My Life as a Dancer

“Endangered Species on deck! Karis, are you ready?”

“Yeah…yeah. Just give me a minute and I’ll be up there.” I close my eyes and start counting from zero to a hundred, as I shift my weight back and forth from the ball of my right foot to the ball of my left foot.

“Karis? You good? You’re about to go on.”

“Yup,” I say. “Let’s do this.” The stage assistant leads me back stage and I wait in the wings as the performance before me draws an outstanding applause as the lights dim slowly and fade to complete darkness. I take my spot on stage, the lights return, the music starts, and for a few minutes, it’s just me in my own little world.

I’ve been dancing since I was 5 years old and although I’ve performed nearly 1,000 times in front of an audience (I’m throwing my competition years in the mix here) I still have an overwhelming feeling of wanting to projectile vomit before I on stage. Beautiful image, I know.

A lot of people I talk to have a rather skewed perception of what life is like as a dancer, but to be fair, it’s different for most genres and studios. My experience was far from anything that may be projected on the Bravo TV network (e.g. Dance Moms). It was rigorous, physically (and sometimes) emotionally painful, and quite frankly, it consumed my life.

I took my first ballet class when I was 5 years old at a small studio in southern New Hampshire. Our recital piece was to a song called, “She’s Like the Wind”. The selected costume was a fluffy baby pink tutu, with puffy chiffon sleeves that cradled a fine line between being adorable and being absolutely heinous. I remember being frolicking on stage, wildly Bambi-eyed, and trying to remember choreography that I had spent months learning prior to this moment. I don’t remember much about that night, other than what it felt like to be on stage. Still, to this day, there is a part of me that does not exist until I am on stage performing in front of an audience. I’ve never been able to explain the rush or adrenaline that overcomes me but it’s the most addicting feeling I’ve ever experienced.

I personally like to block out the years that followed my initial dance performance because it is an embarrassing collection of dances to songs that should never, ever be listened to (e.g. “Space Cowboy” by N’Sync) in combination with an abundance of very ugly unitards. Dance, at this time in my life, was merely an extracurricular activity my parents were willing to shell out money for.

It wasn’t until I had been offered a position on the competition team in the 7th grade that I began to take my training seriously. I was one of the younger dancers on the team and I was ecstatic to be joining the older girls I had idolized in class. This was my golden opportunity to show them I belonged there and I knew I’d have to put in more effort in my performance in class to stay on par with them.

What many people don’t understand about dance training is that it takes incredible strength, control and discipline to train your body to move a certain way. Dancers utilize muscles most people overlook on a daily basis. Consider the execution of a standard ballet repertoire of plies, tendu, frappe, battement, pirouettes, across the floor, etc. all while maintaining the correct technique. But you can’t just whack your leg up and call it a day. There’s actually a technique to everything. And great technique, along with genuine passion and talent, separates an incredible dancer from an ordinary dancer.

For seven years, I’d spend hours after school and weekends training and rehearsing with my teammates for upcoming competitions. Come winter and spring, my Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays would be entirely consumed by dance. It was exhausting and I would dread them entirely. My mom would use entire bottles of gel on my hair to get it into the perfect bun. She’d do my makeup according to my director’s request, which was generally a tasteful depiction of a circus clown. My eyes would itch and burn from the fake eyelashes and I would constantly have this disgusting jelly rubbed onto my teeth to keep me smiling through a performance.

Competitions are a hub for a bunch of dancers to pretend like they support each other. But the truth is we’re all there to prove we’re better than everyone else. It wasn’t an organic environment and it wasn’t what drew me to dance in the first place. Competitions are dance performances at one of the highest levels, in fact, some of the greatest dances I have ever seen have been at competitions. But it made me feel like a sell-out. It was like I was performing for the advertisement of the company, for the judges, for medals and placement in the ‘Top Performance of the Weekend’ List. It had gotten to the point where I’d felt like nothing more than a robot caked with makeup, moving mindlessly throughout a song.

I had hit a wall. I had improved by biblical proportions from the girl in the frilly pink tutu years ago and to my surprise, started getting recognized for my on-stage performance. I was aware that I had embarked into a more serious part of dance and very lucky there were opportunities for me to grow. Here’s the thing though: you can have the greatest technique in the world, but if you don’t have passion then you have nothing. And I was running on empty.

So in my junior year of high school, I quit. It devastated my parents, who had poured their time and money into this dance life of mine only for me to throw it away. As much as I loved to dance, it had worn me down physically and mentally. I took the time to try and find other things that would spark my interest for over a year, but nothing made my soul sing quite like dance did.

When I got to college, I ended up joining the dance company at my (now) alma mater, where I was reminded why I love to dance. I had the opportunity to participate in the artistic visions of my classmates, of other professional dancers and choreographers. Back home, I was a very big fish in a very small pond. Now, I was dancing with people whose passion, technique, and talent far surpassed my own. It’s a humbling experience and an honor to share the stage with these type of dancers.

I had grown up from the competitive freak in my earlier years and had acquired an appreciation for great dancing. A beautiful dance performance truly makes the audience feel something. Great dancers and choreographers are able to project the idea and vision such that it is translated effortlessly on stage. And you, yourself as a dancer, transform briefly, into something far beyond words.

There are some passions you will discover in your lifetime that bring you to strange and interesting places. For me, dance challenged my body to do things I’d never thought I’d be capable of doing. It pushed me to express a story and emotion through movement. It proved to me that no matter how tough I was on myself, I was always stronger than I thought I was. It reminded me that anything I wanted I’d have to work relentlessly for.

Looking back on the past twenty four years, a majority of my life has been spent in a studio, repeatedly counting the numbers 1 through 8, sweating like a pig on a summer day, listening to the same song over and over, feeling like my legs were going to give out. And you know what? I’d never take a second of it back.

I’m currently a dancer and choreographer for a company in Boston. At 24, I’ve started to notice that contemporary and lyrical dance, my strongest genres, are stressful on my body. I’m starting to learn more hip-hop style, which is probably the most entertaining type of dance currently out there. I still love to dance more than anything else.