Being right versus feeling good with the body

I'm taking dance classes at Alvin Ailey

I have mentioned in a previous post that I started taking a dance class. I told myself this was for me and that I wasn’t going to write about this hobby. But, best laid plans and all of that.

Mondays there’s a contemporary class I enjoy and Tuesdays there’s jazz. For three weeks out of the month, I’m able to make it to either a jazz or contemporary class and let loose. I haven’t taken an official dance class since my freshman year of high school. I took Zumba classes throughout the pandemic, but any Zumba or dance instructor will tell you that Zumba is not dance and vice versa. I knew this intuitively but figured one could help with the other. And, like most things, those plans went to the garbage can the second I walked into my first class.

I signed up for a beginner jazz class, hoping that I could at least keep up even if I am not naturally good at dance. In any dance setting, I’ve always felt awkward and self-conscious. My limbs don’t move the way I expect them to. I feel like I can’t fit in and emulate what I’m seeing. I am always too conscious of where my body is and not in the ways dancers are spatially aware. Dancers can fill even a small corner with their movement. I wanted to fade into the crowd using the movements around me. Even when I was taking dance as a kid, I was more concerned about looking like the teacher, my classmates, or my perception of a dancer.

But that was also how I wrote, too. This seems like a tangent but stay with me for a moment. My first creative writing class was a summer poetry course I took junior year of high school. The senior-year English teacher, also a poet in his out-of-school life, taught a small workshop for a week. The class consisted of me and my friend group, the only students nerdy enough to take more English classes during the summer. But, that summer I learned the issue with my writing, creative and not, was a desire to please and perform to expectations. I wrote the poems I thought my teacher wanted to see. I wrote essays I thought should be written. My teacher would comment that I could replicate the rhyme scheme or rhythms we were given but they still felt stilted and distant. That summer I eventually found my voice and words once I started digging into my feelings and looking for the words to pin them down.

As a beginner dancer I am struggling to dig and find the connection between my feelings and the movements in front of me. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think about my body filling up more space than the thin athletic bodies in my class. Dancers who are not beginners like me and get called to the front of the class to demo by the teacher. Other times I look down and the instructor exclaims for me to lift my head and not scowl as I dance. Most times I’m looking for the girl who gets the moves faster than I do so I can see how she transitions from one move to the next. But I never want to see myself dance.

But last Monday there was a breakthrough. We were dancing to “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims. I decided to challenge myself. I wouldn’t look to other classmates. I would only be allowed to look to the instructor to learn the moves and then at myself. So, when I stumbled or made the wrong step, I committed. I could feel and see where I made mistakes and then correct them. I knew this change would help the choreography settle in my muscle memory faster. But I didn’t realize it would also force me to look inward. Pun intended, listening to the song 3,4,5 times as we learned the choreography, the lyrics started to take a hold of me. I was able to, for a moment, make those moves feel right in my body.

Even if I couldn’t see the effect of these choices, my instructor could and commented at the end that she saw improvement over the past few classes. And so, like the writer I am, I am thinking about other places where I can move from wanting to be right versus feeling in tune with my body. Every Black feminist writer I love talks about this and I can never understand this sensory, body knowledge they refer to. This idea probably has a lot of crossover with my interests in friendship and Black women’s systems of knowledge. Ultimately, I think dance is starting to unlock this knowledge in me, which is why I had to break the rules and write about dance.