Dance. A sport for people of all ages. There are so many dancers in the world, about 452,876, 756 professionals. Dance can be an activity done for fun or it can be your job. Professional dancers go through 2-3 pairs of pointe shoes a week, and male dancers lift over 1.5 tons of ballerinas in one performance. Wow, that’s a lot of ballerinas!

Me, I love to dance and I’m a serious dancer (although I don’t wear out 2-3 pairs of pointe shoes a week). I work very hard at my dancing and spend a lot of time practicing, so it’s always good to take a little break and to have some fun every once in a while. We have to stop worrying about hitting the right move at the right time, we have to relax and have fun. And that’s exactly what we do the last week of company practice. We practice our dances, get them all ready for recital and then, after a full year of hard work, we party!

We get pizza, pop and desserts, but best of all, we get to hang out with our best friends. Even though we’re taking a break from real, choreographed dance, we don’t stop dancing. As soon as we finish eating we all go in the other room and dance around. That’s when our faces light up, that’s when we forget everything else and let ourselves go. Eating and being together is great but a moment like this, when we are all dancing, which is what we love to do, and being together, is priceless. We look at each other and laugh because we are dancing absolutely ridiculously, but no one cares because we’re having fun, smiling, and enjoying every second of it.

Singing along we move freely around the dance floor. Laughing, jumping, twisting, turning, kicking, leaping, anything we want, because this is our time and we want to enjoy it. Our smiling faces light up the room and you can tell we’re having a great time. Dancing together, dancing separately, dancing however, whenever, wherever we want and having fun doing it.

Making silly faces at each other through the mirror, we continue to dance. I am so happy I feel as if I am walking on a cloud, my footsteps are light and my dance is joyful. I am doing whatever my body wants to do, whatever the music tells me to do. I’m expressing myself through my movements, and letting myself go, with no restrictions, just absolute freedom.

We aren’t worried about what we have planned for the next day, or how much homework we still have to finish. We are living in the moment, taking it all in and enjoying it. This allows us to have so much more fun, to be so much happier, to be so much more joyful. We enjoy the time we have together, doing what we love and not letting it slip away unnoticed, not letting our thoughts of the past or our thoughts for tomorrow get in the way of the joy of today. We knew there is nothing we’d rather do than dance, and no one we’d rather be with than each other, so we cherish the moment. We take advantage of what we all have in common. Dance.