Concourse

Auditions are coming up quickly and I don’t even realize it. This Sunday begins the audition workshops for Common Ground, and the actual audition day is the following Sunday. Immediately the next day, CADC begins their audition workshops, and the audition day is one week from that day.

While I’m the only one audition for Common ground, Kevin, Alfonso, and I are all shooting for CADC. I really want to get into at least one of them, but CADC I guess is the one that is more likely to take people with potential, and potential is all I have.

Well, maybe I’ve actually got some skill. I’ve been a little bit more positive about my dancing. Of all the 11 pieces that I learned since I’ve been here in Irvine (yes, I’ve been cramming in hella workshops), I think I pretty much got 10 of them down okay. That doesn’t mean I’m super clean at them; I just followed the choreographer pretty well. In contrast, in my first ever choreo class, I stumbled on anything that didn’t fall on a beat. Watching recent videos of myself, I can see that I am not as sloppy as I used to be. Still a little sloppy though.

Kevin and I are unsure about ourselves, but we are extremely positive that Alfonso will get in. He’s just fucking amazing now; it’s ridiculous. The three of us took a series of five workshops on Sunday, and he got picked out to be in the select groups for two of them. He puts so much energy, personality, and performance into his dancing that the judges of CADC, who also know of him already, can’t possibly refuse him unless he really really fucks up during his audition.

Being the best choreo dancer out of the three of us, Alfonso has taken up the role as the one to bring up our spirits, especially mine because I have none. Alfonso has a lot of confidence in me, but shit, I don’t know why he does. He has stared me straight in the eye and told me that I’m getting on CADC. It was almost as much of a command as it was a fact, the truth, the certain future. As long as we all stick together, he says, we’ll all get in. I don’t know. He sees more in me than I see in myself; I’m trying not to let him get my hopes up for fear that this all might end like another UCSD, but it is definitely motivating and pushing me more.

I had never worried about disappointing myself if I didn’t make it into a team, but now I worry that Alfonso might be the one that I’d disappoint if I were to get rejected.



Last year, at the first session for Bboys Anonymous (BBA), UCI’s breakdancing club, I remember feeling intimidated watching all the really pro bboys circling up and battling it out. We newbies gathered into a corner, not too sure how to talk to each other because there wasn’t much we could teach each other. I glanced around nervously; people everywhere were pretty much flying through the air or gliding across the ground. It felt like some kinda of epic Star Wars battle scene.

Trying to not look like a sitting duck, I halfheartedly ran through one of the few breakdancing moves I knew well: a six-step.

That was when this white guy sat down next to me. He must’ve recognized that I wasn’t part of the intimidating pro circle, so he felt safe to ask me how I did what I just did. I walked him through the six-step, and he eventually got it down. It wasn’t too clean; his motion was stiff like a second-hand skipping around the clock. We took a break, and he introduced himself to me as Alfonso (and from that I inferred that he was actually Mexican, not white).

That was how I met my first dancer friend. But of course, back then we weren’t dancers, and we weren’t friends. We were acquaintances who attended the BBA sessions, and we bonded over the same interest: getting good at breakdancing.

My only interest was breakdancing, but a few weeks into school, Alfonso started to slightly branch out. He asked me to do join the KASA (Korean American Student Association, a. k. a. the Korean Association of Smoking and Alcohol) dance team to compete in a traditional dance-off among the KASA’s of a bunch of colleges around SoCal. I went to one workshop with him, but I dropped out afterward. Choreo wasn’t for me, I thought.

Alfonso ended up competing with UCI’s KASA, and their team got second place. He went back to breakdancing for a while, but along came winter quarter and the Kaba Modern auditions. He was one of the two (the other being Sam) who told me about the workshops that would eventually get me hooked into choreo.

Starting Spring Quarter and all, Alfonso and I were both aspiring choreo hip hop dancers. Toward the end of that quarter, I could already see Alfonso’s confidence growing, and I didn’t doubt that he would shoot so far fucking ahead of Kevin and me.

I thought to myself, Alfonso and I started at the same time, so why shouldn’t I be as dope of a dancer as he is? Damn.



One thing that is for sure is that if I were to quit dancing because of not getting into a team, I’d disappoint both Alfonso and myself.