The Ballerina Life

Throughout my life, I have taken many ballet classes and have had several different teachers.  Although I have had my favorites, all of them have given me valuable knowledge that helped me to improve my technique, performance and mentality about ballet. For most of my beginning years of dance, I trained with one ballet teacher, Miss Kim.  Growing up in a competitive dance studio, we were required to take a few ballet classes each week in order to dance on the competition team.  Because I had Miss Kim as a teacher from age 3-18, I really learned all of the basics from her.  I learned the names of steps, how to execute them and finally, how to perform them.  A lot of what Miss Kim focused on was the emerging style of contemporary ballet.  She always chose pop/rock songs for our dances, such as “American Pie” by Don McLean or “Hotel California” by the Eagles.  I enjoyed this because it was fun to do such structured dancing to crowd-pleasing songs that the audience could identify with. 

            I don’t think I realized how much Miss Kim taught me until I went to college.  Because Hofstra’s Dance Department does not require you to audition, there is a very wide range of ability and dance training.  Of course I had to work very hard in class, but I never felt like I was drowning.  Oftentimes at Hofstra, we would leave ballet class and people would be complaining about how hard the class was.  Personally, I never found the classes to be too difficult.  I think this is because I always had difficult ballet classes growing up, and being in such mentally and physically demanding classes helped to prepare me for college dance classes.  I can thank Miss Kim for my many years of ballet training and for preparing me enough for me to stay afloat in college level ballet. 

Vocabulary:

Technique (noun) - Proper positioning of the body in dance

Mentality (noun) - Way of thinking

Execute (verb) - To do

Emerging (adjective) - Starting to become popular

Audition (verb) - To try out for something

Afloat (adverb) - Able to keep up with 

Vocabulary Exercise: Put the correct word in the blank space provided. 

The lazy woman has a negative ______________ about getting a job. 

Pointing your feet when you kick is the proper ______________ for the Rockettes. 

I want to _______________ for the school musical but I do not think I will make it.

The rich woman was able to stay _________________ with all her expensive bills. 

Lorde is an ________________ musical artist with a new hit song. 

It is hard to ________________ all of my chores on a Saturday. 

Grammar Point: Some words can be used as different parts of speech depending on the context of the sentence. 

Choose one vocabulary word and write a new sentence to make it a different part of speech.