What does it take to dedicate your life to an art form? A professional dancer shares an intimate look at the discipline, vulnerability, and profound joy of speaking through movement.
As an artist, your chosen medium becomes your native language. For a painter, it is color and texture; for a writer, it is the architecture of a sentence. For a dancer, the medium is the body itself—an instrument that must be tuned, a canvas that must be animated, and a library of stories waiting to be told.
To dedicate oneself to a physical art form like dance is to enter into a lifelong conversation with your own body. It is an exercise in profound discipline and radical self-acceptance. It begins not in the spotlight of the stage, but in the quiet, unglamorous hours of practice in the studio. It is a process of repetition, of breaking down a complex movement into a thousand tiny pieces and reassembling them until they become as natural as breathing.
This is the grind that precedes the grace. It is the endless drilling of a hip drop until it is perfectly synchronized with a single beat of a drum. It is the slow, patient work of increasing the flexibility of the spine, not for spectacle, but to unlock a greater range of emotional expression.
“People see the finished product—the costume, the lights, the polished performance,” says performance artist Johanna Michelle. “What they don’t see are the years of solitary work, the frustration of hitting a plateau, and the quiet determination to push through it. Every artist knows that struggle. The mastery is born from the mundane.”
And then there is the vulnerability of performance. To step onto a stage is to offer your work, your heart, and your very self up for public consumption. For a dancer, this is intensely personal. There is nothing to hide behind—no character, no script. There is only the music and the story your body is telling in that fleeting moment.
It requires a kind of courage to be that open. Each performance is an act of trust—trust in your training, trust in the music, and trust in the audience’s willingness to receive what you are offering. Some nights, the connection is electric; you feel a palpable exchange of energy with the room. Other nights, it can feel like you are shouting into a void. Both are part of the artist’s path.
But the reward for this discipline and vulnerability is a profound sense of purpose. To have a moment of perfect synchronicity with the music, to feel an entire audience holding its breath with you, to translate a complex emotion into a physical gesture that is understood without a single word—this is a kind of magic.
It is the reason for the endless hours of practice. It is the reason for facing the fear of the stage. For the artist, it is not a choice, but a necessity. It is the deep, abiding need to take what is inside and give it form, to use the body as a canvas and create something beautiful, if only for a moment.
