It was a cold night. The sounds of crunchy leaves under my feet with the smell of the rain made the dancers tired and cold.  I heard a vibration in my pocket.

Is the dance competition still going to happen? 

Of course, ‘the show must go on’ 

However, that doesn’t stop these girls around the age of 7-15 from competing in a dance competition. We have a group of girls my age who are 9 years old competing with other girls who are younger and older. 

Tiny squeaky steps… a little girl comes running behind us. “Hi big sister, there are so many people sitting out there waiting for us.” 

The dance competition lasted the whole night. From 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm girls performed on the stage, showing off their hard work and talent. We see many compassionate dancers expressing their emotions through the beauty of dance and talents that you couldn’t ever imagine were shown that night. The amount of people in the audience caused every dancer to be nervous before getting onto the stage. There was high tension due to everyone wanting first place. Ultimately, only one dance group gets to take a picture with their big trophy and get onto the special news outlet in Asia. WeChat. 

“What number dance routine is this one?” I said. 

“It’s 5,” says CeCe. 

That means we are going on next. Luckily, many of the girls were rated based on their group number, not their solo performances. Now imagine girls putting in all this effort for many years just for them to have to quit. They didn’t quit because of losing interest or not being able to afford it, but they had to quit due to the cost of not having enough time. As kids transition from elementary school to middle school things can get very different and they need to learn to be more independent. Public schools are taking dance/arts credit out or not making it a priority because they think core subject education is much more important. They lower the funding for these dance and art classes or they completely take the funding for these classes and give it back to the core subjects. 

“Honey art center.” comes out the loudspeaker. 

“We’re going on now CeCe,” I said.

We do our routine of shaking it off as a group before entering the stage. Once we got on the stage we were blinded by the stage light. The warm yellow sunny light flashed onto us, making us the center of attention. CeCe being younger than us has a lower stamina than us. CeCe was breathing hard towards the end of the routine like a dog coming back from a run, which gave me the confidence that we would win because she had put her all into this performance. Once we were done with this performance we had to go sit and watch the other performances until we went up again. Each person or group had a maximum of 3 routines they wanted to perform. It was our time to go on stage one more time. This time meant everything because it could determine whether our group score went down or up. If anything we are putting more effort into this number than the first one. Minutes go by after the last performance. Everyone sitting in their circle with the rest of their team and their coaches making the air in the room harder to breathe. Holding our breath for each score being announced by the judges. We knew walking into this competition that we would see many talented girls but we didn’t know our score would be so low…well it wasn’t first, second, or third place.