I know I don't dance well, but I love to anyway. If you spied on me while I'm in my studio, in my kitchen, or just hanging around the apartment, you’d often find me dancing – awkwardly - to any and all types of music. If I’m walking down the street and a car rolls by with music blasting out of their windows, even if I don’t like the music I’ll involuntarily move to the beat. At concerts both casual and formal, as soon as the music starts I just can’t sit still. Give me a beat, any beat, and I’ll dance!
When I was a little girl, many of my friends took dance classes – ballet, tap & jazz. I wanted to join them with all of my tiny heart, but in a family with eight kids, there was very little extra money for such luxuries - tuition for 12 years of Catholic school was already an extravagance. I begged and pleaded with my parents for formal dance training until they found the best compromise they could muster: I could take acrobatic classes. The acrobatic classes were held at the local dance studio, taught by a couple of the dance teachers, some of my friends would be there too, and they were the cheapest offering in the dance school curriculum. So I put aside my dreams of being a prima ballerina, and instead attached them to Nadia Comaneci. For the next couple of years, I tumbled, cartwheeled and handspringed all over the house, the yard, and my friends’ yards. I loved it! But in the deep dark recesses of my heart, I still wanted to dance.
When I began acting in high school, I started reading books like An Actor Prepares and My Life in Art. My dreams of the Olympics were replaced with reveries of rehearsals for the most tragic of stories in frigid Russian theatres. As did the lucky members of the Moscow Art Theatre, I began to subsist on a diet of tea and scrambled eggs, and decided to undertake my own version of their rigorous physical and vocal training. I made a deal with my mother to take on extra chores around the house, in exchange for voice lessons at the university up the road from my high school, and a ballet class at the community college down the road from our house. The ballet class was in small room at the college, the instructor was obviously well passed her prime, and the other students were mostly senior citizens. But God I loved that class! I threw myself into it and practiced every chance I got. During one class the teacher told me that I had a natural talent, but that it was such a shame that I hadn’t gotten training early on. This was simultaneously both the most wonderful and the most painful thing I could have heard. After that, dance was never quite the same for me, but I stuck with the class through the end of the semester. When I added piano lessons to my already crowded schedule of voice lessons, play rehearsals, and choir practice, I decided to nurture my inner dancer in private, doing barre exercises every day in my room to a vinyl record of ballet music that I bought for a quarter at a yard sale (pictured above). Dancing morphed into “movement training”, and any class I took thereafter was in service to my acting ambitions.
I had completely forgotten all of this, until a friend emailed me to ask if I would donate one of my hats to an online auction fundraiser for the New York City Dance Alliance Foundation. The distant longings and memories all came flooding back. Given my own experience with financial hardship, I leapt at the opportunity to be able to help other dreamers in my own small way.
From their website:
“The NYC Dance Alliance Foundation, Inc. is an IRS approved 501(c)(3) public charity, committed to broadening performing arts awareness while advocating education and high standards of excellence in dance. NYCDAF is dedicated to investing in the next generation of professional performers by offering scholarships for secondary and college education.”
Learn more about the wonderful work that they do here. The online auction runs from now through August 5th and includes many wonderful things to bid on here. I’ve donated a Harbinger in black pleated satin, which you can bid on here.
So follow your dreams, stay on your toes, get up and dance!
Happy weekend,
Terry
