Dance Was My First Love

Dance was my first love. Not my first hobby. Not my first extracurricular. My first love.

The kind that quietly shapes who you become before you even realize it's happening.

As a student, I learned the steps.
As a performer, I learned what it meant to feel them.
As a choreographer and director, I discovered the joy of creating worlds through movement.
As an educator, mentor, and adjudicator, I began seeing dance through someone else's eyes, finding just as much fulfillment in watching a dancer grow as I once found on stage.
As a researcher, I started asking different questions. Why do we move? What makes a dancer? How do we create a relationship with the body that can last a lifetime?

Every chapter has changed my relationship with dance.
And somehow, every chapter has brought me back to the beginning.
People often talk about finding their passion.
What they don't talk about is what happens after you've lived with that passion for decades.
It changes.
It matures.
It asks different things of you.

The dance that captivated me at sixteen is not the same dance that inspires me today.
And that's the beauty of it.
Love that lasts isn't static.
It evolves.

Across every season of my life, dance has remained my first love. Not because it has stayed the same, but because it has continually invited me to see it differently.
Each chapter has asked me to listen more deeply.
To learn more humbly.
To let go of what I thought I knew.

And perhaps that's what keeps me falling for it.
Not the steps.
Not the stage.
But the endless possibility of discovering something new.
Maybe that's what a lifelong love really is.
Not finding the same thing over and over again.
But finding yourself in it, again and again.

In Dance,
Ashley