About 100 years ago, I was a dancer. I studied ballet and jazz dancing. Loved it. LOVED IT. Lived for it, every single minute of the day and night.
I discovered dance at 19, late for a dancer. I had always danced in school and in plays and in everything that I could dance in. I started working for a dance studio because I thought I could combine work with something I loved.
Dance took over my life. I studied as much as I could at the studio. I was even told that, if I had started as a child, I would have had a career in dance. Of course, at 19, this was not going to happen. And this was back in the stone age, when there wasn’t MTV and music videos and all that stuff. If you were a dancer, you went to Toronto or New York, you didn’t stay in Winnipeg. I accepted my limitations but thought I would go on to teach, maybe run my own studio one day.
My first ex kind of supported this, but he always made me feel bad about dancing. He came to a show I was dancing in and watched me warm up on my pointe shoes before the show and commented to a friend – “And she wonders why I won’t dance with her.” Suddenly, my passion was wrong, was bad because it made him feel less.
I kept dancing, though, going out to clubs with my best friend because he didn’t like to go out dancing. She and I would close down the clubs, dancing more than drinking. I loved it. It was the early ‘80s and the music, at least the dance music, was pretty good, or so it seemed.
When my ex decided that a younger woman was what he needed (I was a whole 24 years old at the time), I decided to move to L.A,, figuring I could dance here, I could act here, I could do all that I wanted to here. But when I danced, I kept hearing his voice and feeling his seemingly disappointment at my gift. I kept up classes for a while and even did a show or two where I was hired as a dancer. But associating that gift with his disapproval took away the joy I felt in the gift and, slowly but surely, I gave it up.
I only danced at weddings and social events and even that was rare. My new husband didn’t really dance and hated clubs, although, ironically, we went dancing on our first date. Over the years, I danced less and less, even at weddings, even at social events. It got to the point where I never danced at all anymore, even around the house. Dancing felt foolish and frivolous, unnecessary and trivial. I lost the rhythm of something that had been so important to my life.
Then, in November, I was in Las Vegas with the ever-spontaneous Chairman. We went to a club as part of our debaucherous weekend. I couldn’t remember the last time I had gone dancing and couldn’t even figure out how to dance to hip-hop or other music I had been hearing more and more over the years. Undeterred, Chairman and I hit the dance floor with enthusiasm. I have always admired Chairman’s freedom and joy with everything creative that he tackles. And he tackled the dance floor with the same abandonment I always loved about him.
I found myself letting go, ignoring the critic in my head that cautioned me about not being familiar with the music, not being current and “hip” and not knowing how to move. The critic that told me it had been so long since I danced that I couldn’t possibly remember how to do it anymore. And you know what? I didn’t care. It felt so free, so great, so wonderful to just let loose and listen to the rhythm and let my body move to its own groove, whether it was “right” or not. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the sea of bodies around me and the sense of sound and light and noise and just danced. I can’t remember when I enjoyed being on a dance floor that much. And Chairman’s smiling face, encouraging this abandonment, just fed that pleasure.
In that night, I found another piece of myself that I had sacrificed so long ago. I gave up one of the greatest passions in my life because one of the greatest passions in my life somehow didn’t appreciate it in me. So, because he didn’t appreciate it, I felt I wasn’t worthy to have that gift and I let it go. It broke my heart. And it took a gin-soaked night in a Las Vegas club to find that joy in that long-dormant gift I used to have. Granted, I’m not the dancer I once was but I didn’t care.
And I look at the relationship that just ended and I realize how many times I came close to letting go of my gifts of writing and directing because they somehow made him feel less than. My success, my joy, my discovery of these gifts somehow drove a wedge between us because it was something he could not control. And I almost gave it all up. I almost buried the thing that gave me the absolute most pleasure and joy in my life because of a man who couldn’t share that with me.
I still twitch when I watch any type of dancing – on stage, in movies (watching “All That Jazz” tonight brought all of this back to me). I long to be able to get back up there and arabesque and jette and all that jazz again. Hard to do at my age so I guess I have to find some other way to feed that now-awakened desire. Country line dancing? Organic belly-dancing at the studio near my place?
I just know that, for more than an hour in an unknown club in Vegas, I found the 24-year-old left behind so long and found the passion and the sheer, pure joy that that young woman felt when she was allowed to just be, to just dance, to just live. And I never, ever want to let that feeling go, let that feeling get buried again. Because nothing and nobody is worth giving that much up for.
