Perched Dance

[Dance + teacher and student + realistic fiction]

Sixteen-year-old Shen Lu is a first-year student at an ordinary district-level key high school in Shanghai’s Hongkou District.

Sharp-tongued and stubborn, she refuses to be told what to do. At school, if she can’t stand a teacher, she’ll hand in a blank test. At home, she bullies her good-natured older cousin until she can barely fight back. She isn’t a bad kid. It’s just that if you want her to submit, you’d better have the skills to back it up.

In her first year of high school, she falls in love with street dance and throws herself into it. The following spring, she walks into that dance studio and takes her place in the front row.

Twenty-six-year-old Gu Qi is a contracted dancer at the studio. She’s quiet and aloof, never filming class demonstrations, and lets her actions speak for her. She never wastes words when teaching. She’ll repeat a move five times. If you can keep up, then keep up. If you can’t, she’ll come over and guide you through it, but won’t explain a thing. It’s not that she lacks patience. She simply believes the body remembers things longer than the mind does.

One is a rebellious kid who refuses to be controlled, tough on the outside but soft-hearted, wanting someone to guide her but afraid to say so. The other is an adult who keeps herself tightly restrained, using silence to apply pressure and actions to show she cares. They’re ten years apart, separated by a classroom and by the word “big sister,” which one of them can never bring herself to say.

This isn’t a story about getting together. It’s about drawing closer, testing the waters, and holding back, and about how sixteen-year-old Shen Lu learns to trust that person while standing in her own shadow.