I can’t talk about being a kid in the 90s without talking about dance. Every Saturday, my Mum would tie my long hair into a bun and I’d wear head-to-toe pink. Leotard, tights and leather shoes with elastic across the top. I did the full range of dance classes; ballet, tap and modern.
Dance exams required pristine new dance shoes and I still have my satin ballet shoes with ribbons, hardly worn, tucked away for safekeeping. The annual shows run by my dance school were the only time I was allowed to wear stage makeup. I loved the experience of waiting in the wings, watching the previous group do their bows, before running out on stage. Weeks and weeks of rehearsal culminated in a few short minutes of performance.
This was a time when the Ballet Shoes books were re-released with new illustrations. Darcey Bussell was at her peak and her book The Young Dancer was one of my most treasured possessions. I was a little older when Center Stage came out in 2000 but I loved watching The Biz after school.
Watching films like Fame, Flashdance and Dirty Dancing fuelled my belief that it was surely only a matter of time before a talent scout from RADA or Sylvia Young plucked me out of obscurity and put me where I really belonged, in stage school in London. In reality, I was a distinctly average kid in the middle of nowhere. I was too short, too chubby and nowhere near flexible or talented enough to progress.
This reality was cemented when our dance school developed a performance around Hiawatha, the Native American legend. This played out much like the famous scene in The Addams Family Values, when the popular kids are chosen to play the pilgrims.
When I was around 13, I couldn’t keep up with dance as I couldn’t get to weekday classes due to the remote location of where I lived and my parents’ work schedules. Saturdays were becoming less about dance and more about meeting up with friends to buy music and clothes.
I wonder what could have been if I’d lived closer to the dance school. If I’d grown up in the era of Misty Copeland, body positivity and more than one shade of “nude” dancewear. We’ll never know.
What I do I know is that I missed it. I kept coming back to dance. I danced in school plays. I have an A Level in Performing Arts. I joined the Stage Musicals Society at university and went back to adult dance classes and performing in shows throughout my 20s.
Without the pressure to look a certain way or getting to the next grade, dance is so much more enjoyable. As much as I love the nostalgia of the Saturday dance class ritual, I wish it had been about the joy of moving your body, not who had the flattest split.
None of this stops me from revisiting the films that inspired me to dance. This final dance sequence from Center Stage is my favourite.