Throughout the summer and the month of September, the Antioch Community High School dance studio underwent various major renovations. With the renovations finally complete, the improved space includes new dimmable lights, air conditioning, windows, mirrors and flooring. With more comfortable, safe flooring and real mirrors that are not made for a funhouse, the dance studio has become a much more practical space for the dancers to rehearse.
The previous flooring was made of linoleum, causing the floors to have several dents throughout, making it difficult to dance on. Along with the impractical dents, the floors were sometimes sticky or slippery, and there was dirt and several paint stains covering the surface. Getting rid of the outdated floors provided the dancers with a much more safe and clean surface to dance on.
With no more paint stains or dents on the floor, juniors on the ACHS varsity dance team, Kennedie Tan, Natalyn Ourada and Sasha Lotz, agreed that the new floors are a big improvement and they make their turns and jumps much easier to accomplish.
“The new floors are raised, so it’s better for impact when you land jumps,” Tan said.
Along with the floors, the new mirrors have significantly changed the quality of the dance team’s practices. The old mirrors made the dancers look distorted and made it difficult for them to stay in sync during everyday rehearsals. With new mirrors, they are able to see each other more clearly now.
“We can actually see ourselves in the mirrors now because the old ones looked like funhouse mirrors,” Lotz said.
Although these new changes have been incredible, there were many challenges the dancers had to face throughout the renovations. While the studio was undergoing construction, the dancers were unable to practice in their usual space. Instead, they were forced to practice in the open and exposed commons.
“We didn’t have our mirrors, so it was very hard to dance together,” Ourada said. “We also had a lot of distractions because people were often walking through the commons, and we always had an uneven amount of space.”
The challenges that the dancers had to face made their practices much more difficult and impractical. With constant distractions, practices were not as productive. Although it was challenging at the beginning, the challenges were worth it for their new and improved studio.
