Have you heard the latest buzz of excitement at Bloom? No! Well here it is: Recital costumes have been revealed! 

For most students, this is one of the most exciting parts about dance--after all, who doesn’t love sparkles?

At Bloom, there is a great deal of thought put into each and every costume. We have staff members dedicated entirely to costuming, to make sure that each and every costume chosen is fitting for the class, flows with the rest of the recital show, and to make sure that each costume looks perfect by the time it reaches the student’s hands. 

Though costumes are an exhilarating part of dance, sometimes, the costume chosen for a class may not fit with a student’s expectations, or may leave a student feeling disappointed or frustrated.

Thoughts that may be circling a dancer’s mind in this situation are: “why this costume?”, “why was this chosen for my class?”, “do I really have to wear that?”, or “that’s not what I wanted”.

Sometimes we as dancers don’t understand why a costume was chosen for us, and we wish we could have chosen it ourselves. 

This month, we asked some of the instructors of Bloom to share with us a costume from their dancing days that they weren’t thrilled about, and how that experience shaped them as a dancer and a person. 

Miss Jocie

Miss Jocie shared: 

“Sometimes we can’t see the bigger vision and we are just focused on what’s right in front of us!

This costume, although I thought it was hideous up close when I was younger, looked amazing on stage, and made our dance complete. This was for an acro dance, to a song titled Topsy-Turvy. 
As we were flipping across the stage, our colorful costumes were a crowd favorite!! Your costume, the song, and choreography are each equally important to the overall performance.”

Miss Ali

Miss Ali shared this photo, and explained:

“This was a costume for a ‘story book’ dance. I was Little Bo Peep and these were my sheep. We won nationals with this dance, so we decided to compete it for a second season. By the end of the year, I had to be sewn into my costume!”

Miss Michelle

Miss Michelle shared:

"When we (my classmates and I) first saw this costume, we were all shocked and confused because, quite frankly, we felt like a colony of rainbow fish, not sassy jazz dancers! It only got worse as the accessories were piled on--gloves, hair pieces, hairstyle, and more. 

When we later on received awards at competitions for this dance, I realized that it didn't really matter what the costume looked like — what mattered was that we were able to execute skillful dancing, and show the passion on our faces!

And, it also brought a lot of laughter as all 30 of us were miserable together!" 

Stories like these remind us that when it comes to costumes, it’s all about perspective!

While we may not be able to choose our costumes, we can choose our attitude about it! It seems that regardless of how much we did or did not like a particular costume chosen for us, the experience we had performing in that costume actually had very little to do with the costume itself, but rather, it had everything to do with our perspective.