There aren’t many thoughts in the heads of the dancers as they cross the floor and plant themselves in their position onstage. The focal point on their mind is the performance itself.
“When I’m stepping on stage, there aren’t a lot of thoughts in my head other than just to do my best,” Jonat said. “Kind of just thinking about the dance and performing my best.”
“I usually try and focus on my performance, and then I try and think of little things my teachers have told me I need to fix while I’m on stage, so that I can just keep getting better,” Rurak added.
The crowd quiets down when their eyes land on the dancer. Sometimes it’s only one figure under those colourful spotlights. Sometimes there are multiple.
To the audience, the performance begins when the dancer makes their first move. To the dancers, the performance began long before they stepped up on that stage. It began before they arrived at the competition’s venue, before they woke up that morning and donned their costume.
After long hours of perfecting the same move over and over again, after piecing together the puzzle pieces of the routine, and after setting moves to the track that best fits them, the process itself becomes the performance.
Music fills the theatre as lights bathe the dancers in different shades of colour. Their moves are swift but careful, every one of them intentional in the way they’re executed. The point of a toe. The flex of an arm. The bend of a back. Each move follows the flow of music like a leaf drifting down a stream.
The routine is one spent months in the making, though, in theory, it’s been worked on for much longer than that. It starts with those baby ballet classes, where dancers first learn what a plié is or how to set themselves in first position. Every year of experience that follows only adds to their repertoire of moves, contributing to the evolution of each performance year after year.
The dancer sinks into their final position, setting themselves there until the music slowly fades into the air.
In less than two minutes, this particular performance is over. All that’s left is to receive feedback and award placement at the end of the competition.
This doesn’t mean that this dancer’s performance has ended. The performance itself begins with their first — the one in which they woke up with butterflies ahead of for the first time, ahead of which they put on their costume and slicked their hair back in a bun for the first time.
Every first performance is different. Rurak’s, for example, took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning she danced in front of a camera instead of a large crowd. When she did first step out on the stage, Rurak recalled feeling both a sense of pride and relief after the lights went down.
“I think I felt pretty relieved after, and I felt pretty proud of myself, because I’d never really done that before, and so it’s pretty cool experiencing that.”
The first performance is the one that sets the tone. It’s the one that, no matter what, a dancer will never forget — because that’s when every performance after it first began.
“I just felt the lights on me,” Jonat reminisced. “Some people get nervous about 100 people watching them, but it almost felt like I was the only one up there. Even now, it just kind of feels like time stops, and you’re doing what you love. It’s just an amazing feeling.”
These are the stories of just two of the hundreds of competitive dancers in the Tri-Cities. Every experience is different, but one thing’s for certain — none of these stories come without immense drive and determination.