After I had my son, a teaching job landed in my lap. I was looking for an excuse to leave the house a few days a week, so without much warning or effort, I became a dance teacher at a community college. It had been ten months or so since I’d moved around, and it felt great. The teaching however, was a soul-sucking experience. The students were a mixture of former kid dancers, folks looking to move like they do on a certain Fox show, or students looking to fill a fine arts requirement that might also help them lose weight. Most of them ended up dropping the course before the half-way point, and I very quickly burnt out. Thankfully, I discovered a modern dance studio five minutes form my house and started taking class on Saturday mornings while my husband watched our toddler. Finally, I was doing something for ME. And this led to a job with the company, taking class twice a week and rehearsing for shows that occur twice a year. When I first started dancing for K, I was grateful to be moving again, craving the immersion in to some creative work that would pull me out of my title of Stay At Home Mom. But K’s work is so vastly different from the work I did in NYC. It is physical, technical, and requires a demanding fitness level. I’m grateful for the work. I feel stronger than I ever have. If I had had this much knowledge of my body and its capabilities when I was in NYC, who knows what I would have done. K had challenged me to do things I never thought I could do, let alone bring awareness to things I should have been doing all along. (Oh, THAT’s what a straight leg and pointed foot feels like! THAT’s what it feels like to get my pelvis over my standing leg. Who knew that could make me feel so powerful?)
Yet, I’m not getting any younger. The dancers in K’s company are. I have to remind myself that I bring a certain level of artistry and maturity to K’s choreography that the younger dancers do not. However, it is also hard to look at these young people and not feel just a smidge jealous. They have their whole lives ahead of them. They could do ANYTHING with their lives right now. And I feel like I’m in the twilight of my performance career. And I don’t feel like I’ve done much to speak of. Shit. I’ve spent 34 years devoting my life to dance, and I feel like I gave it a half-ass try. In some ways, I feel as if I’m mourning the loss of a career. If I quit dancing now, then what? I’m not equipped to do much else. If I just slip out the back door of the dance world, no one would notice.
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