully, I don’t remember much about what she was doing, as I was concentrating on being wormlike.

When the lights changed from blue to red, it was our cue to stop being a unified worm and to break apart, stand up, spread across the stage, and begin moving our limbs in herky-jerky movements, more-or-less to the rhythm of the music. In rehearsal, the primary dancer stressed the importance of us not “lining up” across the stage, but placing ourselves randomly, facing every which way. I made sure that I was facing away from the audience!

Our next cue was when the lights transitioned from red into a deep violet. At this point, we were to stop our angular movements, slowly “deflate” into piles on the floor, then gradually join up with the other white-clad dancers like drops of a liquid will join up with other drops to form a larger puddle. Once we joined with the others, we were to randomly and suddenly get to our knees, throw our arms into the air and wave them around for a moment before again “deflating” and re-joining the puddle. These outbursts were to gradually become less and less frequent as the music slowed in tempo, until we ended the piece lying prone on the floor in a huddled mass, our arms and legs draped across the person next to us.

After a brief moment of silence, the hall erupted into thunderous applause. We all stood up to take our bows and then filed off the stage. I remember that my hands were shaking violently and as soon as we were off stage, I collapsed onto the floor, hyperventilating. I said to my friend, “Don’t you ever make me do anything like that again!”

To this day, I don’t remember the name of the composer, the primary dancer, or the name of the piece of music, but I do remember the feeling of “what have I gotten myself into??” as I entered the stage for that performance.

.