Why I dance
I’m a terrible dancer. This is my party line.
But this is not entirely true. What is more accurate is that I have no real technique to speak of. The last time I did any formal dance was as a primary aged child over thirty years ago, and like many kids the dance was ballet. Back then it was all about ‘happy feet’ and ‘sad feet’, that is, the feet that make a dance teacher happy (or not). They didn’t make me especially happy, but that wasn’t the point. I love ballet – I love watching it – but I don’t think happiness is ever the point in this beautiful discipline. Being a non-conformist from the start, mine was an electric blue tutu rather than the standard ballerina pink. I begged my mum to let me bend the rules. And even then I had a lousy memory for the pretty floor-travelling, posy-carrying routines.
Having no technique then is one of my weaknesses. As well as a poor memory for choreographed moves. A brain that is slow to pick up on combinations. Knee joints that tire easily. An over-dependence on my hands. A tendency to get dizzy easily. But my biggest flaw of all is having too much consciousness of these failings.
Because the other thing is this, no one I dance with seems to care. Mostly they urge me forward, reminding me endlessly that form follows feeling. I only re-started dancing regularly, weekly, at the start of 2023. In my forties. With the largest body I have ever had. Despite fatigue and asthma from the covid years. Despite my introversion. I picked the weirdest class of all.
This week I’m on a three-day intensive with my weekly choreography and improvisation dance teacher, Ana. We have just finished our first day together as I write this. Four of us and teacher. I have danced for over three hours all told, with processing and reflection time around the edges. Always observing myself, I am an endless supply line of questions. Today, Why is it so hard to let my head go? I ask this in the literal sense, but I could be talking about my need to cognate.
Choreo and Improv is my jam though. Complimentary to the somatic, creative and authentic movement I love in my own work. It is always the smaller class because most people like to be told what to do, they feel safe in the hold of technique, but being me, I love the lawless exploration of improv. The terror of it. The edginess of what it surfaces. I love the fact that the bits that scared me 18 months ago I now find excitement in (contact improv) and that there seems to be no trajectory of development beyond becoming easy with the unknown. This is good for me. It is all completely dependent on mood. A good week. A bad week. The reasons why, personal.
People have always talked about the ‘runner’s high’ – guiltily I never really understood it - but for me the equivalent feeling is the ‘dancer’s high’ – the sheer exhilaration of never wanting to stop. Sitting in the colourful, sunlit café in the foyer on a sticky red sofa at breaktime, I am content in the feeling that with these people I could stay forever experimenting with dynamic, form, sensing, contact. With no technique to cling on to or default into, my body is always on a mysterious path. I never know where I am, I have nothing to live up to and therefore absolutely nothing to lose. I drink my tea in blissful memory of how disorienting it always is to be a body with other bodies. How magnificent and mundane. How transgressive for a Wednesday.
I’m yet to find a love for the visibility of dance, which is to say that I definitely don’t dance to perform or be seen - it’s enough to open my eyes to myself - but on Friday I’ll be part of a trio doing an improvised curtain-raiser before a performance by acclaimed dancer Emilyn Claide. The occasion is meaningful: it is Claid’s final performance on stage. An older woman, soloing. A therapist too. I had absolutely no intention of doing more than the workshop itself until I walked in this morning, but what would I be saying no to?
I dance with this group of women (and a couple of men, sometimes) because somewhat inexplicably this fixture of my week has become one of the safest places for me to grow myself up. I am never comfortable in these sessions, but being uncomfortable is the deal you make with improvisation. Besides, when has comfort in one’s body ever been normative for most of us. Saying no, is just another way of saying yes to everything I am freeing myself of. Shame, mainly.
Dance for me is freedom. Even in its confusions, even in my inadequacies, it is freedom. And not an individual freedom, but a collective freedom. The freedom is not born of skilfulness or even confidence, but in the deeply felt sense that life is better when you are not a prisoner in your body. When free bodies are free together. Granted, I still don’t like to dance in front of studio mirrors. It is enough for me that our bodies mirror; where the natural distortion between you and another is empathic, unique, vulnerable. I am having to learn to find ease in a body I can’t shrink or minimise. Last month we danced in coffee grounds spread over the studio floor. There is no place to hide in two kilos of caffeine.
