#eloranta

The price of freedom is $1308.

$1300 for the rental car.

$6 for the nitro oat latte.

$2 for street parking.

And thus, I'm plugged in and connected to wifi, away from the grimy floors of the dance commune I call home. My socks are still sticky and blackened, hidden in my white shoes. My shiny white Jeep is parked approximately 18 inches from the curb, and I paid a parking meter with my credit card, for the first time in my life. I was so nervous that before I left the air conditioned haven of my car, supplied by $5/gal gas, I searched up "how to pay a parking meter."

All of my 1 month trips have built up to this month. First in Italy, then Korea, then London. But now, I am free to make major financial decisions, to drive, plan my day. And still at the end of the day, I am to produce a body of knowledge on the topic of dance in LA. Whereas I entered university four years ago, afraid to leave my own dorm room without a plan, I have come so far: and now I find myself parallel parking in a North Hollywood downtown street by myself for a month. I'm careful and anxious. I'm sitting and sipping a $5.25 nitro oat latte, which is approximately $2 cheaper than an espresso oat latte.

Soul searching. Developing. Dancing. Asking questions.Finding the right people. Being clever with the places I spend my time. Reading.

For a proper update, yesterday, I traveled for 13 hrs from Inman Square to Burbank, and then took two back-to-back choreo classes. By the middle of my second class, it was almost 22 hrs from the beginning of my travels, and my day's consumption of a cream cheese bagel and a Trader Joe's butter chicken meal was failing me.

First class: Max Pham. His choreo, designed for the stage, was so precise, and clever (matching rhythms and sounds so fluidly yet not at all obvious). Thankfully, I never got lost during the class, which I thank my three years of training for. However, I was so far from target, which gave me more appreciation for this opportunity: I felt too sharp and light, rigid and brittle in comparison with the LA majority, whose motions were heavy and rubbery, small and exact. And yet, people were making friends and smiling throughout the class.

Second class: Shaun Evaristo. Three words: I felt something. I paid the premium of $25 on top of my 2 week unlimited to take his class, which is a fiscally ridiculous decision. However, I had watched the Steezy spotlight of him, which called him one of the best dance teachers to grace the LA community. Thus, I wrote this one off as a business expense. Anddddddddddddd...

It was worth it! The choreo was amazing. I've never seen someone dance like that in my life, in person. He made choreo for himself, to feel the music, and it was an honor for me to live that myself. The way he checked in on us throughout the class, using his temperature checks to pace his teaching. It made all of us feel seen. It was the first time ever that I had felt soooo emotional (emotionally invested, or just emotional I'm not sure) while dancing, and I don't think all of that was pure delusion.

So, I was rejected by my first community team here in Boston. I was sad, because although I came out of that audition pretty level-headed, I always tend to let the anticipation grow. Specifically, the audition choreo this round was not difficult per-say, but there were a lot of dancers in the room. But in the week of radio silence from the team, I let myself think, what if?

As much as the next person, I hate rejection. I hate the way it takes my journey and connection with dance out of my own hands, and into that of someone else: "No you cannot train with us! We don't want to share space and time with your dance." (cries)

At this time, I remind myself that my connection to dance is deeper than any one gateway, and that if a single door closes, I have an internal connection to it that I should be fostering and strengthening in the first place. I remember the first semester of sophomore year, having come back from Seoul that summer where I took my first ever choreo dance classes, I was rejected from Donk, but started training with McKersin in the freestyle dance class at MIT. It became my steepest dance growth, and most memorable cherished time, up-to date.

Additionally, there are great dancers who were never gifted opportunities, but had to create them for herself. Watch Danyel Moulton's podcast for example, where she talks about building the best team she possibly could, and building a career for herself rather than going to auditions in Hollywood.

But bringing this back to my situation. Actually, I had come back from LA swearing off dance teams for at least a semester: I thought that the growth-to-time-spent ratio was too low, given all the weekends swallowed up by performances. However, my attempts of training through classes this month have made me consider otherwise: the classes here do not inspire and push me the same way the classes did in LA. A lot of teachers do not know how to teach, or do not come prepared enough to push their students. I need a community of pushers. So in these teams, I am seeking more systematic training where I'm guaranteed returns.

That would be the easy way out: to join a team and its community.

Harder is building my own training system. Let's conduct a thought experiment, of what this would entail:

Friend group with regular practice hours at a certain time of the week, to drill choreo and fundamentals and share realizations

Regular classes with regular attendance and growth over time

Private lessons

Regular reflections: monitoring growth, and tracking what kind of dancer I'm becoming!

Battles and sessions, pro-active signing up

I owe it to myself and my challenging month to continue training hard during my adult career life in both choreography and hip hop.

How did we get hereeee to day 24?

So I am 4 days deep into a 5 day street dance intensive by Versa Style LA that I saw advertised on a poster in front of the Movement Lifestyle bathroom.

