Beyond the Stage

Ellie brown ‘19 talks about her experiences with dance. As well as what matters most.

You can feel the anxiety buzzing around the room. You have butterflies in your stomach. When you walk on the stage the heat and lights hit you like an oncoming car. This is what Brown goes through every performance.

Ellie Brown ’19 is a dancer at Nolte Academy and a behind the scenes worker at the shows here in our very own high school. Brown has a bit of social anxiety, but she gets through this with the friends and family who have inspired her to do her best. Brown’s boyfriend, Diego, says “The closer you are to her the more talkative and expressive she is with you, but she definitely has a lot of charisma and determination when it comes to difficult situations.”  

Brown describes the minutes before the show as nerve-wracking, she says, “ I always get super nervous before going on stage, I get butterflies in my stomach and I get a lot of nervous energy. I always take a few deep breaths before going on (the stage) and run through the dance I’m about to do in my head. The first thing I notice when I walk on stage is how hot it is and how bright the lights are, it’s always a bit startling, but once I start dancing everything seems to go away. I just focus on the music and my mind kind of goes blank.”

 Brown started dancing when she was 2, so her advice to new dancers is, “Just let go, what I love about dancing is you can forget your problems.”

When Brown was younger, she aspired to be a professional ballerina, she soon moved on to other forms of dance. She says she changed her mind because, “I realized I wasn’t doing it because I loved it, i was doing it to please other people.”

Now of course Ellie Brown has hopes and a life outside dancing, her ultimate goal in life is to be a nice person, and is very family oriented. Her family consists of her mother, father, and sister. Her family is very supportive of her dancing career. After she gets home from Nolte, they all sit down and talk. Brown says she thinks a reason they’re so close is because her extended family is spread out across the United States, so they are all they have.

Of course, like all of us, Brown has had her struggles, but she says she’s lived a good life so far, and there’s much more to come. When asked what was the best thing that happened to her, she replied, “I’m grateful for all the experiences that have happened to me.”