I led two small creative movement classes in person last week and one reluctant participant said she could only let go as she watched me lead, remarking that she had never seen someone look so free in their body. God. That got me. But I felt it too. I surprised myself. When you lead a movement or dance class you have to overcome your own shame, otherwise the class feels it. But as I have said already this is a role I can’t perform. It has to be real, or not at all.
I’m still trying to assimilate what this turn towards dance in my forties means to me. And not a dance that is aping youth, or a fling with my own past, but dance that can only be for and in the now. I am still trying to make sense of why in all other areas of life I look to people who have gone before, but in matters of the body I look to what younger bodies know. Bodies who have known different conditionings and freedoms. I am greedy not for youth but the freedom of what youth knows. I want to rub it in like the coffee grounds.
There are times when I don’t see any of it as dance. I just see it as courting my own life force. There are times I see it all as movement – that plainer thing that perhaps even (especially) a scientist can allow for. But maybe my fear of claiming the word dance is that it all feels too final. A dance must, of course, end. The curtain will fall, or the lights, or the body itself.
But there is no end point for me in this. No obvious achievement level. No certificate or qualification. I have no delusions that might compel me to take to the stage more than this once, but at the heart of improvisation is surprise and a relinquishing of control. Spinning makes me sick, but still I spin and spin. I want to be in the circle of my life.
I started from nowhere, and I will finish nowhere. Where words solidify, dance is always ephemeral. A book cements itself, a dance wriggles free. When I move my hand on the page something is made that might stay, when I move my hand through empty space it is into thin air. One benefits the other. We cannot live only in the protection of what feels eternal. I do it because life is immeasurably better doing it, than not. And because when it’s gone, it’s gone.
I'm always late to the game these days, but I just wanted to come back to this one and let you know how much it moved me. ("Moved me"! Ha) After the slow meditation class you led a couple of weeks ago, I've been simmering some thoughts around movement, dancing, and the mind connection to the physical body and sensation. I too danced (ballet) as a young person. I am considering writing about that sometime, but it's got a lot of trauma tied up with it and I don't know if I want to put it on my normal blog. I may write it up and keep it a draft for my own eyes only, but even if it never sees the light of day, I wanted to reflect one thing back to you. I don't remember ever being told, in all my long years of dance training (followed by years of yoga) to just feel my strong body, as you suggested in the warrior pose of the movement class. Just feel it. Full stop. No correction offered, no suggestion of HOW it should feel or look, no improvement for how to do it better or improve the stretch or the line or "go deeper into the pose". Just feel your arms in space, feel their strength. That was it. Seems simple, but it was so profound, and has unlocked a cascade of realizations about habitual tension patterns I hold as well as a constant subconscious awareness of where my body is in space and whether it's in the "right" conformation, all of which has led to a level of physical discomfort that never goes away. Crazy that in all my almost-50 years, I've never thought like this. But now I am. It's pretty tectonic actually. Bet you wouldn't have expected one or two quick phrases to impact someone so much! (Or maybe you would ... group work can be so powerful!) Anyway, no need to respond, just wanted to let you know how important that was for me, and how helpful I'm finding it. 🧡🧡
As someone who also danced when they were little, for me this was ballet and figure skating, this resonated a lot. I still remember the desperate need I had to be seen as 'good', and never knowing the answer. I am much clumsier now, and any technique I did now is all but lost or abandoned. I have to move a bit more softly now than I used to, flinging myself about doesn't feel quite as good.
‘But my biggest flaw of all is having too much consciousness of these failings.’
It's reassuring and empowering to read how you are kindling a new relationship with dance now. I continue to try and find a new relationship with my body as it grows and my thoughts as they flit and worry, but shame can be heftily stifling. I sometimes have to remind myself that it will feel different now, and that's okay.
It's only been in recent years where I've been able to remember how dance, and movement, felt or even how I know I wanted it to feel in my bones. There was no place for the movement my body wants to do now back then, inside of myself or outside. But, now there could be. I think. Maybe one day I'll dance in the ocean and find my way back onto the ice. That's what my body wants now.
‘I do it because life is immeasurably better doing it, than not. And because when it’s gone, it’s gone.’
Words to reckon with and to live alongside. Some edge-work for a quiet Thursday.
Good luck for the rest of your intensive, although I'm not sure those are the right words. Perhaps, I hope you feel all of it, is more apt. Oh, and happy summer solstice too. Take care, Naomi xx