The more I dance the more I write

If I could shimmy like my sister Kate


Shake it like jelly on a plate


My mama wanted to know last night


How sister Kate could do it oh so nice


Now, all the boys in the neighborhood


Knew Kate could shimmy, and it's mighty good


I may be late but I'll be up to date

When I can shimmy like my sister Kate.

I mean, shake it like my sister Kate.

Those were the lyrics to my first ecstatic dance.  My dad played blues guitar and sang, and I’d shake and shimmy just as fast and furiously as my little three-year-old booty could across the ice blue carpet of our Florida living room. By the end of a jam session I'd usually ripped off most of my clothes and whirled around and around, my eyes streaming, to collapse in a heap.  This dance had a name.  I called it the widdy-waddy dance.

Since I was clearly not such a ballet type, my mother took me to tap class.  I loved the tah-TAH sounds my shiny Mary Janes made the first time I put them on, and hated the thick white tights that slid down my hips to create an unpleasant basket effect around my crotch during class as the instructor’s grating voice shouted, “shuffle ball change, shuffle ball change".  I crumpled.  We didn't go back.

The funny thing about the shadow, all those parts of ourselves we aren’t comfortable acknowledging, is that we leave our love and passion in the dark as often as we leave our fear and anger.  As Rilke says, “the darkness pulls in everything.”

After that one tap class I decided that I had a secret.  My way of dancing wasn’t o.k. with the rest of the world, so I needed to hide it.  The surest way to hide something is to bury it someplace where you can't even find it yourself, like a squirrel with an acorn.  That's what I did.  I told myself I wasn't interested in dance.  I didn't even like watching it very much.  I would still dance around alone in my room, but that didn't count.  That was silliness.  It wasn't dance.  When I danced in the theater, that was acting.  It wasn't dance.

The acorn stayed buried until I started developing my intuition during a terrible period of writer’s block.

The conversation with myself went something like this:

          "I HAVE to get out of this block.  What can I do?  WHAT?"

           "You are a dancer.  Dance."

           "What?  I'm not."

           "Yes you are."

           "Sure you don't mean that dance will shake me loose-- that's all?"

           "No.  You are a dancer.  It is a part of who you are.  Find it."

           "Really?  If I'm a dancer I'll be able to be a writer?"

           "Yes."

I didn't have anything to lose. I listened to that voice.

Within six weeks of my first epiphany I’d found my teacher, Dunya McPherson, and Dancemeditation.  I watched her dance and thought, ‘That’s it. I can come out now.  Its safe for me.  She's such an amazing dancer, and... she's doing the widdy-waddy dance!  She's moving just how her body wants to move.'  I went on her website and fell in love with her writing too.  Clearly perfect.

The writer's block took time to fully melt away; maybe a year of furious dancing within the healing context of Dancemeditation with its focus on awareness and respect for the body's innate intelligence.

When the block finally melted I thought, 'Well, maybe I got what I needed and now I can stop.'  But of course its not like that.  The more I deepen into dance, the more my writing deepens, the more I deepen.  The body is a doorway to reality beyond the personality, the ego, which can hold us all hostage.  It was my ego telling me I couldn't, shouldn't write.  My ego was telling me to stay small, safe, and to avoid criticism at all cost.

I'm often scared.   Dance is an art form that takes many years and hours to begin to master.  It isn't about steps, its about learning how to move the body with more and more articulation and awareness.  Five years and eighty days to earn my Dancemeditation teacher training certificate and I'm still near the beginning of that journey.  The exciting part is that like studying nature, studying the body from the inside out is also a life's work.

At its core my dance feels strong. The widdy-waddy dance is intact.  Its unfolding with greater variation every time I have an opportunity to learn technique, to discover more ways to move, different ways of seeing, feeling, of being in the world.

Full Egg Moon: What Are You Hatching?

Happy full Moonday!  Today is the first full moon of spring, commonly known as the egg moon, which makes me think: what are you hatching?

The word that keeps coming up for me is freedom.  Several years ago I opened a door to find a man holding a gun an inch from my chest.

After that experience I felt a kind of freedom I'd never had before.   I lost all self-consciousness.  I would wear rainbow socks and sing as loud as I liked.   This faded after awhile, and I've been wanting to get that feeling back ever since without another gun.

Photo by Alan Houghton

On a recent light grey afternoon I went for a walk through the grimer part of my neighborhood on my way to East River Park, down by the Williamsburg Bridge which feels like a forgotten, liminal place.

I had been thinking about my grandparents house, a place I had adored, and how I hadn't gotten to say goodbye to it as the contents were emptied and the house was sold when I was in college.

I was thinking about that and about the movie Up, (which no one had warned me would make fat rivers shoot out of my eyes during the film's first 20 minutes), when I came across a room-sized open metal box.

Inside it was a broken table and chairs, lots of upholstered furniture, chipped odds and ends.  Near the front of the box was an upturned, formidably sized television encased in an an ornate wooden cabinet with drawers.  Upside down it somehow reminded me of Cyclops's eye.

And then there was a old wooden trunk like a treasure chest, big enough to hide in.  Of course I had to open it.  Inside I found yellowed newspapers that happened to be from the year I was born.  There were some electronic parts, and sealed in plastic, a green rafia hula skirt complete with a carved out coconut husk bra.   

The collection as a whole had clearly been the furnishings of someone's life.  I stood back for a moment to witness it fully.  Then I imagined my own apartment inside the box instead.    I picked up the hula skirt.  It weighed almost nothing.  I took it. 

When I got home, I found some hula videos on you tube, put on the skirt (the coconut bra didn't fit, sadly), some rainbow socks, and danced.

In the comments, I'd love it if you'd share what's hatching in your life... what qualities of experience-- adventure, freedom, love, forgiveness, mercy, etc...  And as always, any offerings of art or poetry on this or any theme are greatly appreciated.

Evesdropping at the Theater

I love going to the theater alone because I don't have to wonder whether or not someone else is having a good time, and I get to eavesdrop on strangers. On most recent solo trip to BAM's Next Wave Festival I was typically running late, and didn't have to apologize to anyone as I breathlessly took my seat after sprinting from the subway.  


After the show it was fun to listen to audience reactions without having to participate in the debate myself. I wrote down my thoughts (not what I do when I'm with friends), and was probably clearer in my writing than I would have been if I'd been talking.

The show was In/I, a dance theater piece starring Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan. I loved it. You can read my review here.