♫♫♫
My name is Matthew Gilmore. I'm a second-year dancer and I'm from Boston, MA.
I started dancing when I was nine years old.
Ever since I was young I always dreamed of attending Juilliard. I attended the
summer program and being here and seeing what a day was like the shoes of
Juilliard students made me strive to work on my technique and work hard to be
able to achieve my goals. Each day I wake up and I go to breakfast and then I'm
off to my first academic class in the morning. In music class, we're working with
rhythm and that's so important when we're at the barre or when in the center
and being able to really see how your body reacts to that music that you're hearing.
[Clapping in rhythm] "One and two and one and two and one and two and one and two and...."
And after my academic class I go to ballet. I love going to ballet
class each morning and tuning my instrument. It is a time to get back to
your technique, get back to the barre. The fundamentals of our day begin at the barre.
"Yes, and start with the plie and use the floor and the brush. And plie, and reach."
Yes, we go to ballet class and we do it every day,
but you find something new in that ballet class every single day.
♫♫♫
We all come into Juilliard with the basic foundation of ballet and modern, but here
it's really honing in on yourself and the technique and how we can take it
from just being a technique to being something that's ours.
You spend so much time in the studio, thinking about dance
talking about dance, and lunchtime's a great time to just get our minds in a
different place and socialize. Each dance class at Juilliard only has 24 dancers
so it's a very tight-knit community and that relationship is so important to
take into partnering classes. ♫♫♫
The most important thing in
partnering is your connection with your partner.
♫♫♫
And after that partnering class we go into New Dances rehearsal.
New Dances is a great process. Each year we get a new
choreographer and it's so exciting because it's a new work so it's being
created on myself and my class and it's something where you never know what the
product will actually be, but it's all about the process.
♫♫♫
We devote our evenings and our free time, lunch blocks, to create
and experiment. Currently, I'm working on a project with
my friend Megan, and it's great to work with her. We feed off each others' energy
and it's...it's a process and we go through it together.
♫♫♫
At the end of the day, your body is totally exhausted but
your mind is so stimulated with new information and corrections and new
choreography and there's so much going on in our day, it makes me want to strive
for more, to be the best dancer I can be. ♫♫♫
Before applying to Juilliard, I really was comfortable in the fact that dance
is something that I'm able to express something more than I can with words.
♫♫♫