Better with Age

Whenever I’ve been out of the dance studio for a while, something magical happens when I return: I can dance amazingly. My legs go higher than they ever have, I can balance well, do a million turns and jump forever. For a day.

Leaving the dance world over and over again throughout the past 10 years has never been easy for me, but neither has reentering. After that initial amazing day of dancing, I go into a rebuilding mode where I have to retrain my body to do everything it once used to do easily. The muscles are no longer there, the flexibility certainly isn’t and the stamina was never my strong point.

Truthfully, I was never a great dancer. I don’t have a lot of natural talent and I didn’t work as hard as other dancers I knew (who are now dancing leading roles with major ballet companies) but I loved every second of it. And while I may not have been the most technically correct dancer, I could knock out some pretty tricky stuff.

And while I would never even be gutsy enough to attempt some of the steps from my former glory days of dancing, I truly believe I am a better dancer now than I ever was before.

I have had the opportunity to completely transform my body, muscles, technique and the way it all moves. Teaching over the past year as my body recovered from my pregnancy with Doodle, helped my reevaluate myself and my dancing. Even though I wasn’t really dancing, my own body adopted a lot of the corrections and information I was giving my students and I’ve been able to fix a lot of my original fatal flaws.

I’m definitely not as strong as I once was nor do I have the small bit of stamina i used to have I know my technique and alignment/posture are better. I can balance longer (I can balance! Which Was never my strong point). I’m more consistent with my abilities and I feel more stable and secure in my dancing.

And I can tell the quality of my dancing has changed. As a young dancer, I always believed there was something “bad” about my dancing because while I could do a lot of complicated movements (and often do them easily), I was rejected from too many summer programs to count, was put in the back of the corps de ballet in the program I did go to and was always left with the feeling that something was wrong with me but no one would ever tell me what it was. I never figured out exactly what the problem was, but I’m pretty sure overtime I’ve been able to overcome it and develop what I hope is a “more pleasing” style of movement.

My legs may not lift as high, my turns may not go around as many times, my jumps may not be as powerful and I may be out of breath by the end of it, but I feel calmer doing what I can can. I feel more open, joyous and carefree and I love it just as much as I always have.

(First video is a rehearsal of my Paquita variation my senior year of high school, 2002.  Second video is a piece I choreographed and performed during my Residency at Dance Ireland, 2011.)