With the annual dancing competition coming, I expressed my strong will to participate to my mom. She then found me a teacher, who was a colleague of her colleague. But the teacher was too "high-end" for me, plus she wasn't in ballet major, which was the only dance genre I had ever systematically learned . It would be too harsh on me if she just rejected me, so she recommended one of her graduating students to teach me for her.
   Lian, my current dance teacher, is a senior in Xinghai Music Academy. She majors in classical dance, and she made up a new dance for me to compete in the school dancing competition. She called it "contemporary dance", and I had known nothing of the sort: in fact, I had been told numerous times that if one had tackled ballet, she or he could try every other dance type.
   "Try" was a tricky word, for it didn't necessarily mean "to excel in". Instead, Lian had tried very hard to rid me of my habits gaining from my six years of professional ballet training: My legs and arms were always too straight, my knees could not move freely, my neck and shoulders were always very stiff, and my overall gesture was too much like a statue. These things were all necessary when dancing ballet: I couldn't remember how many times my ballet teacher had hit me with a stick when I couldn't get my knees tight and my legs straight. Now I have to drive a car to crash all of these habits and start to feel another dance genre.
   Though it was hard, and even confusing sometimes, it is overall every enlightening. Unlike ballet which has more boundaries and confinements, contemporary dance allows me express my body and my emotions as freely as I would like to. There wasn't any standard for an "excellent" movement, and my body had to be extremely nimble. My emotions should be like flowing water, and carrying my limbs to "flow" with them. I started to like this dance, though it didn't feel as classicl or sassy as ballet.
   It is really exciting to try something new, something that has broken the "standards" of dance which I used to be familiar with. I have written in my Chinese weekly journal that dancing allows me to express my feelings for others and for my life without holding anything back. Contemporary dance in particular: I should make full use of not only my body movements but also my facial expressions. I have watched a video online, and the dancer was imitating a blind woman. She accomplished it as if she were a blind woman herself, and all of these imitations became vivid and genuine thanks to her boundaries-free facial expressions and body movements.
   The dancing competition will be held on Monday the week after the next. I have already gone through half of the entire dance, and I really do look forward to the next dancing class.