may I slag off my one true passion in life? June 2021

AAAND STEP, STEP, ARM ,TURN, LAYOUT, LAND, KAH KAH, CONTRACT! stunning work everyone take 5.

…or run out when they aren’t looking and pace purposefully off the premises until you’re safely inside a dark pub. Or maybe you’ll mix it up today and go hide in an alley way in the corner of a disused car park, sitting on a pile of concrete slabs crouching your head behind some crates until you’re fully hidden. BUT FUCK! You forgot your phone! Which means you’ll be spending an hour dwelling amongst said darkness or concrete, waiting for the class to be over and the teacher to have left the studios so you can go back and get it without having to dejectedly avoid their eyeline when they ask you if you’re ok???????? Because they did actually see you sprint for your life out the studio door before the next run of the choreography, and earnestly asking if you're ok is literally the most embarrassing response to that in the world. I’d much rather they call me a worthless bag of spam and make me cry like Miles Teller crumpling under the glare of JK Simmonds in Whiplash, except its Louie Spence with his lateral lisp and he’s spitting all over your face (hot xxxx).

It’s FINE, that’s only happened a couple of times!!! (not the spitty Louie Spence bit). Usually I like to just pretend I’m injured so they don’t think I’m pathetic when I mark the routine more than not, or if I tap out for 5 minutes to sit on the floor and watch a 10 year old in Lycra leggings and red lipstick use a triple-pirouette-layout-into-splits as a meticulously planned personal attack. Fuck you Kayleigh (probably. They're always called Kayleigh). Fuck you. Go run back to your mum named Jacquie (more than likely) with her candy-apple-red hair (absolutely definitely) holding your pineapple sports bag and your leg warmers that by the way literally no dancer has ever worn ever and you just bought to look like #ThatDancerBitch. I don’t care if you’re 11. I hate you with everything I have.

I miss when class was for looking shit in trackies and a primark vest top and making eye contact with the friend you came with, the only person with a face as red as yours, with a synchronised heavy exhale that you both know means ‘I literally want to die right now, thank god you do too.’ I miss teachers that say ‘I don’t know the bloody counts so good luck’ and fellow students that self-deprecatingly ask you to go in front so that they have someone to copy, to which you reply ‘babe I don’t know it either 🤣’ and you both laugh in that fake-seeming but real-feeling way that looks like it could be a TV advertisement for female friendships.

Nowadays, class has just all gotten a bit.. Missguided.com. Every time I’m in there I feel like I’m in a war of the North London Slick-back, where girls are gelling their hairs down so hard that they could actually offer their steel barnets, with diamond-strong chemical bonds, as a kind of sentient hammer. All posited into a terrifyingly dense low bun that no amount of conditioner and hot water could ever unfuse. I feel like I spend the whole time avoiding being impaled by spear-sharp winged eyeliner… and e v e r y o n e is dressed Kim Kardashian-paparazzi-casual, i.e. Tour de France type shorts, a baggy cropped jumper, trendy trainers and a scared looking baby at their side which they kind of wish wasn’t there to divide anyones attention from them (I’m the baby).

I’ve only ever felt edginess used as an actual weapon once before, when I went to the en vivo Depop market in Hackney in which people with padlocks through their earring holes and reworked-neon-spiked-crocs would sit at the end of their clothing racks scowling at other sellers hoping to stab them with nothing but their own razor-sharp vibe. within the first twenty minutes I’d bought a very nice bag, dutifully nodded my head to thank the edge-lord who sold it to me and scurried away like a sheepish victorian scullery maid terrified of her master.

Class used to be about fucking up! It used to be about getting better at carrying on even when you have a mind-blank during the first run in the smaller groups that make you understand what it might feel like to be Ed Miliband at a nightclub: as overwhelmed and as out of place as its possible to be.

Since the age of the Instagram dancer, it’s become a maze of black mesh and smizing down a camera lens. It’s become ‘Im just going to put you into little performance groups’ instead of ‘how about smaller groups so we can really utilise the space?’ It’s become 36 counts of freestyle before and after the choreography where you’re expected to go into Sasha Fierce mode like you already have a perfectly constructed performance alter that feels absolutely no awkwardness in seductively biting their fingernail and slowly descending into a sexy wide-knee squat while your other hand lightly grazes your pussy, all without breaking eye contact with the camera-lens. HOW is that a dance class for ‘ALL’. I can guarantee you, choreographers, you do not want to watch Tracey from Staines doing that.

The glamour of the new age commercial dancer who comes in with a face full of makeup makes me nervous. It makes the whole thing seem like a competition, which doesn’t feel necessary, unless you’re at an audition. And even then my dance school auditions weren’t particularly competitive-feeling at all. At a Laban audition you’re much more likely to lose out on a place for seeming too unenthusiastic in a hug with one of your fellow auditionees, or forgetting to 'thank your movement space’ (aka the air) for ‘allowing itself to be carved by you’.

Please come with me next time. I have to go back, obviously, I cant let the eyeliner flicks win. Or someone send me a pair of fucking Yeezy’s or something I can wear. Gonna go raid my wardrobe for some mesh, though it might have to be mum’s allotment chicken wire. Im scared. I am SCARED.