It's All In The Research

          It is obvious that in order to do something, you need to know how.  If you want to play a game, you need to know the rules.  If you want to do a math problem, you need to learn the steps.  In the dance Me Verses Myself, I decided to make it lyrical, a kind of dance that I haven't had much training in.  Since I want to do this style, I need to learn how.  I have an idea and a little bit of experience, including a major dance background, but I still need to learn more.  Today I was looking up videos of how to do lyrical steps.  I found a person online that teaches steps for jazz and lyrical dance, so I began to go along with her exercises.  Her name is Cathy Roe and is excellent at both dancing and making great educational dance videos.  Another way that I found I could become a better lyrical dancer is by practicing the replication of other people's lyrical dance routines.  From this, I will be able to add many kinds of steps into my portfolio of knowledge, which I will be able to pull from when putting together the dance; Me Verses Myself.

Me Verses Myself

            Why do I always feel the need to do and be the best at everything?  Is this a problem or a gift?  I believe that this comes to show the way I am.  It can be a big problem, being a perfectionist and being ambitious to achieve more than what’s practical.  It can often lead to disappointment, major stress, and not being as good as I could if I simply focused on one field.  The plus of course is that I have some great skills that open many doors for me in my future. 

            I chose to choreograph and perform a Dance to Green Day’s song, “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” as my major project for STAC for the forth quarter.  In this, not only will I learn more about dance, different styles of dance, and choreography, but I will all discover a lot about myself; the impossible struggles of being the best, causing fights dealing with me and against me, meaning figuring out what is the best for me and if I am hurting myself or helping myself more.  Am I wasting my time, or following my dreams to end in success?  These struggles will be what I will portray in the dance of me verses myself.

A major reason why I choose to dance to the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” is because I feel so much passion in that song and it makes me want to dance, but that is just the skin of my reasons.  The deeper reason is that the message in the lyrics isn’t what Green Day was talking about, but it still fits my situation perfectly.  Green Day was talking about the hardships of a young couple’s pain of being separated by the boy going off to the army.  That is why he is singing to wake him up once his hardships are over.  I see my message to fit even better to the lyrics, as strange as that may be.  I aimed for success by putting all my time and energy into what I love to do, mostly relating to the performing arts.  I spent nearly my whole life training my voice, dancing abilities and acting skills.  With the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” I get to express my feelings towards the struggle of being the best, even though I started training later than many others in the same field, due to youthful ignorance of not knowing to start as a very little girl, in dance classes especially.  Many others had a huge head start, pushing them into a much more likely road to success.  How do I keep up?  I need to work at least twice as hard.  In the song, two of the bold lines are “20 years have gone so fast” and “wake me up, when September ends.”   These lines represent how I am behind in my training and how time is running out quickly to get much better at my passion.  These are the “20 years” that “have gone so fast.”  When my training ends (being sung as September or the end of those 20 years), That is when it is finally time to see if all my efforts were worth it.  That is when I will be either woken up to the success or proven to have put in my efforts so strongly, but not to get that outcome I dreamed of.  This goes back to causing a battle within myself.  Am I doing what’s right for myself, or only forming damage by putting in all my efforts to see my dreams fail.  I love what I do.  Right now, that and my dedication is what I’m leaning on.  This dance will show my mixed feeling of the stress I am putting on myself, while telling every last bit of me to keep going, that I will shine.  This is the dance of me verses myself.  My practice is my dreaming time, “so wake me up when September ends”.