Broken bone dances
Dancer: Kate
Dance Location: Calder High School, Mytholmroyd
This is a dance that... I did for GCSE dance. I was really bad at it.
We'd come up to the woods a lot when I was younger, around 15, and we'd make fires and drink. It was a month away from my GCSE dance exam when I fell down one of the steps on the path here and felt my foot crack. I woke up the next day with it completely swollen up. Turned out I had walked a mile and a half on a broken bone.
I had always been told I wasn't good at dancing, so I was absolutely determined to get this GCSE. My cast was on loose and I would slip it on and off, like a sock, to practice. I still have a lump on the side of my foot from it healing wrongly. I did pass though, I got that GCSE and went on to study A-level dance.
The dance itself was rubbish. It was to this generic music that was set by the AQA and we were trying to include everything we'd learnt, so there was lots of angles, some classic leaps, a bit of step ball change.
I've enjoyed trying to remember it again though. I can picture it better in my head than I can dance it. It was always more of an intellectual process than a physical embodied one. I wasn't connected to my body in the same way then. I don't think I realised I was by body then, whereas I cherish it now.