Virginia Batten dances with Extra Effort

They say dance like no one's watching. Virginia Batten dances so that someday everyone will.

"I dance all the time, my life is all about dance," Batten said while stretching. "Everything that I do is so that I can dance."

For Virginia dance started the same way it does for most kids.

"My mom put me in dance when I was three," Virginia said. "As I got older I really started to fall in love with it."

By the age of ten dance classes were no longer enough.

"I was dancing a lot in our house in our extra room," Virginia remembered. "It was making a lot of noise and I was jumping...we just decided I needed a place to practice that wasn't going to cause so much ruckus in the house."

So for Christmas her parents turned their garage into a dance studio complete with a mirror, balance bar, and wooden floor.

"I just really wanted to be able to work on all the technical things," Virginia said.

By August of 2020 she convinced her parents let allow her to attend virtual school so she could dedicate every spare moment to dance. These days she wakes up between 5:00-7:00am and does some school work. Then she will run 3-4 miles, stretch and dance in her home studio.  She'll then finish school for the next five hours before heading to the Brand Performing Arts Center in her hometown of Wilson and do classes from about 4:30pm-9:30pm.

"I've counted before," Virginia said. "Like 30 hours of dance a week."

She has the dedication of someone who knows exactly where they are going, even if sometimes she has trouble telling which way is which.

"Steps are hard, small steps," Virginia said. "I just sometimes I get my feet mixed up."

Virginia has battled the learning disability dyslexia. She has difficulty with numbers in math problems and directional instructions in dance.

"It's made school really difficult, but I've been able to overcome a lot of that," Virginia said.

She's been able to maintain over a 4.0 GPA and has won some of the most prestigious dance competitions in the country. Her dream is to make her passion her college major and her career.

"I would really like to dance for a professional company someday," Virginia said. "I really enjoy teaching and choreographing. I'm not sure the exact path I want to go down, but I know that I want dance to always be a really big part of my life."