In some ways this is the climax of my 2 months of Eloranta training so far: 7 hours a day (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.) of drilling hip hop fundamentals. I could write pages about the journey my body is going through, the bruises on my shoulders from my first dive into proper floorwork. The pulling sensation on my lats from the repeated locking and whacking motions. The grumbling of my stomach after every break, because my diet which is designed to be high fiber and high protein simply doesn't provide enough calories for the amount of dancing I am doing. The craving for a caffeine hit at 12 p.m. which is a sign that I've been leaning too heavily on the program's redbull sponsorship every lunch time.

But what I want to write about most right now is beyond the physical realm of how Versa Style has pushed me, but a very emotional human aspect. I walk into the studio and the members of the community here greet me first by name. They remember first! After meeting a single time! And they are cheerful and fearless in greeting me. Even though I am new and a visitor, and may only be here just for the week. I feel so welcomed in this space in a way I've never ever in my whole dance journey felt in Boston.

And the kids here are talented and hungry and humble. And a lot of their phenomenal attitude I think is owed to the leadership of Miss Funk and Breeze-lee, a Latino married dancer couple in their early fourties, who founded the company exactly 20 years ago, with a mission to grow a community/family of dancers who would then grow to spread the love and joy. Their "why" is so clear, and it really hits me hard when I see it through their actions: they keep their costs low for the intensive, their youth training program and their outreach class, instead relying on grants to pay their staff dancers and teachers. A meager $40 a month for their program for 16-22 year olds, a team which will meet for over 5 hours a week, 3 of which are personalized training.

Something Miss Funk says every day is, "thank you for trusting us with your time and energy," and I realized only when hearing this that it is true: i do trust them, more and more, day by day, for every day I am wowed by this group of people and what they've created here in LA with dance. On the flip side, I realized there are spaces in Boston I trust less with my time, for I have experienced a new standard for teaching and training here in LA. I will have to grapple with this when I get back home!

Yesterday after my freestyle class with SuperDave, I asked him a very simple question: how should I practice by myself. He said I was going to hate the answer, and I knew almost instantly what it was.

Record myself.

The full answer: record yourself, watch it, remember what FEELING you were going for, repeat but with improvements. The vocabulary will come from drilling foundations, but only intentional freestyle training can improve freestyle.

Here in LA, I am fortunate enough to say my most defining limit in terms of training this month is my own stamina. Thus, I was wondering what optimized training would look like. And I rly do think it is timely monitoring and feedback!

So I will definitely clean through my dance videos every night before bed, as a supplement to my doomscrolling.

A boon of my doomscrolling however, was discovering how much educational dance content exists. Like from old steezy videos, to independent creators, to professionals like Antoine Troupe.

As part of the pursuit of abnormal opportunities, I have killed my anxiety receptors. Thus, for years I have not been afraid of putting myself in spaces where others would feel anxious. However, I'm now realizing that this fearlessness is closely tied with my dislike of monitoring my own dance videos: i.e. it's easier to be less self-conscious when you choose not to perceive yourself accurately.

Delulu. I am delulu about my dance skill sometimes.

Monitoring has meant rooting myself in the reality of my dance skills. And boyyyy is it hard to be real with myself. Here are my realizations from the first week, some is not just about myself:

I am not listening to the music. Once the music is on I need to be counted in almost every class, because I don't know these songs and I couldn't hum for you by memory what I'm dancing to. In fact, I can't tell you what sound in the music I'm dancing to, and now that I think about it, it's probably because I'm used to dancing evenly to counts in simpler choreo. Once I start feeling the music more, I think it'll help me connect move to move, as well as start putting in some of that musicality.

I need to know what I like and dislike in dance and music. That way I can play up the parts I really feel. Earlier this semester I said I knew I was growing out of my previous music taste, but I never put in the real work of finding music I was into. I think I like house music, and some slower songs from Billie Eilish, Laufey... I like some old school hip hop sounds. I like doja cat's music... starting simple.

I am an intermediate dancer. Okay, so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to plaster this label on myself. However, the reason it has been useful for me, is because the classes at Movement Lifestyle are labeled as either beginner/int or int/advanced. And I am definitely in the space where I can learn from either. When I asked Kat Jones which bin I should focus on, she said definitely jump into the challenging classes, but really look for good teachers. Which brought me to wonder what a class really dedicated to leveling up intermediate dancers would look like.

Good dancers have so much control of their bodies. Whether it's when I'm in choreo class or my freestyle class, I've watched dancers hit every single sound with some part of their body, with so much control. It's unbelievable. I need to just lock myself in a studio some time and work on bringing my waves up to speed. Or creating tutting sequences on the fly. Isolations and body control. Isolations and body control.

Literal Plans for the future:

Finish this two week unlimited strong. 2 classes a day.

Rest and do a lot of homework practices, in the house studio.

Then start the Versa Style Street Dance intensive!

Dance Metrics for the future:

Dance old school like the Singletarys.

Dance with control like Shaun E.

Develop four textures and pull from them.