We'll Dance

I really truly hate sports. All sports. Except for dance.

If you just thought to yourself that dance isn’t sport, please stop reading this right now and carry on with your close-minded life. According to the physical education board, dance isn’t a sport, so therefore all of the school’s dance team is behind in P.E credits and has to mess with their schedule to even get out of high school. Each week in school, we spend around twelve hours running our choreography over and over again, repetitive cleaning even when we feel like our dance couldn’t get any cleaner. Sweat in our eyes, calluses on our feet, hair thrown back, in too short shorts we keep on dancing. We hear the shouted criticism and wordlessly oblige. One more time! Point your toes! Keep your energy up! Do it for your team. We spend more hours at school than any other sport (except maybe those hardcore tennis kids) and work ourselves to tears sometimes. Pushing past the soreness from the night before, smiling when all we really want to do is eat our body weight in cheeseburgers. That’s the other thing us dancers do. We eat like we have never seen food before and will never see it again.

We work so hard for our team. We sold our souls to the devil, and we know it. We give our lives to our dance team. And for what? All our pain and energy and social lives and decreasing amount of turned in homework and discipline and money and rhinestones so that for two and a half minutes we can shine.

We spend all day at a competition in a rushed and stressful blur. Hairspray and teenagers litter the gym floor, a hushed anticipation fills the room, and then a surge of pride and happiness. Or sometimes a sigh of defeat and a grumpy bus ride home.

All this for the trophy none of us can keep, in the costumes we paid for but have to return, the recognition we won’t get from our school full of people with the close-minded notion that dance is not a sport. The crazy thing is that we know that we are giving up everything for next to nothing and that we need to get our priorities straight. We know that we’re crazy and that in the long run our high school dance team won’t always matter. Yet, none of us can even imagine our lives without dance dominating it. Without dance we’re just 20 unconnected girls without a passion. We’re just like everybody else, and that terrifies us. Dance is all we can think of. It’s all we are. It’s today and tomorrow and yesterday. One day, after high school is behind us, we’ll get our own lives. Until then, we’ll dance.

-Tabitha Lawrence