The very first day that I was home after the club shut down, I was devising a plan for home school with my son who is in PreK. I asked him what they normally do in school on Wednesdays, and he gave me the daily run down.
“Well, Mama, first we have some choice time, then we read a story, then we have a snack, then we go to recess, oh, and today! Today, mama, we have a dance party.”
A dance party? A dance party! We never had dance parties when I was a kid. My heart is singing inside my chest. Does this kid have any idea how very much I LOVE DANCING?
He actually doesn’t, I realize. He’s only known me for a little over five years and for those years, there has been very little dancing. There is fun. There are shenanigans with toys and puppets, but there has been little to no dancing in my life AT ALL for several years now.
Honestly, this is a shame. I’ve been dancing around for as long as I can remember. When other kids were learning sports and getting into trouble, I was most frequently found on my front porch or driveway dancing around to whatever cassette was my favorite. In the winter, I had a patch of floor in the basement where I would rock out on for an hour after dinner. First, it was Flashdance. (Yes, my parents never sheltered me from adult topics. I saw Flashdance when I was 8, strippers and all.) Followed by Footloose. I legitimately thought that everyone danced out their feelings alone like Alex Owens and Ren McCormack. I mean, didn’t they? Didn’t you?
When I was young, I loved dancing alone. It felt great. My mother didn’t enroll me in dance classes. She thought the local studio was overpriced. She had signed me up for ice skating when I was five and I loved the hell out of that. I also think the skating moms were more her speed. So, even my childhood sport was really dance-y. On the ice, my favorite event was music interp, where the object was to improvise your skate to a song that you only got to listen to 3 times before you had to perform to it.
When I was in junior high, developing curves threw off my center of gravity. My skating career stalled out, so I set my sights on the pom pom squad. They got to dance at halftime. I never made the squad. By my third failed audition for poms my freshman year, I gave up my dreams of halftime shows and pleated skirts. Years later, someone on the squad would tell me that I was never picked because I never smiled. (I just couldn’t ditch my angry hip hop face.) By this stage of life, dancing had become a regular part of my daily routine. The Fly Girls were all the rage, and I had plans to become one. I also had girlfriends who would indulge me in making up and practicing routines to Rob Base and DZ EZ Rock. I have fond memories of an exquisite piece of art we made up one summer to Prince’s Batdance.
At age 15, my outlet for dance expression would change when my older girlfriend got her driver’s license, and we had the freedom to go to an under 21 night club in Peoria called Stage 2. For the next three years, we would go there religiously on Saturday nights (Sunday nights in the summertime.) We would vie for prime real estate in the front of the stage on the dance floor and dance our asses off until 10:30pm. My curfew was 11, I think. It was way cooler than being on the pom pom squad. There were kids from all walks of life and they played EVERYTHING (I identified with the alternative grunge set, but don’t think my heart didn’t skip a beat for Motown Philly. It was the best time you could have while being an angsty teenager.
In college, I would go to Theatre School and have some of the best times of my life. I never considered studying dance, because I had discovered a talent for acting and was planning on becoming a serious stage actress. Oh, geez, wasn’t college just the place to be ultra pretentious? I would dance at parties. I took a couple of semesters of dance classes, but alongside the dance majors, I again felt like I wasn’t good enough. This time the feedback was this: you’re emotional life is clear, you’ve got great musicality and creativity, but your technique is a mess and there’s no way we have time to get you up to speed. Okay, then.
It still felt great to sneak off into an open studio or apartment basement and privately dance it out. My senior year, I played a ridiculously underaged Anna in a student produced performance of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This and was given the gift of a “dance it out” moment added to the performance. Phil Ruvelas, I will love you forever for that.
During my professional acting career, I would find myself being the mover or the dancer in shows. I even choreographed a couple of numbers in plays because word got around that I was good at putting together dances for non dancers. Years passed and I got practical, became a Pilates teacher, and my movement practice would take place of actually dancing. Evolving into management, my movement practice has diminished every year. The amount of time I spent enjoying movement up until “The Great Pause” was minimal.
One excuse is busyness, and the confrontation I am currently having with that excuse is coming in an entirely different blog.
The other excuse: unworthiness. I’ve been surrounded for over 15 years by professional dancers. Their gamine figures, their innate coordination and ability to create beautiful shapes in space, and their je ne sais quois garners admiration from all who witness them. I have never danced for anything other than pure recreation. As I have been surrounded by these exquisite creatures over the years, I have devolved into a patron of their art, a fan, a mere mortal whose tools of physical expression feel inferior. With this feeling, I dance less and less. Now, I’m rusty and insecure and a monitor my movements from the outside with a critical eye.
But on Wednesday, March 18th, I danced with my 5 year old son. I made a playlist, we turned it up. I danced and he played and danced. In our first dance party, he mostly wiggled and drove a remote control car into my feet, but I danced. At first, it didn’t feel good. I felt awkward, and I couldn’t figure out what to do with any part of my body. With every song, I loosened up more and more. I began to let myself go, and just as I lept up playfully and dramatically on the sofa, my husband came upstairs.
He said, “Really, Lisa?”
I let myself feel shame for a moment and then I said, “Yes, really.”
I thought to myself, this is the woman that I want my son to know: expressive, fearless, free, and fun.
The next day, when my son and I were planning our schedule for the day, he insisted that we include dance party. He loves this time together. He doesn’t really dance. He’ll wiggle around a little and then engage me in a chase around the dining room table, or we will throw foam rockets at each other, but the whole thing has evolved into something that works for both of us, and it has found a place in our daily routine. Most days our evening schedule goes dinner, digestion rest, dance party, shower, a little bit of nintendo (Daddy is responsible for introducing him to that) and books then sleep. Daddy even joins us for dance party now, and we’ve agreed that this will continue to be our nightly ritual when I return to work.
You see, I have no one to blame but myself for dancing less. I also don’t aspire to do it for others’ entertainment. I am giving myself permission to crank it up and unleash the drama on my living room with reckless abandon.
Everyone should give themselves this permission. There’s a kind of therapy that comes with dancing that you can’t get from talking about what ails you or moving in any other way. There is a reason why people have been doing it since time immemorial. You deserve this kind for connection to yourself and freedom to express yourself as much as anyone else.
Lisa Moves 