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.
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. 🧡🧡
Ooof Rebecca, I in return am so moved reading this. You know, on a really selfish level it's wonderful to hear that something has landed so powerfully. Not least from these 'cameras off' classes where I can't really see what's happening or being felt. It's so useful for me to hear this. But your reflection and cascade of realisations is so much more than that. Sometimes we just hear the right thing at the right time don't we and everything can feel so utterly different on the other side. It doesn't happen often to me, but when it does it's so powerful. I am glad to my bones and my soul that the invitation to feel your strong body found YOU, wonderful YOU. I am currently trying to pull together plans for my metamorphic memoir of the middle years so perhaps I will come back to you one day in the not too distant and ask you more about this tectonic shifting if I might...xxx
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
Hey Naomi. Happy solstice! And thank you for sharing your experience. I love that you did figure skating and are perhaps feeling a calling back to the ice. That's amazing. And to dance in the ocean...wow that would be fantastic. It's a wonderful thing to give your body what it wants. We don't do it enough. We're too busy worrying about everything but really none of it matters xx
I think dancing in the ocean would be a beautiful collective experience with a small group of people, or another close person, but for now I'm just waiting for a quiet moment where I feel comfortable enough to try. I'm also forever looking for holdfasts now after your piece last year xx
Fascinating. Really interested to know where you are and where you dance!
I was trained in dance for about 16 years - never to professional level BUT I struggle with improv and literally freeze in front of people. However in my kitchen, I find it so freeing. Also I love hard rock and it’s difficult to dance ballet to hard rock!
Anyway. This resonated wildly and so inspiring. Would love to get dance back into my life in a freeing type of way….
Thank you Tory. I love reading about your experience here and how despite having a lot of dance experience improv is so hard. I think I'm lucky in this regard. Sounds like it's time to go and find somewhere to rock out!
What a lovely, freeing, enlivening creative practice to have discovered. What you say about the impermanence of it versus the way a book becomes finalised has really given me food for thought.
I love this piece! I recently started dancing again, not for performance, but with other people. It’s the best thing for my creative practice! I love the high I get in my body, I love the release I get in my head when I finally get past my self consciousness and into some freedom. You described it so well!!
Love this, Ruth. About a year ago, I started going to Mixxed Fit dance classes (basically hip-hop) and doing Extreme Hip-Hop (hip-hop with a step:). If you had told me 10 years ago that I would being doing this, I would have laughed and also been frightened. The process has not been an easy one. I'm generally the only white woman in the group, and I dance like a middle-aged white woman in a hip-hop class. I never look in the mirror (maybe someday). But I am more comfortable in myself and my body than I think I've ever been. And I love the collectivity of it, as you say. I am trying to interact with myself somatically and heal trauama through my body. Dance, and the women I dance with, help!
Aww Emily, I love this! Good for you for going to this class! I can so imagine the feelings you have and the things it brings up but I am so happy for you that you go anyway and make it work for you.
This is glorious! So inspiring and hurrah for feeling ease, joy and freedom in our bodies. I had a flirtation with ballroom and Latin dancing before Covid and LOVED it. I would love to do unpartnered dancing though for the freedom! This has inspired me to give it a try! Thank you.
Thanks Lara! I'm glad you found some inspiration in this. I have never done ballroom or latin, but at the end of the day they are all ways of being in our bodies more joyfully. I would find partnered dance very hard I think so I guess everything has its own challenge. But yes, it is the freedom I love I think. I am always trying to find ways to throw off structure so for me structured dance disciplines and even movement practices like yoga can be too stifling - I like to just be FREE in the stage of my life I'm in at the moment haha!
I loved your post and shared it on Facebook with the women with whom I dance.
You and I, Ruth, may dance different styles (I'm classical ballet), but the range of sentiment, that expression that it allowed you to find yourself and to grow! Oh so very BINGO!
In our 70's, our group is conscious of restrictive issues, but we push on and through and the seratonin high at the end of every session is remarkable. Assisted by the fact we are all now close friends and laugh an awful lot. Thank you for putting dance into words so beautifully.
Thank you Prue! Oh, I do love adult ballet to be fair. I have done some myself and it's a very different vibe with a group that is there for different reasons. It's so lovely to know other people who are not afraid to just go for it!
As ever, you have very much reflected how I feel! As someone who writes, and is very much I'm my own head, the only thing that frees me up is dance. I have found a contemporary dance class in my new town and it's the sort of movement I always wanted to do as a child who went to many many different quite inflexible dance classes.
