With dancing experience purely from viewing Dance Moms and Shake It Up as a child, I took it upon myself to prepare for CWU Dance tryouts, to give you all an insight into a world I’ve never been a part of. Spoiler alert: my toe is now twice as large, purple, and my pride is shot.
To fully immerse myself in the mindset of an individual trying out, I tried to prepare by browsing old performances of the CWU Dance Team on YouTube, but learned that most performances posted are from nine years ago, unfortunately. Thankfully, their Instagram did have a few performances for me to study and learn.
Instead, I watched tutorials on short dances while not taking into consideration that tryouts would probably include multiple types of dance and not just hip-hop.
Not only did I need to learn how to memorize choreography, but I also needed to achieve the skill requirements. I went to the gym to focus on those first. I started my training with a Calypso. My coordination is something close to nonexistent, so it took an hour to even get the rough concept of what I am supposed to do.
Before the tryouts, the skills I could confidently do were a leap on my left leg, leg hold on left, single turn, high kick and a backbend.
The tryouts took place at 10 a.m. on a Saturday. To really live action roleplay (LARP) as a dancer, I took the time to put on my best makeup and do my hair. I had to look at Pinterest if we are being honest. Furthering my research, I made sure my outfit fit the part. Thankfully, upon entering, everyone else was in a similar outfit.
And just like that, the tryouts began. We started with stretching. This was the one task I succeeded in. Once we lined up to do some warm-ups across the floor, I learned my fate.
After a few humbling attempts and awkwardly running across the floor because I could not move with such speed and elegance, it was finally time for leaps. A move I have had to do many times in gymnastics. However, it was all over once I realized I had to use my non-dominant foot. On the first leap, my toe landed still pointed. This mis-step reflected across the rest of the practice. As the bruise progressed, so did the humbling I experienced.
Once lines were over, it was time to learn the routines. Now, in gymnastics, which I did do growing up, there’s no trying out. You learn the routine slowly and the longest one will be about a minute and 30 seconds. My focus was mainly on beam growing up, so I had gotten used to a 45-second routine learned and created through several practices in high school.
In tryouts, we took about 10 minutes to learn a 30-second dance. To the average person, this may seem simple. To the most uncoordinated individual alive, with no dance experience, (me), I only knew half of the choreography by the time we reached the official tryout portion.
Starting with hip-hop, we were placed in groups of three. My group, unfortunately, had me. Someone who spent the entire time skipping moves and staring at my peers in the mirror in front of us to make sure I was doing the right move while dancing to ‘The Box’ by Roddy Ricch. I’m not saying I am the worst dancer, but let’s just say I don’t think them skipping over me for a repeat performance after this was a coincidence.
The same goes for the jazz section. Except this time, the rhythm was even worse somehow. I didn’t even attempt my right-legged calypso at the end. Or the freestyle portion we were doing after each performance.
With a limp and a body that has aged 10 years in the span of a three-hour tryout, I can successfully say I did attempt to dance and might have awoken the urge to relearn any skills I have lost by taking a break from gymnastics, basically all of them. Thank you to the Dance team for honoring my request in allowing me to try out and write this piece. Pain and all, it was a fun experience.
