Dancing and Dartmouth

Day 6: Mount Holyoke to Dartmouth to Amherst

11:30am Ballet Class at Mount Holyoke
1:30pm Leave for Dartmouth
6:30pm Head back to Amherst

I'm writing this a day late for several reasons. 1) We didn't get back to Amherst until 9:30 last night and I was too exhausted to think let alone write. 2) It feels pretty fancy to be blogging from a train. 3) The events of yesterday were far too emotional to start analyzing right away, so I've given myself almost 24 hours to just be thinking about the events of yesterday and how I want to handle them. Here goes.

We got to sleep in yesterday and I got ready for a ballet class at Mount Holyoke. We had planned to be touring Amherst, but I also really wanted to take a ballet class. We learned that Amherst is part of a 5 college system. Basically that means you enroll at any one of the 5 and can take classes at the other schools if your home school doesn't provide the class you want. For example, I was looking at amherst, but they didn't have any ballet classes. At all. So we checked the four other colleges that were nearby, and sure enough Mount Holyoke had an intermediate ballet class that I could take. So we drove over to Mount Holyoke (about 20 minutes from Amherst) and my mom fell in love with the campus. It was beautiful but there was just one tiny little problem--all girls school. **shudders** Still, I went and took the class. the girls at this campus were certainly the friendliest I've experienced. They seemed genuinely excited that another dancer was looking into their school and they were excited to talk to me. Several gave me their emails and Facebook information and said to message them if I ever had any questions. So that was pretty neat. 


Non-ballerinas feel free to skip this paragraph:

 That ballet class was so...strange. It was maybe Vaganova? I'm pretty sure we only did one tendu combination. It was our second combination, about half of us were in pointe shoes, and she put a pirouette from fifth in that combination....no balances in retire first...just straight to pirouettes. Then the way she gave combinations was crazy--she would count backwards from 4 to say there were four jetes or whatever. Generally I got the feeling that this teacher wasn't particularly good at tailoring her class for the level of the students. She'd throw in some really hard things that most didn't seem like were technically ready for the step. Especially considering that for some this was their only ballet class per week. There were definitely some very pretty dancers in the class, and I felt like I could hang pretty well. Other than the funkiness of this individual teacher that is. Plus I've been sitting most of the week so it was just a rough class as I threw on pointe shoes and was having trouble finding all my pieces. Also, this week was their last class before their finals, so I had to learn two variations in literally 30 seconds each to try to do them with the second group and it was so much fun. By the time we got to those it felt good to do a whole variation and feel like I could actually dance a bit instead of just having to yell at myself for forgetting to engage core muscles in tendus and things like that.




Okay welcome back. After the ballet class I jumped all hot and sweaty into the car and we started the two hour drive to Hanover, New Hampshire to just see Dartmouth. Unexpected bonus was that we got to drive through Vermont, which was really pretty and it means I can say we visited 7 states in the Northeast this trip! (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire)



So we got to Dartmouth. Just. Wow. I. Can't even. Every school we went to, people were always mentioning a sort of visceral reaction to a campus--an intangible but intense sense that you belonged at this place. I definitely hadn't really had that at any campus. Intellectually, I loved Princeton, and I could absolutely picture myself there, but I didn't have any sort of reaction to it like everyone was saying.

Dartmouth evoked the reaction. I just walked onto that campus and just started laughing. Even now writing about it I feel my heart racing a bit. I didn't have to talk to anyone, go in any buildings, I just knew that I loved it. I really, really love it. 

Still, we went in and talked to an admissions person, got a map, and started walking around. I knew I loved it because all I wanted to do was waltz around the streets. I could barely keep myself together I was so excited about this school! So we did the only natural thing to do and went and got caffeine at the local coffee shop. The coffee? Amazing, of course. Better that the coffee at Harvard. Plus then we just started talking to these two Dartmouth students who were just so excited to talk to us about everyday life in Hanover. I was just captivated. 

There is just one major, MAJOR problem with Dartmouth. No dance. None. And there really isn't even a city I could delude myself into thinking I'd take classes with. There's no ballet. EXCEPT. We were talking with the two students at the coffee shop and I asked about dance at Dartmouth (come on, it's even an alliteration) and they got really excited. Apparently there are a lot of student run groups that do mostly contemporary stuff, but they have a base in ballet. I may be crazy, but it seems like there's the student base with enough interest in an art form like ballet where I could start a student group dedicated to continuing a good ballet education. I dunno. 

My mom put it this way: "I saw in a span of 30 seconds that ballet wasn't the most important thing to you any more." 

I don't really think ballet is any less important to me than it was before this trip, I just think that Dartmouth made me see a whole new world of possibilities that I can be excited about. I'm still a ways away from having to make any huge decisions about the extent to which I'll dance in college, I mean, less than 10% acceptance rate makes it pretty likely I won't even have to make a decision with Dartmouth. Still, it was a really cool experience to feel almost called and connected to a specific school and I'm excited to see all the opportunities and possibilities that'll come in this next year. 

Who knows. Maybe I'll go to Clemson. Maybe I'll go dance with a company for a year somewhere. And hey, maybe I'll bring dance to Dartmouth.