Sometimes the movement feels so utterly wonderful that I wonder why I ever bother to try and wrestle words onto a page.
haha that last line! Yes, I know that feeling completely!
I love that you relate to all of this though. I think dance and writing are actually a really great combination of things to spend time on. They feed different parts of me. I think my writing is better for the dance, though I don't know if the same can be said for the other way around!
Some beautiful phrases in here, and I feel your passion and freedom in every word. I recently wrote a piece about my return to tap dancing after 20 years. It's called "if a sky full of crap..." I do feel safer being shown what steps to follow but I am autistic so the infinite possibilities overwhelm me with analysis paralysis. In zumba I enter what I call a dance trance as the moves I'm watching enter my body and dance themselves in echo back to the instructor. I do admire the improvisers though, especially the hoofers. The mirrors haunt me too. That is not me I see in them surely! And I get much more from practice than performing but I appreciate you stepping into the discomfort to connect with and inspire others. A big standing ovation from me!
aww thank you Lyndsay. It's lovely to hear your thoughts on this and I am fascinated by the different experiences and how being autistic might change your experience of the set steps etc. I can absolutely see why it's less overwelming. I get very overwhelmed by the physical blankness of the studio space sometimes, and I reflect often on why i love doing my movement work outside with all that stimulus. Somehow the studio feels too big and vast and unsensory to me. And yet, I am also overwhelmed by too much sensory stimulation, so it's always this knife edge...
Oh YES! Every word of this resonates...I discovered dance in my mid fifties, then 5rhythms, then a whole host of somatic explorations. Then lockdown...and everything stopped and, for one reason or another, never restarted here. And now I am heading for seventy...but would join like a shot if the opportunity arose. I miss it so...
I enjoyed reading about your dancing journey and development. Your post made me dream of a retreat where you’d lead movement and Beth Kempton would lead writing. 🙂
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. 🧡🧡
Ooof Rebecca, I in return am so moved reading this. You know, on a really selfish level it's wonderful to hear that something has landed so powerfully. Not least from these 'cameras off' classes where I can't really see what's happening or being felt. It's so useful for me to hear this. But your reflection and cascade of realisations is so much more than that. Sometimes we just hear the right thing at the right time don't we and everything can feel so utterly different on the other side. It doesn't happen often to me, but when it does it's so powerful. I am glad to my bones and my soul that the invitation to feel your strong body found YOU, wonderful YOU. I am currently trying to pull together plans for my metamorphic memoir of the middle years so perhaps I will come back to you one day in the not too distant and ask you more about this tectonic shifting if I might...xxx
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
Hey Naomi. Happy solstice! And thank you for sharing your experience. I love that you did figure skating and are perhaps feeling a calling back to the ice. That's amazing. And to dance in the ocean...wow that would be fantastic. It's a wonderful thing to give your body what it wants. We don't do it enough. We're too busy worrying about everything but really none of it matters xx
I think dancing in the ocean would be a beautiful collective experience with a small group of people, or another close person, but for now I'm just waiting for a quiet moment where I feel comfortable enough to try. I'm also forever looking for holdfasts now after your piece last year xx
Yes! This and with the shame. You put it so eloquently. AND agree about having to do it now whilst you can. Thank you for sharing this.
Fascinating. Really interested to know where you are and where you dance!
I was trained in dance for about 16 years - never to professional level BUT I struggle with improv and literally freeze in front of people. However in my kitchen, I find it so freeing. Also I love hard rock and it’s difficult to dance ballet to hard rock!
Anyway. This resonated wildly and so inspiring. Would love to get dance back into my life in a freeing type of way….
Thank you Tory. I love reading about your experience here and how despite having a lot of dance experience improv is so hard. I think I'm lucky in this regard. Sounds like it's time to go and find somewhere to rock out!
What a lovely, freeing, enlivening creative practice to have discovered. What you say about the impermanence of it versus the way a book becomes finalised has really given me food for thought.
Thank you Bonnie. I'm glad that bit spoke to you because that feels like my biggest insight 😂
Words as light, beautiful and free as your dancing. You have actually made me want to dance. Xx
Thank you Bel :) ha! My conversion work here is done! Xx
Me too! Googling dance classes in Plymouth as we speak 😅
🤣🤣🤣
I love this piece! I recently started dancing again, not for performance, but with other people. It’s the best thing for my creative practice! I love the high I get in my body, I love the release I get in my head when I finally get past my self consciousness and into some freedom. You described it so well!!
So glad this resonated Jes, and that you know this all too! :) thank you!
