#non-binary dancer

I’ve been struggling to phrase the sentiment behind these photos, aside from the fact that my friend is amazing and super fun to shoot with.

okay so i just wrote an epically long answer to this on mobile.... and tumblr ate it right as i was about to post. UGH.

so i don’t exactly have a dance story so much as a dance backstory, at least where irish dance is concerned, because i’m about to return to it after a really long break but i haven’t actually done so yet. but, it’s a substantial backstory

i did ballet from the ages of four to ten and then left a couple of weeks before my eleventh birthday because i kept dislocating my kneecaps (no one knew i had hypermobility at that point, they just thought my knees were screwed). honestly it wasn’t that hard a decision because i was really unhappy at my dance school which was super strict and i didn’t have any friends there, so the doctor’s recommendation kind of gave me an excuse to quit that i’d been waiting for

i didn’t dance at all for a couple of years but i was really into folk music. i’d fallen in love with irish music (and also folklore etc) thanks to a book called “the new policeman” by kate thompson. i was totally obsessed with ireland at the time -- in a way that would probably have been really obnoxious to any actual irish people, haha -- and when i found a vhs of lord of the dance in a charity shop for 50p, i bought it

i fell in love with it. i mean, i’m pretty sure i was mostly just really gay for bernadette flynn, but hey, i didn’t realise that at the time. i begged my parents to let me take irish dance classes and it took a LOT of persuading because they weren’t keen on the idea. eventually i managed to convince them on the basis that i wouldn’t compete*.

i was the oldest one there by quite a lot, at least among the beginners, and it was the first time in my life i’d felt tall. ballet meant i was good at things like turnout though, so i made quite rapid progress and joined the higher level group where i could be with people my own age. i ended up competing a handful of times: at our class feis, at a festival, and at two proper feisanna.

the second of those two was trainor feis 2011. it was the biggest competition i ever entered and actually had enough people in u15 to provide a decent competition experience! by this point, i had a solo dress that my mum made me for christmas 2010, despite her misgivings. it was fairly simple and tasteful -- there are some pictures on my blog -- and i wore it for that one competition before i left irish dance.

why? well... i’d fallen back in love with ballet, and i’d been taking classes for a couple of months, but i’d reached a point where i couldn’t balance the two. it was a lot of time and energy and money and i had to choose between the two. i wasn’t very happy at my irish dance school because the teachers and the students were pretty bitchy. plus, i’d had shin splints and the physio had told me not to do classes two days running etc etc, but my teachers kept on pushing me to do more classes even though it would likely injure me. my ballet teacher was way more chilled out and friendly, and the other people in my class were welcoming, unlike those at irish who were ... not that friendly towards me

if i’d been in a less toxic, bitchy school, i probably would’ve struggled to make that decision, and it still wasn’t easy, but yeah. i picked ballet. didn’t regret it, just occasionally felt nostalgic, until timehop reminded me that it was six years since i left irish. and then someone contacted me saying they’re hoping to restart the irish dance society at our university. and i realised that i missed it and wanted to go back.

then i started looking at the tag on tumblr and got filled with like... intense nostalgia to the point of actually looking up where i could take classes and doing drills again and so on.

even though i have chronic pain and fatigue and it’ll be extremely difficult to manage those enough to dance regularly. and i now identify as non-binary which is going to make the act of navigating the very heavily gendered world of dance a little tricky.  (costumes are going to be... Difficult) and i’m still trying to balance my degree with my life and i’m 21 and this probably won’t work out but i’m doing it anyway

and that’s where i am right now. i don’t really know what my irish dance story is going to look like from now n because i’m still very much at the beginning of it, but we shall have to see.

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