The Fitting Dance

I've been reading The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. And it is opening something in me. Last night I read about a drummer who was thought to be non-musical by his teachers. A mathematician who was deemed unpromising in math. And others who couldn't quite find their niche through the framework and direction of guides. I haven't read about any dancers who were thought to be non-dancing material.

But I think that person might be me.

The author was talking about how dancers use "muscle memory," and I thought about how I cannot copy someone else's choreography, nor even remember my own. It's like my brain is absolutely stumped. If stupid has a feeling, I've experienced it deeply when it comes to trying to memorize moves and reproduce them in some kind of predetermined sequence. My muscles, if they have memory, can't seem to remember in a conventional way.

Yet I have feelings deep inside that respond instinctively to music, that understand how to give shape to sound.

This morning I was going to exercise, and instead got caught up listening to some newly discovered music by Vassilis Tsabropoulos. Before I knew it, I'd closed the shades and begun dancing in front of the mirror. My hands became birds, then a kind of tailor pulling thread from wrists, knees, and my open mouth. It made me feel like both laughing and crying at once. I felt I could do this forever.

But I would never remember how to do it again. Not just this way. It would always be new.

Is there such a thing as an improv dancer? If so, maybe I am one. I don't know how I would grow in this. Perhaps just by shutting the door and the shades, and letting my spirit dance free.

Only When I Dance

I watched him dance the dance of a story— a true story of a man whose dance danced him, rather than the other way 'round. It was breathtaking.

And I wondered why it has taken me this long to experience the language of dance. Such language gives shivers, sends us inside ourselves and out again.

You can find the dance that made me wonder where I've been without this language, tucked in the middle of this documentary, but only if you get the film. Unfortunately, it's not in the trailer...

The Art of Moving

It was a snap decision. I looked up the details on their website, dialed a number, left a message for Connie.

When I told a friend about my intentions, I said I had just decided "yes" last night, after Connie called me back.

But maybe I had been wanting this for a long time. I've been on an Art Pilgrimage and the thought has crossed my mind that sometime this art might need to move to my body. Maybe I would need to learn what it is to be a dancer.

Reading The Artist's Way, I remembered (as Julia asked me to) what I had always wanted to do as a child. I remembered that if life had been different I could have continued the ballet class my grandmother paid for (and I went to only for a short time). I remembered that I have always wanted to feel the air with my fingertips and toes, in just this way.

So I called Connie. And she said, "Come."

I did. Today.

First position. Second. Third. I remembered these. I watched. I tried. For long moments I was completely lost. I know some French, but not the ballet teacher's words that tell me what to do. At some point it occurred to me that, yes, there is a sequence. Everything to the front, now to the side, then to the back. I found little ways in, even as I got lost along the way.

"Move like a queen," she said. "Majestic."

Okay. I will never be a dancer among dancers. But I can pretend, just for a while, to be a queen.