Love this, Ruth. About a year ago, I started going to Mixxed Fit dance classes (basically hip-hop) and doing Extreme Hip-Hop (hip-hop with a step:). If you had told me 10 years ago that I would being doing this, I would have laughed and also been frightened. The process has not been an easy one. I'm generally the only white woman in the group, and I dance like a middle-aged white woman in a hip-hop class. I never look in the mirror (maybe someday). But I am more comfortable in myself and my body than I think I've ever been. And I love the collectivity of it, as you say. I am trying to interact with myself somatically and heal trauama through my body. Dance, and the women I dance with, help!
Aww Emily, I love this! Good for you for going to this class! I can so imagine the feelings you have and the things it brings up but I am so happy for you that you go anyway and make it work for you.
Thanks Ruth! Yes, the feelings are there, but the joy outweighs them most of the time.
This is glorious! So inspiring and hurrah for feeling ease, joy and freedom in our bodies. I had a flirtation with ballroom and Latin dancing before Covid and LOVED it. I would love to do unpartnered dancing though for the freedom! This has inspired me to give it a try! Thank you.
Thanks Lara! I'm glad you found some inspiration in this. I have never done ballroom or latin, but at the end of the day they are all ways of being in our bodies more joyfully. I would find partnered dance very hard I think so I guess everything has its own challenge. But yes, it is the freedom I love I think. I am always trying to find ways to throw off structure so for me structured dance disciplines and even movement practices like yoga can be too stifling - I like to just be FREE in the stage of my life I'm in at the moment haha!
I loved your post and shared it on Facebook with the women with whom I dance.
You and I, Ruth, may dance different styles (I'm classical ballet), but the range of sentiment, that expression that it allowed you to find yourself and to grow! Oh so very BINGO!
In our 70's, our group is conscious of restrictive issues, but we push on and through and the seratonin high at the end of every session is remarkable. Assisted by the fact we are all now close friends and laugh an awful lot. Thank you for putting dance into words so beautifully.
Thank you Prue! Oh, I do love adult ballet to be fair. I have done some myself and it's a very different vibe with a group that is there for different reasons. It's so lovely to know other people who are not afraid to just go for it!
I loved reading about this, Ruth. I could feel the freedom you felt, and long for it too.
Thank you Jo :) GO seek it! X
As ever, you have very much reflected how I feel! As someone who writes, and is very much I'm my own head, the only thing that frees me up is dance. I have found a contemporary dance class in my new town and it's the sort of movement I always wanted to do as a child who went to many many different quite inflexible dance classes.
Sometimes the movement feels so utterly wonderful that I wonder why I ever bother to try and wrestle words onto a page.
haha that last line! Yes, I know that feeling completely!
I love that you relate to all of this though. I think dance and writing are actually a really great combination of things to spend time on. They feed different parts of me. I think my writing is better for the dance, though I don't know if the same can be said for the other way around!
Some beautiful phrases in here, and I feel your passion and freedom in every word. I recently wrote a piece about my return to tap dancing after 20 years. It's called "if a sky full of crap..." I do feel safer being shown what steps to follow but I am autistic so the infinite possibilities overwhelm me with analysis paralysis. In zumba I enter what I call a dance trance as the moves I'm watching enter my body and dance themselves in echo back to the instructor. I do admire the improvisers though, especially the hoofers. The mirrors haunt me too. That is not me I see in them surely! And I get much more from practice than performing but I appreciate you stepping into the discomfort to connect with and inspire others. A big standing ovation from me!
aww thank you Lyndsay. It's lovely to hear your thoughts on this and I am fascinated by the different experiences and how being autistic might change your experience of the set steps etc. I can absolutely see why it's less overwelming. I get very overwhelmed by the physical blankness of the studio space sometimes, and I reflect often on why i love doing my movement work outside with all that stimulus. Somehow the studio feels too big and vast and unsensory to me. And yet, I am also overwhelmed by too much sensory stimulation, so it's always this knife edge...
Oh YES! Every word of this resonates...I discovered dance in my mid fifties, then 5rhythms, then a whole host of somatic explorations. Then lockdown...and everything stopped and, for one reason or another, never restarted here. And now I am heading for seventy...but would join like a shot if the opportunity arose. I miss it so...
I hate that so much has stopped after Covid. It's really sad. I hope you will eventually find something else. It sounds like you were on a roll :)
I enjoyed reading about your dancing journey and development. Your post made me dream of a retreat where you’d lead movement and Beth Kempton would lead writing. 🙂
That sounds lovely, Terje. Thank you! Have you told Beth? 🤔🤭
Not yet.