Learning to Dance

Learning to Dance

I began taking dance classes the year I turned forty. I had a seven-year old son, a three-year old daughter, was stressed, depressed, and twenty pounds overweight.

Unprepared to face the terror a dance class can evoke,I still remember the day my movement teacher instructed the ten of us to pretend we were tossing a ball to one another. The playful volleying stopped when the non-existent ball was lobbed in my direction. The imaginary ball arcing toward me seemed so heavy that I received it crouched with arms extended. The other women watched as I struggled with this unexpected burden, raised to a standing position, and hefted the weight of the world towards someone else.

My response took me and everyone else by surprise. Really, it was no surprise at all. I was literally heavy as well as weighted by the demands of young children, a difficult marriage, and struggles for money. My simple movement revealed everything, and I was humiliated by that revelation. Dance was teaching me things about myself I might not learn any other way.

Once I recognized the power of dance as a teacher, I realized I was more self-conscious than I imagined myself to be. Coming of age in the 1960’s, I thought of myself as fairly uninhibited. However, on many occasions in the dance studio I felt like a medieval Eve cast from the Garden in a t-shirt and tights, protecting breasts and crotch. If I wanted to dance, I had to come to terms with this constricting image.

If I had thought about it at all, I thought dancing meant maintaining a vertical orientation. As well as reckoning with my prudery, I had to learn to think of bodies as forms and spatial relationships. This realization came through another unsettling experience. Our teacher instructed us to divide into pairs, close our eyes, and let our bodies take a shape. I remember feeling uneasy about the intimacy as we would bend and move, one dancer making a space with an arm or leg or rounded torso, the other answering with her limbs and arched spine, not touching but getting close enough to see, if we peeked, the holes in one another’s leotards and to smell armpits and crotches. “Now,” she said, “open your eyes and become aware of the other shapes.” When I looked around, I had a new sense of when it meant to dance.

Every time I took one of these classes, a little voice repeated, you shouldn’t be here. You don’t belong. Because I was so timid, I tried to take up as little room as possible. My elbows resisted leaving the comfort of my torso. As I learned to dance with my arms, the space I claimed was defined by how high and wide I could reach. Once I discovered the joy in extending my range of motion, I couldn’t go back to that attenuated sense of myself. My arms wouldn’t let me.

Certainly, extending my arms was a bold gesture in claiming space, but an exercise called “going across the floor” taught me to quit worrying about what I thought others thought of me. Gradually, I began to treat myself with some respect. If asked to do a grande sissonne, I would breathe deeply, elevate my rib cage, and take flying leaps across the floor.

In learning to dance, I made peace with the paradox of accepting limitations while finding unlimited joy in movement. Although I grew stronger and more flexible, taking classes now and then was not making me a “real” dancer. I was too old. I had a limited vocabulary of movement.

Why did I put myself through the embarrassment and self-consciousness? Because dancing is joyful. Rolling my pelvis, reaching and bending, regaining the feelings of a younger me carried away by music, experiencing the natural pleasures of rhythm and patterned movement—it was an ordeal, but it felt good.

Now, on the other side of fifty, I see how risk and joy can be contained in a single gesture. I am not afraid to be a beginner. I have learned to dance.

Published in Sojourn magazine, January 1997