Dancing is the best thing I did for myself this year, and it’ll be the best Christmas present I could have given myself. Dancing was self-confidence and aesthetic pleasure, the satisfaction of hitting a beat just right or perfecting a move. It was the joy of fooling around with my dance members and then becoming serious a moment later, because we only had an hour to record this business and nobody wanted to postpone filming again.
Growing up, I was surrounded by friends who did classical dance, did Bollywood dance, took ballet lessons, or were somehow otherwise musically inclined. Though I had some brief experiences with dance lessons and performances, I always felt awkward, physically and mentally. I tried my best, but I still looked clumsy, lacking the skills and motivation my friends had.
When I first got into K-Pop, I learned that lots of fans learned and casually performed choreographies of their favorite groups or songs. I shied away from that area of fandom, figuring I was too ungraceful and didn’t have the dance background that was probably necessary to even attempt it. Thanks to my interest-turned-love for the genre, I joined the campus K-Pop club, and in a rush of impulsivity one day, I signed up for a dance performance. Blood, Sweat and Tears, a BTS song with a fairly complex choreography, was made even more difficult by the fact that I had chosen a main dancer’s part.
There was a long adjustment period at the beginning where I couldn’t figure out how to practice without having mastered what I was doing. I was my typical clumsy, untrained self stumbling through practices and run-throughs, which made me feel about as adaptable as a rock – unable to ever improve. I wanted to quit and nurse my wounds, go at a comfortable, easy pace and fall back on my cushion of insecurity. But, as intensely set as I was to prove myself to my dance members, through hours spent rehearsing in my dorm room, or mock-dancing in buses, hallways, and at one point, the library, I saw the slightest crack of light through the stone. From there, it was a game of leaps and bounds – literally. By the week before our performance, I knew what I was doing, albeit lacking the finesse that trained dancers have.
Throughout that next week, as I waded through midterms and unreasonable physics exams, I realized that pushing myself, even impulsively, to do this dance was an unknowing gift to myself from someone who desperately wanted to be better. I had forcibly put myself through the struggles of facing my insecurity and inability, and scraped for that extra bit of time in between school and work to do so. That week, I was still trying my best to train sharpness into my movements and power and grace into my limbs. However, what I had gained over the course of practicing seemed so great in comparison to the potential pitfall of disgrace and awkwardness that I found the burden of perfection gone. I was content with what I had achieved so far, and I would improve as much as I could, if not to my envisioned level.
At the performance, I stumbled yet again. In the moment, there’s not much you can remember about performing – it’s all a blur of lights and cheers, and your blood pumping too fast. One of my friends later sent me a video she’d taken, but I was too scared of what I’d see to watch it. I was attacked by my old fears of inability, preemptively cringing that I would be stiff and off-beat, clumsy as usual.
I put off watching the video for a week, until after the final recording session for our dance. I had been wracked with nerves at the thought of recording, that a permanently flawed me would be out there for posterity to judge as they saw fit. I feared that my old self would peek through the hours I had put in, ruining the semblance of pride in my abilities that I had built up. But once the recording period was over, I regained that sense of calm that flowed through me the week before the performance. Watching that friend’s video, shot from a few rows behind the crowd, I heard the cheers and screams in full volume, enthusiasm enough to buoy me again. No one in that crowd cared how precise my movements were, or how I might have tripped trying to not fall off the short stage. No one minded anything but my own enthusiasm and love for what I was doing, and I realized that I shouldn’t either.
I had struggled, sure, and you could probably still tell I probably hadn’t ever received dance training in my life, but I was proud of what I had learned and how I had performed once more. The recording would be an achievement, but never something to drag me down. My goal was to be at the level of a professional who had done this for years, and if at the end of everything I could aspire to a fraction of that grace and charisma, I would take it gladly. And What did my skill matter anyway? It was worth everything, from my bruised knees and scraped knuckles to the time I was accidentally kicked in the head (oops). It was worth it because of the happiness and pride it brought me, and others, to see this dance.