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As a senior in college, I still find myself dancing regularly. I am on a club dance team this year and actually act as the captain with my friend Christine (a fellow Kines major!) for the team. In college, I knew I wanted to keep dancing but knew I couldn't follow the rigorous life of ballet rehearsal for 20 hours a week anymore. I wanted to find some way in college that I could keep dancing but without so much time commitment. As I made my way through the Student Org Fair as a little college freshmen, I came across this organization called Premiere Dance. It was a club dance team on campus. They performed around campus some and held auditions in a few weeks. It seemed like a perfect fit, except for one thing. To my dismay, the team did jazz (a style I am familiar with) and hip hop (a style I had never done before in my life). Well great I thought. I am never going to make this team if I have to perform hip hop at the audition!
I decided to try out anyway. I figured that maybe it might workout, after all, I have been a seriously trained dancer for the majority of my life. This hip hop audition became a test of the theory of positive transfer of learning. Since I was successful at the skills required to be a ballet and jazz dancer, would those skills transfer into a test of hip hop dancing?  Luckily,  if calculated, my percent transfer score would have been high - I made the team! Hip hop and other styles of dance do share some of the same elements, from knowing how to learn choreography, listen to counts, and mimic the movements of another person. Those skills I have practiced in my previous training appropriately transferred into my performance as a hip hop dancer. Here is a video of my team and I performing  our hip hop routine at a home volleyball game in 2016! Go badgers!

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The Spanish variation is one of my all-time favorite variations I have ever performed. It is sassy and fierce and involves a long jumping and kicking sequence throughout pretty much the entire variation. I was cast in the variation my senior year of high school. We got to wear these beautiful lace layered brown skirts (pictured below) and a large flower in our hair. Performing this variation on stage is something I will never forget. The energy you get from performing electrifies you. Adrenaline shoots through your vessels and picks up your heart rate. You feel a little nervous, but extremely excited. Performing is my favorite part about dancing, and I would also say my strong suit. The crowd brings such energy. I love to draw people in to my performance and leave them hanging onto every movement I make on stage.
All of this excess energy and adrenaline that amounts during the performance can really screw up the stability and focus required in the choreography. On top of that, I was always a little nervous about the state of my ankle. Although it was mostly healed from that old injury, every once in a while it would give out if I wasn't careful. To avoid any slips in our performance, our teachers would make us practice the jumping sequence and high kick-battement sequence in all of our ballet classes. She would also make us practice these movements at random times during the class, when we were at least expecting it and often when we were exhausted. My teacher was most likely invoking a strategy based on the principles of contextual interference. She wanted to have us practice the sequence at random times and in random order in order to aid in our retention of the sequence. That way, we would have become used to subtle adjustments and error corrections from the random practice and be well-equipped for the performance. On the left is an action shot of me during one of shows -- in my opinion, the random practice worked very well!

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Following the summer of my junior year of high school, I had rehabilitated my ankle to pretty tip-top shape. I had plie-ed and releve-ed my way back to the peak of my ballet training and auditioned for the renowned American Ballet Theatre's (ABT) summer intensive training program, where I would be trained by some of the magnificent dancers of ABT. I was accepted into the program and journeyed to Winston-Salem, North Carolina where I spent a month training for 8 hours everyday en pointe (I went through 6 pairs of pointe shoes this month!).
All along, I had some ideas about what I wanted my future to look like. I was obsessed with ballet, and wanted to keep doing it forever. I had told my mom a few times that I was interested in dancing for a career, and it wasn't completely out of the question. A lot of the dancers at Dancenter North went on to dance for professional ballet or contemporary companies after high school (or during it, if they skipped high school graduation). My mom was supportive but also skeptical -- she didn't really know much about what it takes to become a professional ballerina. I entered the ABT summer intensive feeling inspired and ready to work to develop the skills necessary to compete with other girls training to become professionals.
A forewarning about ballet: it can seem very archaic at times. You also may not agree with a lot of the opinions that our upheld in the professional ballet world. But it is the reality. Anyway, during my intensive, I at times took a lot of criticism. My instructors at the program would say "You are eating too much in the dining hall, you need to slim down," or "Your feet don't pointe well in your pointe shoes and are not pleasing to look at," or "Your knees are not hyper-extended enough to look good in an arabesque," or "You are too tall for partnering, it would be more desirable if you were shorter." Now, these are tough remarks about things about my body that I cannot really change.I can't break my legs so my knees are straighter, nor break my feet so they point further, nor become unhealthily skinny for my own self. What my instructors were hinting at is something that we learned about in  Kines 361 about skills vs. abilities. A skill is something that can be modified with practice; you can get better at skill. An ability is unmodifiable with practice. Abilities can act as limiting factors on performance. One such ability could be body configuration. This is what my ballet teachers were getting at in this summer intensive program. I might have loved ballet and been working very had to improve certain skills (like pirouettes and arabesques), but at the bottom line, I still didn't have the right body configuration to become a ballerina, plain and simple. I was a little crushed. I still am a little crushed. Apart of me wants to be a professional ballerina still today. But I understand what an ability means, and that I don't have the ability to become a professional ballerina. I still had a great time at the summer intensive. Here are some pictures of me when I was training in North Carolina!

