Pirouetting through the Pandemic: Taylor Zhou’s Ballet Journey

By Cathy Zhou ’21

Have you ever felt an urge to dance around your room during remote learning, just to let out that boredom and craziness that has accompanied you for a whole day? I have. During the pandemic, many of us have found ways to relax. Taylor Zhou’23 has used this opportunity to take dance to another level, pursuing ballet at her local studio and starting the Lyrical Dance club at St. Mark’s. 

Taylor would go to her studio once or twice a week to take ballet classes, and even more often when she is on break. “My class routine is basically stretching, barre exercises, center exercises, and pointe work”, she said, “sometimes I also do strength and conditioning exercises. If there’s a performance coming up, I will have additional rehearsals.” Although Taylor has not performed in shows recently because of COVID-19, she is still learning new variations for fun, such as Sleeping Beauty and Cupid.

Yet, the most exciting moment for Taylor is not performing or competing ballet, but simply being able to dance again after injuries. “I get injured often, and it takes a long time to recover,” she said. In June and July, she injured her calf and wasn’t able to dance for three weeks. “That time was like torture to be honest, lol.” Yet, when she was able to dance again, she carried a renewed excitement and gratitude for ballet, more than ever before.

Taylor has danced for around eight or nine years now, but her dance journey has been a bumpy ride. She started in Chinese folk dance when she was six but broke her elbow while doing a cartwheel on a balance beam. She stopped for a year and decided to try Latin dance and then, finally, ballet. “I just couldn’t take my eyes off those ballerinas when I watched them perform on stage”, she said, “watching them dance on pointe shoes so gracefully really fueled my dreams of being a princess.”

After experiencing many forms of dance, Taylor interprets dance not only as an art form. Especially during the pandemic, dance is a way to express her emotions and to portray beauty. She explains, “for example, I’m not used to expressing my emotions in words but dance provides me with a way to say what I want to say with my body, in the form of physical movements.” She believes that dance, especially ballet, is not something far away or something that only professional dancers can do. “Really anyone can dance,” she said, “it’s actually a natural instinct of humans.”

She also sees dance as representative of different cultures. “There are different genres of dance that originated from different places in the world, incorporating various cultural elements,” she explains, “I feel that dance can also be a way to promote diversity in the St. Mark’s community and beyond, to help people understand the importance of it.”

For that reason, Taylor took the initiative to start the Lyrical Dance club at St. Mark’s this year with Jiayi Yu’23, another very talented dancer, in hopes that more St. Markers can try this new art form. “We could feel the beauty of dance and communicate with each other while dancing,” she said. Taylor and Jiayi also hope to bring different styles of dance and choreography to St. Mark’s. “Since the two of us have different dancing backgrounds and have done different types of dance in the past, we are complementary,” said Taylor. “We might even start to prepare for a few programs that can be more involving and fun, and eventually have everyone dance on stage!”

Presidential Mock Election at SM: Interview with Mr. Lyons

By James Nichols-Worley ’23

It’s that most wonderful time of the year again– no, not Hanukkah– November. On Tuesday night after Halloween, the world stopped. Then, five days later, we found out who won America’s favorite quadrennial contest. 

Mr. Lyons and his Advanced Government class ran their mock election at St. Mark’s but luckily one with far less weight. We spoke with Mr. Lyons about his work and thoughts on this year’s mock election results.

What was the process of choosing the different questions on the ballot?

The ballot that went out is the same ballot largely that went out last winter. Obviously at that point it was a primary with the 20 Democratic nominees. They are largely the same repeated questions as when they were created in 2016. 

It’s not just what the St. Mark’s community is interested in, but what has national correlations. We carried them forward because we want to see change over time, like with marijuana legalization from 2016 to 2020. 

Every year though, we add in some questions. Like about mail-in voting, because that wasn’t an issue in 2016. The ones at the end are the more hot button questions.

Do you think anything’s changed about St. Mark’s since our mock primary in the spring?I haven’t sat down with the data, there’s so many ways you can slice it. Do the faculty feel differently about the carbon tax? Do third form girls feel differently about the wealth tax? The short answer is, I haven’t had time. 

What we had with the newsletter was, the [advanced gov] class sat down and asked questions about the data. How do we fit with gun control, how do we sit with America?

Were there any surprising results, or any surprising correlations?

A lot of them were what you expect, St. Mark’s is pretty liberal. The overwhelming vote for Biden wasn’t surprising. 

I was personally surprised there wasn’t broader acceptance for outlawing handguns. Maybe it was the word “outlaw” that scared people. Most people killed by guns are with handguns, even if AK-47s look scary, which is why we used that wording.

Students don’t feel strongly about lowering the drinking age. When I was growing up, they raised the drinking age. It's not just because they want to have a beer. If I can join the army, get married, vote, how come I can make those decisions but not have a beer?

A similar percentage of the school voted for independent candidates as did in the real election. Is this coincidence or something prescient about the school’s political makeup?

I think that unlike 2016, there were very few people who didn’t feel strongly about Trump. You either strongly embraced Trump or strongly rejected him, which made it very hard for 3rd party candidates. They might have been willing to vote for the Green Party in 2016, but they decided to vote against Trump for the person who has a chance.

Over half the school identifies as somewhat or very liberal, and less than ¼ identify as somewhat or very conservative. Do we do enough to encourage more diverse political discussion, or is it not a problem?

If you’re asking my personal opinion, one of the reasons we value diversity in education is because we want to learn from people who think differently than us. I want to have political speakers, I like [discussions about] government. 

We should have opportunities to hear people who disagree with us. If the school has a groupthink, you know where everyone thinks the same so nobody can speak out against the majority, we should be able to hear more from the minority ideology, both inside and outside the school. 

We don’t have a Republicans club, even though we have a Democrats club. I think we need to hear these opinions even if a lot of people disagree with them. I would want to.

Were there any instances of people voting who didn’t go to St. Mark’s, or people who voted more than once?

No, not that we can tell. People could have cheated, but did they? Probably not. Just because there’s a possibility something could have happened, it doesn’t mean it did. We definitely haven’t seen any evidence of it.

Mr. Jewell, the head of the St. Mark’s History and Social Sciences Department, commented on the mock election, “Well done. Isn’t it a great thing to track election results?”

While not all of the data from the mock election has been released (and probably will not be released publicly for privacy reasons, although the survey was anonymous), the St. Marker received exclusive data about the last thing you’d expect: the drinking age.

Out of all the faculty who had an opinion on lowering the drinking age, about ¾ (74%) were against lowering it.

The student body, however, was more broadly split. Just over half all students who expressed an opinion opposed lowering the drinking age. Yet, a much different story appears when analyzing the data form by form. The youngest grade, the 3rd form, opposed lowering the drinking age in similar percentages as the faculty. Yet the oldest grade, the 6th form (many of whom are 18 or are turning 18), supported in the majority (55%) lowering the drinking age to 18. In the mock election’s newsletter, it was noted that over 80% of Americans oppose lowering the drinking age.

If, by any chance (or by magic), the drinking age is lowered, would the school return to letting students drink on campus? Fat chance of that, but it does sound like a great plan for the seniors.  

So now, what does the future hold for St. Mark’s? Perhaps with Joe Biden’s victory in the actual U.S. election, political tensions can now cool down, at least at St. Mark’s, and we’ll be able to more openly debate our different beliefs. After the election, we likely won’t see as many spreadsheets and pie charts as we did during the election, but we certainly should continue to explore and discuss political thoughts and critical issues that shape America.