- Please provide a brief description of your STEP Signature Project. Write two or three sentences describing the main activities your STEP Signature Project entailed.
For my STEP project, I took private dance lessons at EA Dance Art. In my sophomore year, I joined OSU’s dancesport club, dancesport basically being the sporty name for competitive ballroom. I used my STEP funds to get Latin heels and lessons to deepen my understanding of dance technique.
- What about your understanding of yourself, your assumptions, or your view of the world changed/transformed while completing your STEP Signature Project?
I don’t think I’ve ever had the kind of hobby that made me want to go out of my way to get better at it. I took guitar lessons all through middle school and a bit into high school, but I’m honestly not 100% sure why. I think it was the kind of thing where my parents just wanted me to have a hobby and I thought guitars were cool. I mean it was fun to play, but I never tried particularly hard to get good at it beyond the surface. Or maybe I’d practice a bit for a specific event, but it was never anything super complex. Same thing went for any sport I tried. Like yeah I ran a few miles every day during cross country, but I never ran during the off season, did any sort of cross training, or even paid attention to what I was eating (mostly junk food, the flow of the universe, and my own spite).
Ballroom might possibly be the first time I’ve ever actively tried to get better at something. It’s so easy for me to think I’m just bad at practicing on my own and I should be giving more time to it, but looking at it through the lens of all the things I’ve tried before, I’ve actually come really far. Of course I’m going to be bad at practicing on my own. That’s something people are supposed to learn, I just never had anything I cared about enough to force myself to learn. And that’s probably the most fundamental change in my understanding of myself. It’s hard to hold onto and I’m going to have to continuously relearn it, but it’s an important realization.
- What events, interactions, relationships, or activities during your STEP Signature Project led to the change/transformation that you discussed in #2, and how did those affect you?
Part of what’s made the whole process of trying to be nicer to myself about being bad at dance is having people who tell me “Hey um, you’re good at dance actually.” Or they tell me what specifically is bad about the dancing and then how to fix it. And during this project, I got to pay people to dedicate hours of their time specifically to telling me those things!
Enoch and Anastasia, the instructors I was taking lessons from, were absolutely fantastic at telling me the things I needed to hear. I’ve never taken an anatomy course, so these dance lessons were probably the most detailed explanations of how my body works that I’ve heard in my entire life. And they dished out enough genuine and specific compliments that I left almost every lesson feeling better about my dancing than when I came, even though we just spent 90 minutes tearing apart everything I’d previously been doing.
I did also genuinely get better at technique during these lessons. Higher level dancers who saw me when I was starting out have seen me at social dancing events or doing practice rounds at club lessons and came over to me to say they could tell that I’d been cooking on Latin/rhythm. With the semester starting, we’ve gotten a lot of new people joining dancesport club, and I feel like a minor deity. There are so many things I can identify because I was doing it the whole time and literally just figured out how to fix it. It feels good to see where I came from and know I’ve surpassed it and then watch as the advice I pass onto new people helps them surpass it too.
- Why is this change/transformation significant or valuable for your life?
I generally don’t feel proud of the things I’ve accomplished. It’s something I’ve always struggled with and will most likely struggle with for the rest of my life. Taking a few dance lessons won’t fix that, but it was nice to practice thinking differently about my approach to learning. Dance has been the most positive influence on my mental and physical health since coming to college, and I’m so glad I got to spend these weeks doing a deeper dive into it.