Canadian Heritage

What I love about Canada is the fact that although most people are Canadian, they feel free to tag "and _____" at the end of that statement.

When I was little, I grew up Ukrainian dancing. This might sound odd to people who didn't grow up in a place like Winnipeg, but in Winnipeg, everyone Ukrainian dances. Even if you're not Ukrainian. Seriously.

Ukrainian dancing is insane. The parents are crazy. It's really, really hard. Teachers scream at you with accents using words you don't understand. It's really competitive -- where you dance means so much. Parents boast about where their kids have/do dance.

You're forced to wear horrendous costumes (although some of them are quite beautiful), have your hair ripped out by your mother in a form of torture called the french braid (which is then pinned up as bobby pins are stabbed into your scalp) and, of course, wear enough makeup to make a hooker blush.

Practices consist of spinning until you puke, wearing unflattering black body suites, and having to touch boys at an age when cooties really is a serious health threat. And, of course, there's the Ukrain-lish -- the Ukrainian version of Spanglish.

When you hit your mid teens, you end up looking for somewhere more performance based to dance. I spent my whole childhood in the same school... It was relatively sanely run, I had the same instructors, etc, and I actually ended up teaching there myself, so being booted out into the weird world of adult 'dance troops' (I'm so not even kidding) was a little insane.

I spent a little while with Zoloto . They were insane. Twelve hour dance workshops. They had a saying called "FBR" (Fucking Back Row) for dancers who didn't show up to three hour practices, three times a week. I still remember hearing (and remember, I'm sixteen years old):

"Anon, if you don't show up next practice, you'll be FBR for the rest of the season!"

Ha! Needless to say, I didn't end up staying there. My mom had to tell all her friends I'd let her down :(

I ended up dancing with Romanetz for the rest of high school and college. Although I didn't have the chance to travel with them, they've been all over the world and were super sane and had a great instructor by the name of Tom Mockery who'd spent time with Ruskelka (which I tried out for any never made).

The reason I'm telling this story? Because it's utterly ridiculous and filled with drama. I wish I could go into more detail about some of the insane behaviour I was privy to.

So, could this be another form of write what you know? Obviously, I'm not going to write a Ukrainian Dancing Spec, but I think I could use the ridiculousness and drama to inspire something else. Maybe I'll displace that drama and put it somewhere else.

Wanna see some little robots -- oops, I mean children -- like the ones I just described? The ones at the start of this video don't look older than TEN! CRAZY! They're followed up by Virsky (they're straight out of the hood, yo). Even after making fun of the whole lifestyle, this video is kind of crazy amazing.