dance dance dance! by Ellie F. '28

Anyone who knows me from high school or Mathcamp or SSP⁠01 Summer Science Program knows that I have the tendency to do everything. I’m in clubs and choirs, running events, and starting (and sometimes even finishing!) silly side projects constantly. Doing things makes me happy, even though it makes my schedule a bit claustrophobic. But hey! PNR exists for a reason, and now seems like the best time to try everything I can.

If you’ve ever seen me near music, you’ll quickly learn that I love to dance. I’m a Minecraft parrot—put any kind of music near me, and I start grooving and schmoving. I’ll bop to classical, rap, and the hold music that plays when I try to call customer service. I’ll nod along to songs I know by heart, and much more often, music that I’ve never heard in my life.

actual footage of me

I’ve been dancing my whole life, but when Covid struck, I stopped taking classes. For all of high school, I danced at home for fun, twirling through my kitchen in socks and pulling so many pique turns and pirouettes in my backyard that I wore holes into four (4) pairs of tennis shoes. But I really miss dancing with other people, and I want to improve! So, on the first weekend after classes started, I decided to try every dance audition or event I could fit into my schedule. 02 thank you to fellow blogger Fiona for making me realize this is possible!! Why? Why not? 

It begins

My auditionmaxxing weekend started with the DanceTroupe showcase. I rolled up with a cup filled with cereal because I didn’t have time to get breakfast, and settled back to enjoy the show. We got to see the choreographers show off all their dances, in hip-hop inspired, contemporary, ballet, and tap styles.

Speaking of tap, the next item on my agenda was an miTAP audition! Having not tapped in half a decade (!!), I was definitely pretty underprepared—I was the only person that didn’t have tap shoes. After warm-ups, I discovered the joy (not) of trying to do pullbacks in tennis shoes. But the miTAP officers were so sweet and let me adapt. Then, we learned a short routine. Even though my final rendition was very far from perfect, I was so happy to try tapping again with such talented dancers. 

Afterwards, I had a serendipitous run-in with Jorge, a current sophomore who taught our friends and I some Latin dances at CPW. He mentioned he was going to his club’s Casino Rueda class, and I had free time, so I joined the circle and learned moves like guapea, dame directo, and un fly. 03 thanks to Jorge for spelling these for me!

non-dance break (but it’s still musical!)

Between all the dancing, I also auditioned for the Video Game Orchestra (VGO) as a violist! It was the chillest and most enjoyable audition I had ever been to. I just had to play a scale and do some sightreading, and I even got to play The Legend from Deltarune for my prepared piece. 

Okay back to dancing :) This time, I went to the Ballroom Dance Team’s team match event, where members of the ballroom dance team were paired with rookies in six dances: foxtrot, waltz, rumba, cha-cha, and swing. Because of my VGO audition, I arrived late, so I wasn’t competing. Instead, I got to admire the pairs dance very beautifully around the floor and cheer for the even numbered team.

Immediately after, I went to Bhangra! Bhangra is a style of dance from the Punjab area of India, and it is so joyful and energetic. I’ve definitely never tried anything similar to it, but the team taught us the basic moves really well. The room was really really hot (⅔ of the fans were broken), and we were jumping and double-bouncing constantly, but the music and dance were so purely fun and happy that I didn’t even mind (okay just a little). Still, I deserved SO MUCH ice cream after that much exercise.

Dawn of the Second Day

The biggest part of Sunday was auditions for DanceTroupe. My first audition was for contemporary, and we learned a routine to Torn. I realized that I missed dancing contemporary a lot! I love getting to be dramatic and trying to convey emotions through my movements.

how i probably looked

After my contemporary audition, I went to ballet. I did barre for the first time in years and am still sore from adagio.⁠04 Barre is exercises done while holding onto a bar (but fancy and French!), adagio is a slow exercise at the center of the floor We also did all sizes of jumps and leaps! Wheeeee! Overall, the DanceTroupe auditions were very relaxed and not stressful at all, and I think they’d be a great experience for anyone interested in dancing, at all skill levels.

Bonus round!! I also auditioned for Next Sing, an acapella group. It was short and sweet, with some range tests as a warmup, rhythm and pitch matching tests, an optional sight-reading, and a short excerpt from a song I chose (part of Killer Instinct from Bring It On)

5/5 Stars, would recommend!

Auditioning, or any way of putting yourself out there, is kinda scary. I felt a bit intimidated many times over my weekend of auditions, but I bet I’ll feel the same way a lot while I’m at MIT. More than that, though, I felt welcomed at every audition I went to. I’m taking that as a sign to keep trying a little bit of everything that interests me, like an easily distractible kid in a candy store. Maybe I’ll find a new hobby, a new friend, a new community, or maybe I won’t. But that’s alright, because either way, I’ll keep dancing and doing the things I love.

wahoo!