Starting Ballet Late
Starting ballet late seems to happen more often now a days than it did back in the day in the 20th century. But it’s a rare that opportunity for those who start late, especially when one starts ballet at age 18. Opportunities strike fast and a matured mind can spot those oppurtunities and move fast. Before I was a ballet dancer I was jumping from one venue to another publicing entertaining audiences with my talent to imitate Michael jackson’s dancing style. I also played the Euphonium in grade school and up to the end of high school. Although if you were to ask anyone who saw me performing they would have probably loved to have traded places with me. If they would have asked me, I would have accepted their kindness and sincerely thanked them. To be honest, it took years to before I was able to pick on the complicated choreographic steps, but I practiced and practiced the basic steps until I got better, then I worked my way on up. I became unknowingly dedicated to dancing at a young age, impressing my family, but I was unhappy with it. I felt it took away time from doing fun things I wanted to be doing from 6 to 16 years old.
Because I was living on the Chicago land area, I grew up in a unsecured environment. In my neighborhood crime, drug dealing, and gang related activity was condoned and was seen as a normal conditions. corruption was around almost al corner in every capacity. I had a great support system in my home,so i was able to bare the environment. Through out the years it only got worse outside and it became harder to go to school without running into conflicts. When I was 16 I decided to leave the Chicago land area and try my luck somewhere else. I never saw myself having to leave dancing but I was actually pretty relieved that I did. I moved out of my mothers house and moved in with my brother and his wife. My brother lived down in the most southern region of Illinois. It was way safer and I was glad because I had the chance to live a life with no obligation to dancing everyday for 5 to 10 hours straight. I even tried out for track and cross country because I had a curiosity to explore other things. I realized I had a natural aptitude for athletics due to dancing. Although I had acquired this “free” time I had been longing for for about the last 10 years. Joined sports, clubs and anything else I could get involved in. It was almost as though I was looking for some activity to fill the void of where dance used to be in my schedule everyday of my life. I did the best I could to get in involved in things such as, photography, acting, lighting and sound design but nothing peeked my interest.
This is a side note that I haven't mentioned until now, but it’s very relevant to how I started classical ballet. I did band in school from 5th grade to my senior year of high school. I played the Euphonium and was told i was a natural for the fact that I never seriously practiced. Music seemed pretty easy for me to understand but never the less it was also something I did to past the time. When I moved I stopped dancing but I didn't stop playing my euphonium for my new high school’s band. My brothers wife introduced me to the band director pretty much the same day I came down to the south to live with them. It was comforting to think of playing an instrument professionally and settling into that lifestyle because that would mean there would be no chance I would have the time to do any dancing what so ever. Dance seemed more like chore I was forced to do growing up. I wasn’t trying to escape from it but it menatlly exhausted me.
Boy was I wrong! While in marching band season the band and band directors of the school took note at well I picked up rhythm in my steps and musical I moved. So when tried tell me that I was a natural at marching to music I told them that I actually wasn’t a natural and that I practiced dancing for 10 years and just recently stopped. This made word get out around the high school that I was a dancer. The word actually got out so far that the locally dance studio in town caught wind that there was a boy at the local community high school who could dance.
The studio invited me to be in the nutcracker but I never did any kind of dancing but Michael Jackson impersonations. They showed me the steps that I had to do and I able to easily mimic them, so it was no big deal for me. After we did two shows of the nutcracker my friend told meat the beginning of the third and final show that if I were interested she would happy to give me private lessons in classical ballet. I thought about it backstage if it was what I truly wanted. I made up my mind by the very end of the performance and told her want to go through with it. So when I was seventeen I was paying my friend for private beginner lessons in ballet and by the time I was 18 I was taking actual ballet classes with other students. When I turned 18 year old, I slowly began to drop everything in school to pursue only dance professionally.
I want nothing else but to be a classical ballet dancer and will never forget how this whole journey started.
