Journal 7: Connecting the Challenges

This week I finished reading my passion project novel Bunheads by Sophie Flack. Reading this novel about the dance world made it easy for me to make direct connections to situations that arose. I found that this could be ideal to helping me with my passion projects overall objective to understand my evolution as a dancer. This text to self connection brought up new ideas I was not previously aware of but also had other situations that I could relate to in my dance experience. Therefore this week I felt as if it would be beneficially to record these correlations to relate to my passion project. Reflection:

The novel Bunheads by Sophie Flack contributes to my passion project in many ways. First I was able to identify how characters in the story overcame obstacles that affected their dance career. This was shown through Hannah feeling the intense pressures of the ballet company and wanting to live a normal life. I can relate to this as a dancer because sometimes I too feel these pressures and anxiety over dances but like Hannah did, I try to see the positive outcome to help me focus on why I love dancing. Seeing Hannah’s situation made me realize the extreme sacrifices we make as dancers such as not living a normal life. Yet the reason we do this is because of our burning desire to perform on stage. Therefore seeing her obstacles conquered by her passion for ballet made me appreciate my own passion for dance and reflect on why I have been dancing for so many years. I think this will help me during my next steps in my project since I was able to parallel my own struggles in the past and why I overlooked them. I will highlight this in my media component of my mini documentary to see my development of my passion throughout the years. Secondly, reading these experiences, I began to question everything I have ever known about ballet. Being a perfect ballet dancer was never my expertise so I did not get the full experience of the discipline to become a prima ballerina. While reading this novel, Flack described everything in such detail I felt like I was in the story and going through the daily rituals of each dancer. Seeing this new dance perspective for me will helped me explore out of my comfort zone for my passion project. I have now built upon my previous knowledge of dance and understand more about the ballet world. I want to incorporate this into my presentation to show others that there is always more ways to grow and develop by grasping as much knowledge as you possibly can. I am going to compare what I have learned in this novel to what I already knew and how it has altered my perspective of dance. With everything I have learned from this novel I believe it was a good choice to help my passion project prove my objective of me developing as a dancer and exploring new territory. After this reflection it was evident for me to see how other people around me encounter similar obstacles to me in the dance world. The next step to my project is to find a source outside of this book and my own experiences that relate to events that happened. This will be a text to media connection by relating it to a movie or film that has the same story line. My plan to accomplish this is to research different dance movies and their summaries. Whichever summary seems the closest to the book Bunheads, I will watch and take notes to compare both the novel and the movie. I think this comparison will further my reflection on the challenges dancers face, why they overcome them and their strength of their passion.

Others Thoughts and Reviews on the novel Bunheads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10757749-bunheads "Bunheads." Goodreads. Web.2016.