Dancing is (not) just dancing
If you hear the word dance you have a box about it.
I also have a box about it.
This box, depending on where you grew up, what music influences you had, or what you saw, contains maybe ballet, folklore, jazz, or hip hop like mine or you think of ballroom, free movement, biodanza, ice skating, and so on.
Whatever you think of, says you have a box about it, certain framed pictures about dance, what you associate with it, how your body moves, etc.
And that’s it. How your body moves shows you how you think, interact with your feelings, and how grounded you can be here on earth. Also, it tells you what beliefs and paradigms you took from your culture, e.g., perfectionism, performance, etc.
When I started dancing, I was 6 years old. I loved tricks and wanted to be a gymnast, but there were no classes for kids in the town where I grew up. However, there was a dance studio. I remember that the reason why my parents were signing me up in the end, was scoliosis in my back.
I am naturally very mobile and flexible, but I was strong, chubby, and not typically ballerina slim.
I remember that in one of my first dance classes, I was first confronted with this thing: „I am not thin. I am not pretty.“ It confused me.
I had a love-hate relationship with my teacher. She was mean, loved concurrence, was intriguing and I could sense that she didn’t like me. I didn’t fit her box.
In one class we were training splits and I was sitting there as if I had never done something else. I saw the surprise in her face which quickly went to ignorance. But I didn’t care.
To have a box, a room where all your conditioning fits in, is normal. What is life threatening though is to be identified with it.
My first years of ballet and jazz dance were hard. I wasn’t chosen to dance good parts or get positive feedback but I stuck around because I loved it.
It kept me alive and I could feel something despite sitting in school.
There were times I spent every day after school in the studio training when we had performances. Due to the training, the technique, and the emotional abuse by my teachers I created a dancer`s deeply insecure box, a strong dancer though but not feeling her body from the inside but driven by unconscious fear.
And I learned colonial dancing. We learned to dance in lines and squares. We develop choreographies. Everything was measured. We stole movements from other cultures without naming the influences. Freedom of movement was tricky.
But in dance, you see how through the years this also broke depending on social or political crises and how people practiced calling back their spirit.
In dance, you practice that without knowing because of the moves, cross-pollination of techniques, people’s drive for healing, ancient Indigenous rituals, and bodywork methods.
And I went there.
I became obsessed with moving my body. After jazz came modern dance. After modern dance came contemporary. The more I got in touch with myself and my body the more it moved me to the floor. I spent years lying and crawling, pushing and pulling myself on and off the floor. I also loved to fly with martial arts and improvisation through the room. And most of my days I spent listening to my pelvis.
After a while, I learned how to feel again. I met a contemporary teacher. Her name was Britta. She offered a healing practitioner movement class. In class, she asked us to stand still and feel the floor, the belly, our sitting bones, and the tailbone. The whole class was about rolling up and down and connecting the bones, standing, lying, sitting, nothing more.
I remember how hard that was. Sometimes, my heart was racing just standing. Sometimes, I got so dizzy I had to lie down and sometimes, I almost threw up, but I came back to class again and again. The more challenging it was for my dancer’s box the more I came back because it nourished something different in me. I started to feel. I could let go of my belly and jaw and the woman in me I suppressed before let a seed free. Suddenly, it was about how I am someone and how I feel.
From that point on, a long journey began where I learned how to express sounds and sighs out of my mouth. I was not a functioning body anymore. And the same way I was conditioned to function in other areas of my life, things started to crumble.
Wishes, wants, and needs came through me I had ignored. I started to become a trained body therapist. I learned how to take back my brain by softening my center and ground.
The more I did that the less patriarchal patterns and beliefs could crowd my brain.
After a while I got stuck with my joy for dancing, injuries came, a pandemic came and as movement is frequency work it was heavier to move. It was not fulfilling me like before.
I was teaching for a long time but every time I went to the dance studio, I got bored.It was a different kind of boring. It was not that one when you just get lazy.It was this kind of feeling of “that`s it, really?”. 8 hours or more a day dancing, on stage or in the studio or teaching, it didn`t matter but still it was not enough. I loved the movements but I was tired of improvisation codes, standing in line, formations, being creative for the next and the next project, endless rehearsals, and diagonals. People judging me. The constant hunt for creative boosts. It was enough: falling into feedback and falling out of them, taking them in, and sometimes throwing them away.
I learned in Marokko to integrate more folklore into my life. Free dancing, including the chakras and much more let me enjoy the fluent energy that could travel through my body now. I enjoyed dancing with other people in one space in synchronicity or pieces.
However, there is a difference between dancing with other women in the space and dancing with women in the space.
In 2024 I met Orly. Orly spends most of her day lying on the floor, moving so slowly, and being with her pelvis, shaking it, circling it, having spiritual practice with it. I saw her piece „Rabia “ and I got hooked.
I met maroccain folklore in 2019 before, but I never saw women dancing and not even mixing it with contemporary, what I had trained.
There was something different about these women.
I, from my side, came from a weird women’s culture in dance where the community between us was fueled by anxiety of the boss bitch teacher feeding us envy, concurrence and intrigues. Later I danced with others and especially other woman but in essence alone. There was something were I could be with my body but also the bond of the women was palpable.
I started a workshop with her. While I was used to be with many different cultures in the studio being with these powerful women from all around the world in the studio was intriguing.
After the end of our workshop Orly came up to me and said:“ Nice to let me finally see your soul.“
I called back my spirit completely. I felt like the longest experiment and research of my life was ending and starting there.
Now I can not move differently anymore.
If someone offers me a box I don’t take it. I shrink it, move it around, poke it a bit.
It is only interesting for me if I can make it through it when dancing.
I give workshops now how to get through the movers box.
All these movements that women were not allowed to do in history.All these instruments there weren`t allowed to use. All these voices that were forbidden to sing. It Doesn`t matter in anymore. It shouldn`t be the chatter in our heads anymore. It should be the floor to dance of from with pride, rabia and juice.
Come join me…
For me it wasn’t about training my body to be somewhere or something. For me it is about discovery. It still is.
Christine
