The Joy of Dancing
Establishing Our Place in the World
She never wanted me to dance, my mother; she would have rather seen me sink into a pool of tar and never be able to escape. She didn’t want me to dance because I loved it utterly, and it did very little for her.
She did everything in her power to ruin the joy I found in dancing. She finally succeeded in discouraging me from performing publicly and pursuing my beloved ballet, but she never destroyed my passion for dancing.
Dancing is about all of the things I love. It is about movement and feeling and music and rhythm. It is an avenue for self-expression. It is everything my mother was terrified of.
Self-expression was something my mother feared beyond all else. She was a person who needed to control everything, always, at any cost. She could never risk unexpected things taking place. Since her freedom and her life were at stake, she thoroughly discouraged all of us from uttering so much as a self-expressive peep.
So now I’m wondering how I can come back to myself? How can I come together again and function as one complete, focused organism? It is hard to imagine what it would be like, since I have never experienced it. I guess I am terrified by the thought of not having all of my parts to rely on, of not being able to shift from one part to the other, of not having the places to hide from everyone and myself.
What is it about dancing that I am afraid to say in front of an audience? That dancing is close to love and passion and beauty, that it is the best of all things? That it describes a time and a culture and a point of view? We define ourselves, stake out our territory, tell the world who we are through our dancing.
When you dance, everything moves. You move, the room moves, the people around you move. Everything shifts and changes, objects move through time and space. Dancing is about understanding one’s place in the world, about gravitation pull, about the space one occupies. It has to do with the earth’s rhythms; it is very primal.
In the Sixties, we started moving away from each other when dancing, started finding our individual places. We no longer viewed ourselves as a unit. The structure went away, and we moved freely. We didn’t always care who our partners were or is we had any; we just wanted to express ourselves in the world.
We stand, we bend, we jump. We are on the floor, in the air. We are free; we are birds; we reinvent ourselves. Dancing is about our physical relationship to the world and each other; it is about life itself.
And so, I must continue in my efforts to be seen and be heard and to stake out my territory in the world. I must always keep dancing.