ABOUT ME

ABOUT ME !

Hi everyone!! My name is Hillary Na Sachi Ko, currently just turned 18 years old. I am a Singaporean,still a student pursuing a dance course :) I have been dancing ballet since i was young and slowly gained the interest of dancing but I gradually lean towards the k-pop genre as during that time k-pop was rising in popularity. At that point of time, I did not know that dancing had many different types of genres but I did not had the information of where I could sign up for those classes. It was a pity because if I had actually signed up for dance classes I could have gain more experience since young. but I still continued to dance and self learn other people’s choreography myself and take the opportunity to perform on stage whenever I can. Like during a school performance or outside performance. I decided to pursue dance as a career because I knew that I was not very good with books and just nice when I joined a dance academy called DF academy , it made me thought that even though I feel like I cannot do well and pursue a normal job like everybody else, I am still able to do well in something else like DANCE. I could show people that dancing can also be a successful career.

As I am not very confident in my myself and knowing that I am lacking in some part of an area, I hope that I am able to learn new skills and also gain more confidence in myself as I am learning something new in NAFA. I can also overcome my stage fright and it can also push me to become a better performer as well. Not only becoming a better performer, I feel that as dancers we should learn more than just knowing how to dance. Knowing more like, having knowledge about our anatomy of our body so that we dancers can prevent from getting injured because our body is very important to us thus we have to take good care of our body. Being a dancer is not just about dancing but also to get to understand the other production, knowing how the backstage is like or having the knowledge to do the lighting, sound, marketing and many more. By learning more than just dance, it helps us to enhance our skills and knowledge on the production side thus allowing us to gain more experience on different things than just dancing.

MOVING ON↷

What I find interesting about dance is how we can actually express ourselves through body language. For example: When you want to show that you are happy there is movements that shows that you are happy. It can be just by jumping around happily or even when you are sad by looking down. I find that there are different kinds of expression, posture, gestures to express our emotions. I like how fascinating is it by also expressing ourselves by making sounds or noises. 

Who knew that making sounds can be interesting as well?!

Nowadays people are too use to dancing with music and when try it without music, it might seem a little odd for them. However, after watching my seniors improvising without any background music, they actually created their own sound effects by making different noises which help them to express what they want the audience to see from their actions which made the dance even more mesmerizing. It made me ponder for awhile,like ‘why did I not thought of making noises’ !! But that is okay, now I realized that maybe I could put that into used soon!!

I like how dance have a lots of different genres like street jazz, hip hop, contemporary , ballet, Latin, urban, reggae and many more. I am able to learn different types of dance genres instead of just one type and it is even better if one day I am able to combine those genres together so like there would be different genres in one dance piece and help to evolve the future of dance. I feel that it  would be cool and creative.

One of the challenges I have encountered for now is sometimes I would get frustrated if I am not being able to do the steps or choreography and execute it as my techniques are not there yet, I will feel demoralized and feel that I am lack in so many areas. Then many thoughts will come flooding in like “am i not good enough” and “why can’t I do it”.

LEARN⇓

During a rehearsal, I feel that when there are things you think you want to change or feel that some area could be better, you can discuss and share your idea, it might make things even better when more than 1 ideas are combine together!

Even when it is during class time, if there is any questions or feedback you are curious about, kindly approach to your lecturer and ask them instead of keeping it to yourself because no one can read your mind. It is important to take initiative on your own to improve yourself. By doing so, your lecturer is able to let you know your strength and weakness so that you can take note of the feedbacks and make improvements to yourself thus doing better and improving further. If you see your friends doing something different or wrong, you can give them a feedback as well so that both side of the party is able to help one another and learn from each other’s mistakes.

Most importantly is to take the feedback as a positive feedback and improve yourself and not to feel bad or lose confidence in your abilities. 

Turn your weakness into a strength. 

Everyone is learning and practicing to be better and we all start from the bottom and slowly make mistakes and learn from it to become improve further.