"I've been doing various kinds of dancing for maybe eight years now. I started out at this summer camp in high school, and they had dancing built into the schedule there. At first I was totally like, 'This is not for me. I'm not interested in this.' I thought I'd be bad at it. Eventually I realized it was really fun. There's certain things, especially in line dancing, where a song plays and I just know the dance. I've had people ask me, 'What's the next step there?' And I can't tell them. There's this thing that I know that I couldn't explain with words, but I just know it. My body just knows the next step. I really like language learning as well.
"I feel like in dancing, there's these kinds of 'words'; these steps which are themselves a kind of unit that can then be combined into sentences. As you get more familiar with it, you can play around with the language a little bit more. You can have fun improvising, change the phrasing and the order. It does feel to me that I'm kind of learning a language. Last year, I joined the ballroom dance team at MIT. In the past, what I really liked about dancing was that there was no judging, no grading or ranking, and there was no correct way to do it. With ballroom, there definitely is a correct way to do it. But it's actually been really fun. There is actually a goal, and it feels like you're building and improving. There's just a lot of depth there to learn. We have competitions all over. MIT hosts, I believe, the largest, at least on the East Coast, ballroom competition, so we hosted that last year. The community, even across teams, is very supportive.
"With ballroom, we've started playing a song that's not strictly in any of the categories. Nobody knows what's going to happen next, so you actually have to be clear in your lead and clear in your follow. You can't just rely on previously learned patterns. You can't just have memorized, 'This is how I say hello. My name is...' You have to understand the underlying concepts and be able to apply them to a new situation. You have to actually be communicating between each other in the language of ballroom, which is the frame and the weight shifts."
(pictured with partner Kendall Nakai)