Josephine Swan never imagined that her stay in South Korea would lead her into K-Pop's glittering and challenging world. Each day, she encounters new hurdles and adventures that fate has in store for her and her four team members. Between gruelling...
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Once again, my arms found themselves in the air, my pelvis stepped out of the vertical axis of my body and shifted my hips.
Don't act like you forgot
My hips swung over to the other side, and my left arm, which had previously been floating in the air, lowered with a jerk and I instantly felt the flat, bare surface of my stomach.
Don't act like you forgot
The unpleasantly tense burning sensation in my leg muscles eased slightly as soon as I squatted down on the floor with the next twist. The sweaty surface of my right palm trembled on the wooden planks laid out, my upright head and slight smile were dedicated to the audience sitting in front of us and the camera rolling.
Don't act like you forgot
My upper body straightened up, jumping, while my legs remained slightly bent, ensuring a firmer and more secure stance as my lower back began to buckle and I made my hips vibrate to the rhythm. With rapid, energetic forward and backward movements, my hips adapted to the fast beat of the music and made my working abdominal muscles work hard, while the equally powerful involvement of my two arms brought the necessary strength and dynamism to the dance sequence.
The atypical remix of the song still echoed through the large room, changing drastically and rapidly, like our accelerating dance steps.
I loosened my bent posture and met Lisa's brisk backward stride so that our bodies turned towards each other. Scattered strands of blonde hair stuck to the centre of her forehead and largely concealed the redness of her skin. Her dark eyes glittered with deep concentration.
My right fingers began to wander spider-like across her front, repeating Lisa's quick turn on her back to the centre of her thigh before she let her back fall backwards in an implied manner, and I pushed us back into a wide-legged stance, briefly supporting her around the waist with my right arm.
With big steps, slightly bent knees and our hips swinging to the sides again, we released our dancing two-person combinations and returned to our initial starting positions with our bent arms raised alternately.
The short-haired Korean woman stood upright and with her legs apart in my line of sight, her fingers fleetingly feeling the back of her head with her bent arms and then, with the help of her bent torso, sliding purposefully onto both sides of her lower thighs. Meanwhile, with a sweeping movement of my right arm, I approached the back of my front dancer and, while she was bent over, let my other hand pose visibly with four fingers raised. Choi's upper body rotated with stitch-like shakes of my pointing hand, causing her receding left shoulder to twitch true to my initiative before we both fell into an opposing bent-knee position. My upper body pressed against my right thigh several times, adapting to Choi's synchronised movements alongside the continuous beat of the mixed music.
As her torso straightened repeatedly and turned sideways, I momentarily caught sight of her staring, almost black eyes, which seemed deeply absorbed and fixed, comparable to Lisa's concentrated expression. Her thin lips were pressed tightly together and seemed to have lost all pink colour under the artificial light. Tiny rivulets of sweat formed at her temples and ran in tiny rivulets over the Korean woman's smooth, pale skin.
I began to unbend from my crouched position, my hands brushing off my thighs and feeling the pronounced bones of Choi's hips. Despite the tight fabric of her training trousers, she offered little resistance to the dancer's quick sideways swaying movements, allowing her body to move freely in combination with her slightly swaying hips. I only emphasised her swaying pelvis with a short hand-covered stroke before I retreated behind her dancing figure again and was thus able to escape the attentive eyes of the audience for a few seconds.
Choi's feet lifted slightly, the black fabric of her trainers stretching under the straightening of her toes as she began to tap her way in behind Ji-soo and Rosé. Our eldest member formed the beginning of the diagonal line that stretched across most of the dance floor we were using, keeping a certain distance between each other to ensure that we had room to dance and move. Our arms turned parallel to the ceiling at an angle, offering a brief glimpse of our moist, sinewy palms before we closed them into fists and dropped them close to the vibrating sides of our bodies as the rhythm changed again and a melodic Indian-tinged transition played.
My stomach muscles tensed as my legs buckled wide apart, allowing my pelvis to thrust and vibrate more intensely to the various notes playing in the background. My shoulders circled simultaneously and supported the slow glide of my evenly rolling body.
Our arms lifted, and I felt the pent-up warmth of my upraised wrist on my scalp as we paused momentarily in our slow pelvic movements and began to thrust our hips sideways again with the rapid lowering of our right arms. I felt the intensified hot burn of my leg and abdominal muscles caused by the throttled thrusts of my hips, and my breathing faltered slightly as my left hand ran its fingers rigidly up along my face and then rested them on Choi's right shoulder. My head tilted like my still swaying hips, letting my loose strands of hair fly out of my braid before his continual neck-slouching movements turned my face towards the lamp-covered ceiling.
As the song drew to a close and our dance performance together came to an end, my right hand clenched into a fist, and my leaning back jerked into an upright position at the same time, and I took my grey eyes off the shining lights of the lamps and onto the bare wall above the seated crowd.
The loudspeakers played a fast-paced mixed sequence of sounds, and our knees sank lower, provocatively forcing the right side of our hips to jut out one after the other. One after the other, our left hands moved away from the shoulders of our respective lead dancers and stretched over our heads at an acute angle. For the moment, our spread palms hid most of our faces while our arms repeatedly stretched upwards as our hips changed sides.
Don't act like you forgot
My right fingers encircled the joint of my elbow, supporting the upright position of my arm. Then, following the unique circular motion of the rest of my crouched body in a descending arm swing, they placed themselves on the right side of my outstretched hip.
Better have my money
Our heads lifted in synchronisation and nodded towards the little song that rang out at the end.
