Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash
I took my first belly dancing class when I moved from Scotland to Louisiana, to start a job teaching Modernism. I knew no one in Shreveport, so I would have to put myself out there, to make friends. My wheelhouse is taking classes, and a dance class appealed to me as I’ve always loved dancing, even though I’m not that great.
I’m not the absolute worst. I took a lot of dance classes as a child, so I have some muscle memory (what to do with your hands, etc.), but I’m not built to be a dancer. I’m built to grind a grain, or pull a plow, or maybe lift a recalcitrant sheep and put it back down a few feet away. My legs are very strong, but they are the exact shape of an emoji chicken drumstick. My torso is long, and my arms are also short. I’m basically a corgi, that can stand upright.
Indeed, it was made very clear to me, at a very young age, that I would never be “a dancer.” My very aspirationally middle class mother put me in all the things she thought a middle-class, white, assigned-female-at-birth child would need to cement her place in the hegemony. I took piano and violin lessons (Suzuki, of course), and gymnastics at our local gym, and dance lessons at the Bonnie Ardelean School of Dance.
I hated piano (although I can still bang out the chorus to “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho”) and I *really* hated violin, but I did like gymnastics, and I really, really loved to dance. I loved the sequins and the tights, and the leotards (to this day I love a tight outfit, drumsticks and all), and I loved being in a class with a room full of people all moving together.
And it was great when I was very young. We were a bunch of kids who couldn’t quite figure out how their limbs worked, wiping our noses on our leotards and crashing into each other on turns. It was heaven. Plus the teachers were wonderful! I adored my ballet teacher, a lovely, red-headed woman who was gentle and kind, and who would escort us patiently through our movements.
As I got a bit older, I finagled my way out of violin and piano, and gymnastics fell by the wayside, but dance stuck. I kept at it because I loved it.
But I very quickly “aged out” of dancing. I’m not sure how old I was when I took my last dance class at Bonnie Ardelean’s, but I’m thinking maybe I was 10 or 11? And I didn’t quit because I wanted to. I quit because it was made very clear to me that I’d never become a “real” dancer, and basically, as a child, I ran out of classes I could take. At a certain age, you were either tracked into the advanced classes (for girls whose legs were not drumstick emojis), or you quit. I could probably have continued bopping about with the toddlers, but that wasn’t really an option.
This makes me so sad in retrospect, and I think it’s something we get sensationally wrong in American culture. We absolutely shit on hobbies. I adored the book by Oliver Burkman, 4,000 Weeks, and he has a great section about how capitalism has ruined non-productivity based activities. For example, we no longer crochet without being encouraged to monetize our “product” on Etsy, nor move our bodies unless we’re “training” for something. For me, Bonnie Ardelean’s was a really early inculcation into this cult of productivity: I would never be a truly good dancer, so I should no longer dance. C’est fin.
But when I moved to Shreveport, I joined a belly dancing class because I wanted to move my body, and be in community (especially with other women). Furthermore, as Saint Penny says, “God wouldn’t have given you maracas if he didn’t want you to shake them.”
I have maracas. I wanted to shake them.
And shake them I did! So badly! For years, first in Shreveport and then in Greensburg, where my next job was located. Before I bought my house in Pittsburgh, I lived near the college, where I took belly dancing lessons in what was normally a pole dancing studio. We’d shimmy around the poles, and try on the lucite practice heels, and if I got there early I’d take a swing around the pole (when I learned the hard way about stripper bruises—they are no joke, y’all).
Then I moved to Pittsburgh and took MORE classes in a place full of poles (this was the early 2010s, when Pole Dancing was REALLY IN, at least in NW PA?), and then finally I met my current teacher and friend, Jennifer (who you should hire for an event or take class from).
I danced with her for years, before the pandemic. And I jumped at the chance to dance with her again, in her first class since, that just started.
It was so great to get into a (pole-free!) studio again! I’m still not a good dancer, but I have missed dancing so much. It is so lovely to meet new people, and to see people who are a little scared be very brave, and to see all the different bodies, of all different ages, moving together in a room where we’re encouraged to be “juicy.”
And something Jennifer talked about this time really stuck. It was something she’s probably said dozens of times before in my presence, but for some reason I actually heard it this time. She talked about how this dance (and all dance) is about owning your space. About knowing your power, and expressing your heart.
Think about that, for a second. For a room full of women who have probably all been force fed the idea that the goal is to take up less space—to be quiet, to be demure, to be thin, to be normal—instead to be encouraged to reach inside themselves and pull out not the heroin chic waifs of our childhood but someone “juicy”. Someone big, and confident. Someone who shakes their maracas because that’s what they’re there for, and they’re ours, rather than anybody else’s.
It’s fucking awesome.
It’s not about being perfect, or beautiful, or even particularly good. It’s about being. It’s about acknowledging the gift that is mobility, that is strength, that is having a body that moves (something we should not take for granted!). In movement, we can honor that which has been so often abused, by ourselves, and others. In dance, we can stamp out our stress and our shame, drowning out those voices that tell us we should be small.
Fuck small. And fuck everyone who says doing something imperfectly is a waste of time.
In fact, here’s a good challenge for 2024: do something you enjoy, really badly. Embroider some absolutely wobbly-ass shit. Build a wonky fucking chair. Get an anorak and become a trainspotter. Collect stamps! Take the horse back riding lessons you never got as a child. Learn to make music with water glasses, like in that movie with Sandra Bullock where she plays an FBI agent who has to go undercover as a beauty pageant contestant which is HILARIOUS because everyone think she’s ugly because she doesn’t comb her hair and then she combs her hair and everyone’s like OMG YOU’RE HOT WE WANT TO BONE YOU.
Anyway, no one has to be hot, doing their new hobby. You can be positively scabrous. What matters is you’re having fun and you’re honoring our right to be in a culture that tells us we’re only worthy if we’re productive.
So let’s all just be a little, in 2024. Cheers to being!
How do you manage to be so funny and so true at the same time? I imagined a standing up corgi with drumstick emoji legs shaking a pair of maracas and lost it.
I want to do things just because I love them. Not make every hobby I have a side hustle. And do things just for myself (like not post my drawings on Instagram).
I took ballet as a child and loved it, but was told that I should take modern dance instead - code for "you're not graceful."
i loved your post on dancing. We all have our own way of seeking our true identity. Now that i have found the real me, am i too old to be me? in writing i can ride horses better than i ever could, certainly train them better. I still have the courage to bring down an escaping sheep and hold it till help arrives. Or react in an emergency. Dancing maybe not, but there are a world of other possibilities where i am my only critic.