"All that is important is this one moment in movement. make the movement important, vital, and worth living. do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused."
-Martha Graham
ABOUT ME
My name is Jessica Tatum, and I am a dreamer. If you want to get technical, I am also a senior ballet major in the College-Conservatory of Music who loves reading, sleeping/eating a lot, and, of course, dancing. I'm also a Business Administration minor, which I plan to complete by the end of this coming semester. I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and I have lived in four additional states: Arizona, Georgia, Maryland and, currently, Ohio. My iPod is an odd mixture of classical, alternative, pop and instrumental music, which I am always mooching from my sister's playlists.
Why I am a dancer? Because barring a period as a toddler when I wished to be a garbage collector, I have always wanted to be a ballerina. Even when everyone around me expected that I would fail, or lose interest, I clung to the hope that someday I would be good enough to transform the activity that I loved into a career I'd be happy in. When I was accepted into CCM, it was as if I had been given permission to pursue ballet; so that's what I'm doing. Honestly, I couldn't be happier.
I have also enjoyed finding and utilizing creative expressions outside of dance. Poetry in particular has been wonderful to explore. There's nothing like having a thought flit into my head for a split second and demand to be recorded lest it be lost forever. I wrote the following poem, for example, while listening to an orchestra play at the Strathmore Music Hall.
INFINITY
Let not the echoing night sky play in vain
to a landscape of sinuous wood
whose grim twilight is broken
only by the breath of imagined stars
breath that moves cold through bodies
and over the dreaming of fingertips.
Let the velvet smoothness of silence be an illusion
before the swirling ecstasy of color and sound
and joy so great that it leaks out through the eyes.
For where else can there be life
but where it fits in the space between words?
It rages there,
yearning for the freedom of an unfilled ear
so listen, it draws closer:
the visceral measure of past and present colliding
in the black becoming blue of the concert hall
Why I am a dancer? Because barring a period as a toddler when I wished to be a garbage collector, I have always wanted to be a ballerina. Even when everyone around me expected that I would fail, or lose interest, I clung to the hope that someday I would be good enough to transform the activity that I loved into a career I'd be happy in. When I was accepted into CCM, it was as if I had been given permission to pursue ballet; so that's what I'm doing. Honestly, I couldn't be happier.
I have also enjoyed finding and utilizing creative expressions outside of dance. Poetry in particular has been wonderful to explore. There's nothing like having a thought flit into my head for a split second and demand to be recorded lest it be lost forever. I wrote the following poem, for example, while listening to an orchestra play at the Strathmore Music Hall.
INFINITY
Let not the echoing night sky play in vain
to a landscape of sinuous wood
whose grim twilight is broken
only by the breath of imagined stars
breath that moves cold through bodies
and over the dreaming of fingertips.
Let the velvet smoothness of silence be an illusion
before the swirling ecstasy of color and sound
and joy so great that it leaks out through the eyes.
For where else can there be life
but where it fits in the space between words?
It rages there,
yearning for the freedom of an unfilled ear
so listen, it draws closer:
the visceral measure of past and present colliding
in the black becoming blue of the concert hall
As I look to the future, I am excited by the thought of living every day with the goal of both dancing professionally and living life to the fullest. I don't want to let a single moment of my college experience go by without stopping at least once to smell the roses.
As I look to the future, I am excited by the thought of living every day with the goal of both dancing professionally and living life to the fullest. I don't want to let a single moment of my college experience go by without stopping at least once to smell the roses.