Student Blog: My Offenses Towards Dance Substitutes

Pittsburgh in the winter has been nothing short of snowstorms and icy walkways to class, but what never ceases to amaze me is how determined some of my dance teachers are to teach their classes. 

Don’t get me wrong — I love to dance. It’s one of my passions in life and it has driven me all 18 years of my life. Yet, in the moments where all of your other classes are cancelled except one, you’re pretty much hoping pretty damn hard that it’s cancelled. The calm morning of 8AM ballet being cancelled. The easygoing afternoon of your improv class and first dance technique class is cancelled for the afternoon… And then the intense anxiety of not knowing if your streak of calmness will end abruptly within the time you have to start getting ready for class and the actual time it begins. No notification of cancellation. Just lovely.

One of my professors couldn’t get to the building, because she was snowed in and still trying to get out of her driveway. Seems like a reasonable time to cancel class? — No. Never. Instead, she gives a substitute. Never in my life until I got to my university have I heard of a teacher giving a substitute to teach a class instead of just cancelling it. I’m sure you can imagine the frustration. Last semester, my former dance professor was known to assign us to other technique classes if she couldn’t be there. Meaning very inconvenient class sizes, the room getting so hot the mirrors would fog, multiple people accidentally kicking you when learning a 2 minute combo in the last 20 minutes of class. I would think I was mentally prepared going in, but you can never fully prepare yourself for a teacher’s class you truly know nothing about, except people telling you that it’s crazy fast and they do something completely different everyday… The worst of all is when you know you’re about to go into groups and the teacher starts narrowing sections in the room and somehow you very unluckily end up in the first group only knowing the first two 8 counts… The mental trauma of having a dance substitute in college does often mock how dance auditions typically work especially when it’s an incredibly sought after job/opportunity, but the stress doesn't get any better. I think it’s mostly how you deal with the stress and how you evolve out of it, but how do you understand that you’re in distress and fully understand it? Complaining. 

Again, PLEASE DO NOT GET ME WRONG, I LOVE TO DANCE!!! But in the era of dance conservatories having 20+ hours of classes a week and then on top of that hours of rehearsal every night, leaving barely enough time to eat… I will take every chance of a break I can get. Sometimes a canceled class is the only time in a week I can even think to myself without going over choreography and/or wondering if the mobile order station is going to take so long that I can’t pick up my food and eat before 5.5 hours of classes… I’m not saying that I didn’t know what I was signing up for when going to get my BFA in Dance, I was fully aware of how packed the schedule would be… But an ounce of downtime can go a long way when trying to get through the rest of semester sanely.