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Sophomore year of high school came, and I was on a roll. We practiced 4 hours a day after school, and auditions were coming up for the annual Nutcracker production that Dancenter North put on. I finally was at the level of competition for some bigger parts that year, and I was feeling really good. Audition results came out, and I was thrilled -- I was cast as one of the Snow Corp members, a really good part for my age group.I had worked so hard for this! I was ecstatic.

Flash forward to October. In the same ballet studio, we were working on pirouette combinations in Ballet Level 6. We were practicing triple pirouettes en pointe, a pretty tricky endeavor. You need to make 3 rotations on the pointe of the pointe shoe and land it sucessfully. In order to complete a pirouette, dancers utilize a technique called spotting. You choose a spot on the wall, and make sure that your head is the last to leave and the first to arrive during the rotation. Spotting helps a dancer avoid becoming dizzy and disoriented. Spotting falls under the category of an vestibulo-ocular reflex, or a coordination between the head moving in one direction and the eyes rotating in the other direction. As you are spotting, As the head rotates to the right, the eyes counter-rotate to the left. As I was spotting in my triple pirouette, an error must have occured in my vestibulo-ocular reflex or the coordinated activity my body was engaging in. I became dizzy and disoriented in the pirouette and felt myself come crashing down to the floor as my right fibula rotated to land directly underneath my body weight. As I lay on the floor, I slowly began to realize through the pain that I woulnd't be dancing in the Nutcracker anymore.

Sure enough, I had spiral fractured my right fibula. I was in a cast for 4 weeks, a boot for 3 weeks, and endured many months of physical therapy. Most of all, I was devastated that I couldn't perform in the Nutcracker, and I would lose so much of the progress I had been making. Not only could I barely walk, but it would be months before I had even close to the amount of strength required to put my pointe shoes back on.  I was heartbroken. Here is a picture of me taking a final bow with the cast of the Nutcracker that year wearing my walking boot (I'm in the third row wearing a teal blue shirt).

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Luckily, I listened to my mom (mom knows best, right) and kept up with my ballet work, as well as taking other dance classes in jazz and contemporary. Slowly but surely, I worked my ways up in the levels at my studio and began to take class with girls closer to my own age. It wasn't easy and took a lot of practice and determination. I started to fall in love with ballet.
I attribute part of my success in ballet to one of my teachers, Miss Vicki. Miss Vicki was a gorgeous ballerina and an even more skillful teacher. She wore a leotard and ballet skirt every single day with her hair tucked neatly into a tight bun. She had these special type of teacher ballet shoes she always wore that I loved. But the best part of Miss Vicki is that she gave the best corrections out of any teacher that I have ever had and since then.
Ballet is a very specific art form. It requires one to bend and tweak the body into positions and shapes that are unnatural and very specific. As a result, during class, a good teacher is supposed to provide her students with corrections to the students' alignment, turn out, muscular position, leg height, head direction, musicality, fluidity....and the list goes on. Actually, the amount of cues we are supposed to think about during class can be very overwhelming. When you try to make one correction, you forget about another and lose your form in that part of the body. Miss Vicki made this so much easier. Miss Vicki was extremely skilled at providing augmented feedback regarding the knowledge of performance rather than just the knowledge of results. She wouldn't just tell you "your ribs are sticking out", but rather she would use her hands to guide your abdominals to engage and to squeeze your ribs together. In other words, her feedback wasn't just descriptive but also prescriptive in nature. Miss Vicki was really good at both verbal and movement kinematic feedback that enhanced our performance rather than stunted it. She was able to determine by just looking at her students which corrections to make a priority, and which to keep to herself. As a result of Miss Vicki, I started to make great progress in ballet. I began to jump levels and advance at a pace I didn't even know possible for myself. It was an exciting time, and I started thinking more and more about what it would be like to become a professional ballerina someday. Here is me in class practicing a combination.

