Saturday, January 30, 2010

Would you like to Dance?

Because I do. Like to dance, that is.

I'm taking a formal dance class for the first time in my life. It's introductory social dance, and the number is Dance 180, which I like because it reminds me of 180°, whi
ch in turn reminds me of Poetry 180, the collection which moved me from reading poetry to writing poetry.

Dancing itself reminds me of the Indian weddings in California where I first learned the rythyms and movements of Bhangra, and of the times in my childhood when someone would just turn on some music and before you knew it the whole family was there, in the living room, dancing like crazy, throwing our arms and legs all over the place. From a technical perspective, none of us were very good, but when the music moves through you that doesn't matter.



Dancing reminds me of the night I got back from a Model UN conference and went straight to a concert, and ended up dancing all night long in my three piece suit. It reminds me of last night, when I went through the same foxtrot steps again and again, trying to make the movements part of me, trying to make them even more fluid and natural than my daily walk.

It reminds me of my friend J, who once told me that he does ballroom dance because "there are two kinds of contact sports, and really, which is better, the ones where it's me and twenty other sweaty guys, or the one where it's me and one beautiful girl?"

The thing about dance is that it takes your whole body and heart and mind, and when you're willing to put it all in it's magic, and when you're not it's nothing.

I love to dance.

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