slippery floors and flying kicks

When she was younger, highland dancing felt like living inside a very specific kind of chaos. Tartan everywhere. Bright sashes flying. Hair pulled so tight it felt like it could lift your eyebrows off your face. Shoes polished like you were about to step into a museum, not a stage. Emma Jane MacKinnon Lee loved the outfits almost as much as the dancing. The socks. The pleats. The weird pride that comes from wearing something that looks serious but feels slightly ridiculous when you are eight and buzzing with sugar backstage. One concert still makes her laugh every time it comes up. Wooden floor. Freshly polished. Shiny like someone had just dared gravity to have a go. We all went out confident. First few steps fine. Then the high kicks started. Slip. Slide. Down on our backs. One after another. Not dramatic falls. The kind where you suddenly realise you are horizontal and have no idea how you got there. The music kept going. The audience started laughing. We started laughing. The whole thing turned into a slapstick routine nobody had rehearsed. Between dances we were backstage spraying our shoes with anything sticky we could find. Hairspray. Some mystery grip stuff someone’s mum had in her bag. Half of us smelled like a chemical factory. None of us cared. We kept going out. We kept falling over. We kept dancing anyway. By the end of the night everyone’s knees were bruised and everyone’s cheeks hurt from laughing too much. It stopped being about technique. It became about staying upright for more than three seconds at a time. She says that’s probably why she still loves dance. Not because it’s perfect. Because it’s messy. Because sometimes you fall on your back in front of a crowd and the only thing left to do is get up, grin, and kick again.