Dancing your way to freedom

When I was 13, I was cast as the lead in the school musical. I was pudgy with adolescence, right in that moment where grown men could start to pretend that they thought I was 18 or 19. It was a lie then as it is now, we convinced ourselves that we really did look older, the men couldn’t be blamed, our burgeoning identity as sexual beings was not something they could be expected to ignore.

I know better now when I look at the pictures. My face was a child’s face, rounded cheeks and confused chin.

The director of the play called me in around lunchtime to speak with him in the theater, shortly after the casting decision had been announced. I was giddy with excitement. I had wanted to be an actress since I was four years old. At five, I tagged along with my mother and brother to auditions for a community musical, only to be turned down and told that the minimum age was 8.

He told me that he wanted me to lose some weight before the performance, which would be several months away. Fifteen pounds or so, he said, he thought that would be good. That number is burned into my memory.

He told me the dance teacher, a tall, thick-thighed Black woman with impeccable grace and style, would be speaking to me about the proposed diet and fitness plan to get me into shape for the performance.

She never did. I can only assume that she had nodded and was mentally telling him to go fuck himself. Only now with my adult perspective do I know how the conversation probably went.

I didn’t lose any weight. I remember thinking, fuck you, don’t cast me because you know I’m the best there is and then tell me I’m not good enough. This is a middle school play. I’m in 8th grade. Relax.

I’d never met anyone like the dance teacher. She wasn’t skinny, but she was elegant and incredibly strong. She wore leggings everywhere with slouchy sweatshirts over sports bras. She seemed utterly at home in her body. She was mesmerizing. She seemed like the kind of person that lived in New York City. I have no idea where she was from, but in my mind, she was the first real New Yorker I’d met.

I don’t remember her name, but I remember taking her class a few years later. She made me feel like there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. Just her existence made me feel beautiful. At the year-end recital many of my relatives came to watch. My performance was a solo piece set to a Tori Amos song. I don’t think they liked it. I was trying to be avant-garde. I was the quintessential tortured teenager. I didn’t want to do things that were pretty or cute. I remember hearing adults rave about the one girl in our class who looked like a “real” dancer. She had trained as a child in the US. How she looked was unattainable.

I didn’t dance again for many years after high school, except on occasion in sweaty clubs or in the driver’s seat of my car with the windows rolled up. Not until I was over 30, and I started going to a women-only dance party in DC where we’d turn off the lights, turn up the music and not speak to each other for an hour. I started taking African Dance at a black-owned studio in Brookland called Dance Place.

The class was women from 18–60. Some were old and wiry. Many were fat, maybe not like me, but not skinny either. Most were Black. I reached a kind of physical ecstasy in that class. Where your face hurts from smiling, you lose your inhibition. It doesn’t matter if you’re no good. What matters is you’re moving, you feel the drums in your bones, the sweat pools inside your bra, your eyes are hot with tears of joy.

I don’t know why the clean mandates of white femininity want to deprive us of this, messy, jiggly, sweaty, primal joy of dance, but even a lifetime of being steeped in it didn’t totally work on me. I can still feel that freedom, somewhere in there.