We Were Dreamers by Simu Liu

Author:Simu Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

In the mid-2000s, the world was caught up in a particularly bad case of dance fever; So You Think You Can Dance was the highest-rated show on TV, movies like Stomp the Yard and Step Up dominated the box office and the Jabbawockeez had just been crowned on America’s Best Dance Crew (although I was always more of a Kaba Modern fan). I swear, one summer I even overheard my parents raving to each other about Katee and Joshua’s beautiful hip-hop duet to “No Air,” choreographed by the legendary Tabitha and Napoleon.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to drop this book and YouTube it. Now.

I myself had always loved to dance, harkening back to my perfect school dance attendance record at UTS and the school-wide culture shows I had participated in. When I heard that Western had a hip-hop team that performed at school shows and traveled to compete against other universities, I just about lost my mind. Even though I had never taken an actual hip-hop dance class in my entire life, I knew in my bones that I had to try. After all, I had just won the Superfrosh by freestyling onstage in front of thousands of people—this was another opportunity for me to spread my wings and dance in front of a crowd!

I signed up for the hip-hop club, registered to audition and promptly found myself in a small-town Canadian version of You Got Served. The team was led by a girl fittingly named Flo, who coincidentally graduated from UTS two years ahead of me. Flo was every bit as smart and capable as anybody who’d walked UTS’s halls, but she was also a mold breaker who wore baggy cargo pants with one leg rolled up—and not to mention, a dope dancer. I was equal parts inspired and smitten, which was unfortunate, seeing as she had a very cool, very talented boyfriend who was also very thirty.

Flo’s passion for dance gave me permission to also deviate from my prescribed path. There was no long-term plan, other than to just continue doing things that made me happy.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though; I had made a commitment to be a part of a competitive team, and we needed to train.

It was the UTS culture show on a whole other level; the crew practiced almost seven nights a week leading up to OUCH, the Ontario Universities’ Competition for Hip-Hop, which was held at the nearby MacMaster University in Hamilton. It was like a full-time job—when we weren’t learning and drilling choreography, we were attending drop-in classes or dissecting dance moves on YouTube. I’d quickly learn that dance wasn’t just about expressing oneself, but about being a team player—and that meant understanding the importance of staying in formation and syncing your movements to everyone else’s.

The concept of the performance was fun and campy, like most dance numbers were—we were mannequins in a department store that came to life and threw down when the lights turned off.

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