Dancer leaves cultural comfort to find passion in modern dance

Nearly every girl has been nudged into a dance studio, in the hope that she will grow up to be as graceful as a ballerina.

And while many refuse to continue after a few years, some will persevere in weekly classes despite the list of responsibilities that expands with age.

Freshman Caitlyn Chen is one of the few who did not give up. Indeed, her dedication is such that many days she spends two to three hours at Studio 10 Dance in San Jose. However, this was not always the case.

Caitlyn started dancing when she was only 4, each class filling a tedious slot in her schedule. She had no real motivation for the amount of work and physical training that dancing required and didn’t put much effort into her practices.

“Chinese dance was something I thought I should do just because my sister and all my cousins did it,” Caitlyn said. “I couldn’t have cared less about pointing my feet in time to weird Chinese classical music.”

Week after week, Caitlyn continued to attend hour-long practices, discouraged by the criticisms that her teacher shouted in her face. The physical discomfort that came with each practice, paired with the emotional abuse that rained on her shoulders, only made her more indifferent and unappreciative.

“We would do middle splits against the wall, and our teacher would use the heel of her clicky dance shoes to shove us  closer to the wall,” Caitlyn said. “If you resisted, she would yell at you in Chinese.”

This trend continued for the next eight years. She showed up. She danced. She went home.

But at a birthday party in seventh grade, she saw one of her friends do eight pirouettes, a complicated type of dance turn. Caitlyn’s interest in dance began to sprout as she started to watch dance shows and admired famous dancers like Sophia Lucia and Ricky Ubeda on YouTube and realizing that dancing could actually be … fun.

Soon after, Caitlyn signed herself up for classes at Studio 10 Dance, which provided classes on a variety of modern dance styles.

“My mom and I kept discouraging Caitlyn from going to a new studio,” said senior Sabrina Chen, Caitlyn’s older sister. “At the time, YaoYong was like a second home to me, and I thought it was the same way for her. When she signed up online all by herself, we were shocked; it was so unlike something our timid Caitlyn would do.”

The change was a good one.

“The teachers were encouraging, not threatening. The students wanted to be there, unlike the Chinese kids [who were]  dragged to class by their parents,” Caitlyn said. “I wanted to go back every day, to try jazz, then lyrical, even hip-hop.”

Seeing how much she loved the new studio, Caitlyn’s parents began to use dance as a motivational factor, using it to get her to do math.

“It was a one-for-one deal. One hour of geometry equals one hour at the studio,” Caitlyn said. “For some reason, it made the time I had at the studio even more valuable, like a reward.”

She threw herself into her newly chosen art forms, lyrical and contemporary most prominently, making up for her former lack of motivation with the most intensive dancing she had ever done. She stretched every day. She did core and back exercises. When the teacher advised another girl, Caitlyn would pretend she had been corrected herself, so as to achieve double the advice from each lesson.

At first, Caitlyn struggled to keep up with the other girls who had been dancing these styles for years. Chinese dance had given her the flexibility, but that was about all she had.

“My spins were out of control and I hardly left the floor when I lept,” Caitlyn said. “It took almost six months for me to learn the simple techniques the other girls my age had already acquired.”

In 2013 Caitlyn auditioned for and got into the junior performance group. This summer, she tried out and became the seventh member of the senior company.

Since the switch, she has perfected new moves, priding herself in her accomplishments in a way that she had never known at YaoYong.

“Dancing has consumed so much of my time, but it’s where I want all my extra time and energy to go,” Caitlyn said. “And hey, sometimes I do need a break from math homework.”