There are days when I long to bring it all back. To live in tights and bare feet, to move and work my body in odd ways until my muscles ache. To feel the euphoric sense of open space waiting to be molded and designed by shapes that consist of arms and torsos and legs. To be in a room with people I hardly know, and yet to feel that we have been in that room together our entire lives. The whole of our existence is the wooden floor pressing against our toes, the reflection of bodies in the large mirrors on the wall, as we pull and stretch out our fingertips beyond their natural extension.
Energy grows and builds with each exercise as our bodies push outward what comes from inside. Even simple plie-releves are laced with tension and release. It is the whole body that breathes and not just the lungs. Motion and momentum gather as we cross from one end of the room, to the other. I take a deep breath. The music pulses and sways, and my body follows suit.
Dance is my passion. Some of my earliest memories involve dance. I had my first lesson when I was three years-old. It was held in a large gymnasium. I was frustrated because we were learning to skip and I could not do it. I could only gallop. My young legs could not grasp the concept of pulling up only one knee at a time as I hopped, before landing and lifting up the other. I went home and practiced in our living room, one moment being elated because I thought I had achieved the skip only to realize I had fallen back into the up-up of the gallop.
I continued to take gymnastic and ballet lesson up until high school where I tried out for and made the modern dance company. I fell in love with modern dance. I loved the freedom of movement that we were allowed and the emotion that could be portrayed. I loved the camaraderie that took place at rehearsals that went from 2:30 pm to midnight the week before a concert. I loved the rush of feeling completely alive as I moved through the space having an experience that, at the same time, felt totally surreal.
I don’t dance now. I did study it; I was a dance major. Was. Do I still have the right to claim dance as my passion when obviously it didn’t win out amongst a myriad of options I had to choose from? The closest I get to dance now is the occasional concert. For awhile, living close to where I went to school, I would sneak into a dance studio at my university instead of taking my evening jog around the track. And then I didn’t even do that anymore. It has been twelve years since I was a dancer. Twelve years! I stop to look back–I can’t believe I’ve actually gone that long without a regular technique class, without rehearsals and performances. How could I have filled up that time so easily? There were entire days, weeks even, when I lived in a leotard.
I left school after my sophomore year for a time. I was not in a place where I had the opportunity to dance. As the days went by I remember watching my dancer’s body slowly seeping through the cracks. My alignment and posture, the complete flexibility, my technical feats were becoming things of the past. By the time I returned to school I knew that what I wanted to accomplish as a dancer would never work with what I wanted to accomplish as a person. My flaw was there. Maybe it was wrong to differentiate between the dancer and myself. If I never could have seen myself without dance, I probably wouldn’t have ever been without it. It can be disturbing to look back and see your passion left on the cutting board, or in my case on the black marley floor. But I guess there are times when we have to give up a dream for other dreams that need to become our own.
A few years after returning to school while walking across campus I heard a beat, music. It was familiar. I looked to where the sound was drifting from to see human forms moving simultaneous–rows of bodies pushing across the space. They were dancers in street clothes and a middle-aged black man with no hair was leading and clapping them across the grass through the shards of late morning sunlight that was passing through the leaves of the surrounding trees.
I fell enchanted by the motion and the rhythm. They penetrated into my body, piercing and reminding me that I should be out there, that I could be. I felt a longing and a homesickness as I watched, as I wanted to join in, to move with them, more that anything. But as I stood there, lost in their movements I realized that a part of me was out there with them. It was an odd sensation of participation in an event that required a body, even though my body wasn’t there. I knew then that although I may never take another technique class, I may never again feel that thrill of standing on stage before an audience of hundreds, that I will always be one who moves to music, whose heart is syncopated by the drum beat, whose senses get lost in a whirl of muscle twisting and stretching and pulling grace our from the pockets of the air. I will always be a dancer.