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In January of my 5th grade year, I enrolled in Dancenter North. It was a pre-professional dance studio that required uniforms and a professional demeanor in class. We took tests on ballet terminology and practiced for 4 hours everyday after school. There was one problem: I hadn't taken ballet since my Mommy-and-Me ballet class at 2 years old. Ballet was slow and boring to me, and I had no interest in taking another ballet class. But Dancenter North insisted that ballet was the foundation of all dance styles (and they weren't wrong) and that success in the studio would require enrolling in a ballet class. So I sacrificed my pride and enrolled in a beginning ballet class. It was very humiliating, and not just because as a beginner I was really bad at ballet. The beginning class had girls in it that were much, much, much younger than me, some 4 years younger than me. I was also really tall for my age. Come recital time, I stuck out like a sore thumb: this very tall teenage girl, tripping around the stage in my ballet slippers among a host of 3rd graders. I told my mom I wanted to quit a few times. "Mom I am so behind. I am never going to get better at this!" My mom told me the same thing as what the Remoteness Effect teaches us in Kines 361. You cannot predict performance based on early sessions of practice. In technical terms, the remoteness effect states that as the number of intervening trials increases, the correlation between any 2 trials decreases. In other words, my performance in ballet class felt really bad because I hadn't given myself enough time to improve.
So, despite my embarrassment, I kept working along in ballet class. Here is a picture of me in class doing just that!

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My dance career did not end with that fluffy tutu and feather boa at 4 years old. Growing up, I danced with the Grayslake Park District dance department. My earliest dance recitals were just ballet and tap, but I started to really like jazz classes too. I started to get pretty good. I remember the day when I got my splits for the first time. I was in 4th grade and I was ecstatic. I wanted to learn everything there was to learn about dance. I started to make-up my own dance choreography in my basement. I stretched everyday after school, and used to read my 4th grade chapter books sitting in the middle splits. I was determined to soak up everything that had to do with dance. The picture featured below is right before one of my dance recitals in 4th grade.
My teacher at the park district started to take notice of my now super interest in dance. On top of that, I was already in the highest level at the park district. There wasn't much else for my teacher to teach me. When I used to be making large leaps in progress in various dance skills, from pirouettes to high kicks, I wasn't making much progress anymore. My teacher noticed this and recommend I switch to a pre-professional dance studio with more intensive training. This idea intimidated me. A pre-professional studio? With actual uniforms and well-known teachers? My mom wasn't sure, and neither was I. But my teacher was right. I had hit the characteristic of learning we talked about in Kines 361 where my rate of improvement had stalled. After so many years of practice at this park district dance facility, I wasn't becoming a better dancer anymore because I had little left to learn, another statement of It was time for the big fish to leave the little pond and enter the big pond. I traded in my leapoard print and feather costumes for a pair of pink ballet slippers and a leotard.

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It all started with a pair of shiny black tap shoes. As a little girl, I LOVED to dance. I was always dancing around my room, out in the driveway, and in the aisles of the grocery store. I started my first ballet class when I was 2 years old. It was a Mommy-and-Me ballet class. I couldn't get enough of it. My mom enrolled me in my first ballet class by myself the next year. At age 4, I started my first tap class. That was where the real fun began. Teaching tap to 4 year olds is really difficult. In tap, the idea is to make small movements with the foot in order to produce a melody with the metal tap of the shoe, all corresponding to the beat of the music. These movements are small and fast, and more experience tappers than my 4-year-old-self can make different sounds with the tap shoe based on the specific angle or position you tap the foot on the ground.
This is why I say teaching tap to 4 year-olds is very difficult. In order to produce the desired tapping sequence and melody to a score of music, the tapper needs to create little tiny taps with the foot in different spatial locations. The more skilled the tappers (and my beginner tap class certainly was not), the faster you can complete these taps and the better the tap melody sounds. Its truly an embodiment of the spatial speed and accuracy principle. The faster the teacher asks you to tap, the harder it is to make those taps sound distinct and correct (especially at 4 years old) because it's difficult to produce these taps in different locations on the tap sole and on the ground. As a result, my "Stop in the Name of Love" tap recital sounded a lot like elephants tap dancing, included with a lot of waving at my Mom and Dad. The music was too fast for us 4 year olds to be able to create different sounds on the tap shoe. Luckily, our costumes were cute enough to hold the audience's attention!