#edance

Once an EDancer, always an EDancer!

This is gonna be a long, heartfelt post with loads of pictures!

Okay, so this kinda happened at the same time with the previous post. Due to the merger, my old dance team had to merge with FBS’ dance team, too. It was actually more convenient since we shared the same coach, and FBS’ dance team was super famous at the time that you gotta go through auditions first! We were given the opportunity to join the team without audition since you know, everyone wished students from FBS would be friends with the ex-STiBA.

Long story short, my original team mates fell back one by one, I never knew the real reasons —I was the outcast, remember?- but they just gradually stopped showing up at the practice, leaving me and one other girl. Well, I have always had the personality when I’m kinda reserved and shy at first before opening up and be a total lunatic. But honestly, I stayed for the dance. I didn’t know any of these guys, we weren’t “friends” yet, the people I knew started disappearing, yet if I wanted to follow them (later, they revived the old dance team as an independent group), like, I didn’t get along with them anyway? So I had nothing to lose, and I just had fallen in love with streetdancing  —eventho my hip-hop sucks ass!

I think it started to come together when one of the senior on the team asked me to join them to enroll in a competition. I was very excited. Although, honestly speaking, I had lots of difficulties catching up. This team was the team, you know, the people that just blended so well with good chemistry and all? I was an outsider, both to the team habits and choreo. I remember we only had about a week to train for the competition, and I was working my ass off so hard that I didn’t have time to think about being an outcast again. I just wanted to give it my all and not making the team looked silly on stage!

That was my very first competition with EDance. I hated the picture back then (because I was still white-washed and despised my tan skin) but now when I’m looking at it, fuck, I look alright! I mean, there weren’t any high-quality phone camera back then so we couldn’t do the tone justice, but right now all I can think about is how proud I am of myself. I started gotten into make up (and because I didn’t have many friends, I had lots of time practicing make up in my room) and it helped me bonding with the other members. I’m very grateful for the people in the picture: Ninit & Tepi who gave me the chance, Ko Allen who kept dancing with me until he graduated, and even Hezky who became a really good friend and still danced with me until when we both lived in Bali. Oh, and we won the thing! Not bad for a first-timer, huh?

As the official dance team of the faculty, EDance also performed in every single faculty party (re: the opening/closing celebration), including LoVED and EDO. It was my first time performing with such a big crew —EDance had twice the numbers of my first dance team- and it was such a different experience! I wasn’t particularly a fan of a megacrew performance but holy cow, there are things that can only look good when performed with a big crew! I’m beyond blessed to learn it with EDance.

On my second year dancing —third year in Uni- it was time for my generation (re: batch) to take over the leadership in the organization. I wasn’t elected or something, but by that time, I have grown so close to Elevernes that we basically became a whole squad, and we kinda have big influence on each other, and to the team. That year, our coach stepped down because he wanted to pursue formal career, so we found a new one. It was my best friend's boyfriend —then, ex now- The new coach brought a whole new flavor to our dance team, we went from full-blown hip-hop to more of girl’s hip-hop and then, slutty (LOL!) depending on the personality of the team. 

I’d say it was the beginning our my golden era of dancing. I moved out to the same boarding house with my best friends, which were also my dance team mates, and we spent many hours practicing for fun, watching dance videos, and basically just being excited for performing and enrolling competitions. EDance was at the peak of its time, we had the best dancers in the University, having the same vision and mission, the crazy fearless attitude, and just the same level of passion for dancing. We basically invented the trend of sexy and fierce girls-style dance in the city (it was a small city, so it wasn’t that great, but also because it was such a small city and everyone knows everyone else, it was pretty cool) because the core team of the crew were the same students from our batch, Eleveners, who just had the same vibration for that particular dance style.

Sadly, all good things must come to and end. And I regret that my end at EDance wasn’t a pleasant one. I started dating this guy and he gradually become very toxic and abusive that I was utterly gas-lighted and was too scared to leave his side.He told me he didn’t like my friends from the dance team and wanted me to hang out with them less (I ended up spending 24/7 with him for more than a year!). There were some moments when I felt like I gotta choose between dancing and my boyfriend, and my insecure-stupid ass chose the latter. I grew distant from my friends, and eventually I neglected dancing.

The turning point was when I, as a member of the “core” team, was offered to join a competition, and I had no hesitation to refuse it. But along the way, my boyfriend was getting more and more intimidating that I was too scared to leave him alone (coz I felt like he’d cheat on me if I didn’t stick around), and I ghosted my friends. I kept justifying my action telling myself —and some other friends- that I couldn’t join the competition because I had a final exam. It wasn’t entirely a lie, because I did have final exam, but deep down I knew what pissed my friends off was my ghosting, the fact that I ignored them and let them freak out on the last minute. It was one of my life regrets. 

After that incident, I only showed up for one more project, a dance video produced by the faculty’s filmography club. My relationship with my friends was already bad, most of them stopped talked to me, and I even got unofficially “kicked out” from the core team. I was in a weak mental state — from both the dating abuse and the guilt- and I thought to myself that I couldn’t go on like this. So the next semester, on the last year of my university life, I stopped coming to the practice.

I truly wished things went differently from how it was. EDance was the first true dance family that I had, it will always be the highlight of my life, and sometimes I’m so angry at myself for being so unreasonably stupid at that time. But you know, we all struggle with different demons inside, and I’m just the kind of person who needed to be thrown down to thrive, so I guess I deserved that. I am now in good relationships with all my EDance friends, time indeed had healed us, however, I think I do owe them a huge apology for my actions. Although I was hurting, I had no right to ruin their joys either.