Something I’ve been intending to do since Week 2 or 3 and also discussed in my blog assessment essay was to write some posts about a very important part of my life: dance. As I kind of tried to justify in my essay, I always put off doing these posts not because they were hard to write – far from it – , but because they always seemed like the easiest and least important task set for the week, and I would push it to the bottom of the list every time.

But now, after missing my train by two seconds, I decided I might as well do something somewhat useful. My brain’s still not in top gear yet so I’m not really interested in talking about networks and hypertext at this very moment, but dance comes easier, so I’ll go with that.

Why do I dance?

I first danced because it made my friends look cool, and I wanted to look cool like them. I danced because I didn’t want to become a stereotypical geek. I wanted to have something the school kids would remember me for.

I also wanted to get girls.

Well, I dance for different reasons now, but I’ll talk about them in later entries. Right now I’d rather talk about my experiences with dancing from when I first started. I’m not really doing this because I think anyone will be interested to read it, as I know my blog has a readership of about, like, one, but it is interesting to look back over the past through writing about it. You immediately put memories into a sort of story, which is kind of cool.

I first tried out dancing in Year 6. My friends had just performed a breakdancing/hip hop set at the talent show at school camp and, although they were really quiet guys back then, everyone all of a sudden had this newfound interest in them. I wanted that. So, later in the year my friends got invited to perform at our primary school graduation dinner and I joined up with them. They taught me some breakdancing basics and we learned some choreography off the special features from the You Got Served DVD. We performed and, although I’d cringe so much if I watched that performance again, everyone absolutely loved it. For those last few days at primary school everyone knew us as the breakdancers.

It was a great feeling, and since we were gonna go to the same high school, I expected we’d come in and instantly become awesome badasses that everyone would look at in awe. Of course, I had forgotten that the transition from Year 6 to Year 7 brings you back down to the bottom of the food chain. I remember saying on my first day to the rest of the class – quietly but confidently – that my favorite hobby was breakdancing. While I did get the “oh wow, he dances” kind of interest from my peers that I initially wanted, there was now a label on my head. I had set an expectation for myself that, when asked to show some moves at orientation camp, I got stage fright and ran away after doing like three seconds of dancing (literally).

So that label quickly washed away as people realized I actually wasn’t that good. To add to things, my friends’ breakdancing teacher actually attended the same school, and he and his group of mates always performed at school events to raucous cheers. We didn’t perform that year. It was too intimidating

The next year my friends and I decided to have a go at performing at the school’s annual charity concert, which is a relatively small event. Another friend had joined up with us and I guess he was more confident, which caused us to try dancing again. We practised for ages in my friends’ living room, making up choreography and learning some more bboy (breakdancing) moves and stunts.

On the day, we got seriously pretty damn nervous. The breakdancing teacher was performing at the concert too, and, as supportive as he was of us, we were afraid he’d upstage us and we would look like fools. Nevertheless, we had spent a lot of time and effort on this set, and we persevered.

Somehow, our performance got an amazing response from the crowd, perhaps an even better one than the teacher’s. I think there were a lot of reasons. We were still really young, and therefore small and cute. Our song choice was a bit more mainstream (“Low” by FloRida. It’s only been six years and I’m already looking on it like its some retro classic). Maybe it was because we combined breakdancing with hip hop choreography, something that the other performance did not.

Whatever it was, our confidence was back. Well, it was back for most of us. I had still felt somewhat insecure about my dancing, especially as a couple of people had straight up said that I was the weakest one of the group. I decided that I didn’t want to weigh down my more talented friends, and quit dancing forever…

…or so I thought.

P.S. Shut up, that was not a corny ending/cliffhanger at all. It’s my blog, I do what I want.