When I was at the dance conference this weekend, a strange thing happened. As I was watching classes, I had a sudden, intense feeling that I wanted to dance. It wasn’t just that I wanted to move, I wanted to create, teach and share.
I’ve always loved dance and I’ve loved teaching since I started when I was 15 and I’ve loved choreographing my entire life. Though my first real choreographed piece wasn’t until I was 17, my sister and I used to constantly make up dances when we were younger. We used to make up dances in the rain, for all our family holidays, in the backyard on summer days and we would even spend our entire spring break (every year!) in our grandparents’ pool making up a dance that we would then perform at the end of our vacation.
Dance has always been a big part of my life and as I’ve floated in and out of it as an adult, sometimes the passion I have for it gets buried under everything else in my life. I haven’t been on a regular routine for taking class since I broke my foot nearly 7 years ago (before I got married, moved to Florida, had Honeybun, moved to Ireland, had Sugarplum , moved back to Florida and had Doodle).
I’m so happy to be back teaching and love my students and my classes. I’ve also been missing being able to take class since Doodle was born. Unfortunately the place I like to go is too far for me to go, take class and be back between feeds and right now I can’t justify giving him a bottle so I can go (Sugarplum was 8 months when I started with her so maybe in the new year). But what I didn’t realize until this weekend was how much I miss the creative part of dance.
Teaching only provides so much creative outlet. Because 4 out of 5 of my classes are beginner/intermediate level classes I have to keep them pretty basic. My advanced classes I can give more complicated and “dancey” things but this is only once a week and only 45 minutes of their class time. I’m also choreographing a piece for the studio’s Holiday performance but, again, it’s beginner/intermediate dancers and since some had just started ballet a few weeks before rehearsals began, I didn’t have a lot to work with.
I’m dying to just get in the studio and create something. To make a dance, to USE my passion.
This is the last choreography project I did which was while we were still in Ireland, nearly 2 years ago: The Water Project
