Though the school currently has no dance team or club, dance is still a prominent part of life for a number of students in the student body. Taking dance classes and dancing with studios for years, the athleticism and grace of dance carries throughout their lives.
Junior Paloma Gomez Whitney spoke about her life through dance, how it’s helped her learn about her own persistence, and how it’s shaped her relationship with her little sister. Gomez Whitney started dancing at two or three years old, studying modern dance until she was seven or eight. At that point, her joy was no longer within the kind of dance that she did.
By age 10, she started dancing again and eventually picked up her main genre, ballet.
“I watched some ballets, like Swan Lake, on YouTube,” she said. “And I just was like, wow. That’s so beautiful. I really want to be able to do stuff like that.”
She currently practices mainly ballet, as well as some contemporary, hip-hop, and jazz, at Minnesota Dance Theater.
Nobody in Gomez Whitney’s family had ever danced before her and her sister Sparrow: She said it has seeped into their lives: “At home, we’re talking about dance, or we’ll do our little dances in the kitchen.”
Part of what makes dance joyful for her is bonding with her sister, doing things like working through moves she’s struggling with.
Ninth grader Anna Klevan spoke about her dance experience fondly. She recalled seeing the Nutcracker and begging her parents to let her dance, and has been dancing since she was four. She does mostly ballet, as well as jazz and modern dance, at Ashley Ballet Arts Academy. Dance has been a big connector for Kleven; her close-knit group of friends at dance are peppered all around Minnesota.
Klevan said, “I have a whole other group of friends at dance, and it’s super fun because … I get to be really close with a lot of other people that go to a bunch of different schools across the Twin Cities.”
She believes that finding your people in sports and hobbies makes progress feel all the more gratifying.
Ninth grader Ellie Camp, who’s been dancing for twelve years, also specializes in ballet, but does jazz as well. She dances at Ballet Royale Minnesota. Ellie’s path to dance was based on a medical condition she has that makes it difficult to participate in other sports; her condition consists of impaired vision and affected strength in her knees, leading to hyperextension, pulled tendons, and other potential injuries. Because she couldn’t engage in the athletics that her peers were in, she was enrolled in dance by her parents, as it was a sport that allowed a lot more of what Ellie could do.
She’s learned from dance that progress isn’t linear, and it takes patience and strength to get past a stubborn point. Camp said, “My parents just chose dance because it was the safer option… It’s taught me that sometimes improvement takes a long time and that even if you get set back, you can always build up and become stronger than before.”
Among the three students, a common note was the pros and cons of dance. Some big obstacles for them while dancing were COVID-19, over-comparison, and body stereotypes. According to Gomez Whitney, self-comparison was one of the hardest things to overcome. In her experience, “Sometimes there can be a negative culture around some aspects like competitiveness.”
She started dancing ballet at the age of twelve, which was much later than a lot of the girls at her studio. She had to learn to give herself grace and be patient with herself.
Last year, she faced an injury that took a toll on her progress.
Gomez Whitney said, “My technique is something that I’ve really had to work for. It’s not just been ingrained in me since I was little, like so many of the girls there.”
Beyond the classrooms and hallways of school, the world of dance offers an ecosystem that harbors strong people who learn the practice of perseverance, begin to understand self-comparison, and express themselves through movement.
