PERFECTION IS NOT ART

Art is anything but perfect.

Hit every beat, nail every trick, point your toes, face, hands...ugh.

My inner monologue when I’m performing sounds a lot like my mother lecturing me circa 2008. If every detail isn’t perfect, I walk off the stage feeling unsure of myself and unhappy.

This aspiration for perfection has consequently created a framework for mistakes that makes them “bad.” When I make a mistake, my whole world crashes down and it takes a village of pole buddies to recover. I get so caught up in the details that I miss the big picture of why I dance in the first place.

When we strive to be our best we often inadvertently think this means “no mistakes.” We forget that what we are doing is an art, and art is anything but perfect. The meaning of dance is so much more than just hitting all your moves perfectly; if that was the case, we’d be watching dancing robots. It’s the rawness of a performance that makes it beautiful.

But the road to embracing your mistakes is a hard and daunting one. In science, there’s a term for this - escape velocity. A rocket, trapped on earth, takes 7.2 million pounds of thrust to get out of earth’s atmosphere...don’t expect this to be easy. But the harder the struggle, the sweeter the reward.

As soon as you stop seeing mistakes as bad, the dark corners of your inner critic subside and new possibilities emerge. Opportunities for creativity and emotion will open up like never before. In other words, don’t let perfection keep you from being your best, and like a rocket ship exiting earth, your world will implode with new possibilities.

With love,

💋 Mimi