The term “community arts” seems pretty self-explanatory, and it is. Community arts are art forms that are based in a community and characterized by interaction within that community. That being said, some community arts are forgotten about such as parades, dance and cooking. People often forget that these things are art in general and also forget that they involve the community. Dance is the art form that I choose to discuss in class. I have been dancing since I was five and I have been in surrounded by the dance community since I was born. My oldest sister was dancing two years before I was even born so I came into the world knowing the dance community. I wanted to share my unique experience with this community art with my classmates.
I chose dance because it is very personal to me. I have been taking classical ballet lessons for fourteen years now and I was born into the dance world. I am the youngest of three girls and each of us started ballet lessons when we were five. Therefore, when I was born, my oldest sister had already been talking dance lessons for two years and my other sister would start within the next two years of my life. I grew up knowing the dance community and I have never been separated from it until college started. My old dance company, Step by Step in Cornwall, New York, is still a part of my life. I recently saw their production of the of the Nutcracker which we call “A Familiar Suite”. It was strange to be on outsider after all the years of being in the production. It was my first time watching the nutcracker since I was four years old instead of performing it. I was always an insider, and to a degree I still am. I am not a professional by any means, but I am trained in classical and modern style dance forms so I am usually an insider in the dance world. I am still performing with Step by Step this summer, however, I feel more like an outsider than I ever have before. In college, I don’t yet have a dance company or club that I participate in. I now watch dance and hear about it. I no longer see the same girls I did every day at the studio. It’s a very strange feeling being an outsider of something you’ve only ever known as an insider.
For my presentation in class I showed my senior production of A Familiar Suite. To prepare for this I first had to get the video. Unfortunately, it was in a box in my parents’ house…in Florida. I called my mom and asked her if she could send it to me over the weekend. She searched the boxes of our stuff to find the DVD and sent it as priority mail as soon as she could. I checked my mailbox for the disc every day. Every day that is wasn’t there I prepared more by trying to decide which scenes to show in class. Should I show the scenes I performed in or the ones that are most important to the storyline? Or I could even show parts of every single dance. The day of the presentation finally came and there was still no DVD in my mailbox. I explained to my professor and she completely understood (you rock professor Natov). That day after class the DVD was waiting for me in my mailbox, of course. I prepared some more to presentation during our next class. I watched the show again and decided which performance of that year I wanted to show. We perform it twice in one day and I decided our first show was better to present. We were more unified as a company in the first show. We were more in time and had more energy. We’ve been performing the same dances with mild changes our whole life so it comes down to things like smiles and all of us tilting our heads the same way to decipher which performance was better than the other. I didn’t do much other research because knowledge of dance is like a second language to me. There are few questions about our performance that I couldn’t answer and even fewer about our community.
I didn’t discover much about the art of dance or community of dancers that I was already privy to, however, I did recall things I thought were most interesting. One of these things happened to be the differences in the generation of dancers I was a part of and the younger girls in my studio. Most of the older girls have been dancing together since they were three while the younger girls were a mod podge of different communities. They were also introduced to competition dance much earlier than we were. In fact, the girls I graduated with only did competitions our senior year. Comp is a completely different community and discipline than the dance we were used to. It is more about tricks and what would be interesting to those who know nothing about dance. Basically, you have to turn a lot, flip a lot, and perform a lot. I noticed the younger girls get more concerned with out-doing each other than performing as a unit. My class-year was unified in our thoughts and our dancing. Most of us had been dancing together for so long that we didn’t need to watch each other intensely to move at the same time. The younger generation danced against each other while we always supported each other. When one of us missed class, others would make sure to record it and send them what was missed. We would meet for extra time in the studio if something was unclear. The younger girls gossiped to each other when someone was falling behind, and that person would eventually fall even more behind if no one helped. When anyone in the studio performed for us in class there was always applause, but if we performed for the younger classes they did not applaud without coaxing from the teachers. What I discovered about myself is that I miss dancing and the girls I danced with way more than I expected to. I was one of the girls who transferred into Step by Step later than the rest, therefore I always felt a little bit on the outside. However, they always welcomed me in and they supported me just as much as they did each other. I knew I would miss the friends and the community, but I never would have guessed I would miss it this much. I am looking forward to finding a place to dance again in Brooklyn.
With this project, I faced frustrating technical limitations. The first was having the main feature of the presentation be more than a thousand miles away. Next was having priority mail show up a day late. Lastly, my new laptop no longer contains a disc reader. I had to go out to Target to buy an external disc reader to plug in to even watch the performance. This project made me curious to get back into a dance community. It also made me want to research more of the origins of dance as a community. When was the first dance school established? When did dancing actually become a viable career path? I also want to see more of the effects of competition on dancing communities. I’m curious to see if competitions are even the reason the younger girls at Step by Step are more self-motivated than we were. Competition is a relatively new norm for neighborhood dance companies and I am curious to see how it effects the small community dance centers. Dance has always been a part of my life and living for a few months without it has only confirmed that it always will be.
