So, I thought there were rules as to when interpretive dancing could be considered OK.
These include –
A. Your age.
If, Mr T says you should be in school, it is highly appropriate that you express song lyrics in dance moves.
B. Your consumption.
Whatever your poison – if you’re up to your eyeballs in – chances are that you will use your physicality to express a songs’ love / heartache / angst. Or whatever the appropriate emotion begs to be demonstrated.
Or C.
Tim Rogers sings it.
Yet none of these antics were afoot last week when my buddy and I, out late on a school night, followed a line of high pant wearing, bearded and bunned hipsters into a dark room.
And it was, a very dark room.
I was a first time virgin at No lights, No lycra. And as all naive virgins are, I had pretty much no idea what was about to unfold. There were maybe 20 random punters, all in silhouette With even the exit signs shaded, not a face could be seen. Making me forget I was in Torquay on a school night. Taking me back to a time when all A, B and C were a big part of my life.
My buddy said, “See you when the lights come back on,” and veered right off and into the unseen. Leaving me standing alone in the dark at the front door.
It’s an odd feeling. Standing in the blackness with sober silhouettes you don’t know. A heavy bass-line playing to a tune you don’t know. Holding your life together in a shape you don’t know.
So I closed my eyes to make the room darker still.
And I danced.
At first I suppose it’s a big ask to call it dance. Lateral weight shift probably more appropriate. But as the beats became more familiar so too did my body. As it drew me into a space. This long ago familiar space.
This space of myself.
David Lee Roth made me jump so high, I could have blitzed the Toyota commercial. I raged against the machine so loud, I punched my body at the world and told it I wouldn’t do what it told me. Tay-tay made me shake it off so hard, my earrings fell out.
I sweated. I cried. I laughed.
I moved.
Think 5 Rhythms dance, nadi shodhana and savasana.
Sometimes we don’t realise how much we hold in our bodies. That habitual cycles of movement with habitual cycles of being can create unconscious rules we feel we have to follow. Leaving unsaid words that we feel we have to swallow. Unshed tears that we feel we have to hide. Unfelt feelings that we push to the back of our being because we’re too high, or it was too far or it was too soon.
When the lights came on, after an hour of sweating in the room, 20 random silhouettes became humanity. The heavy bass-line steadied to my own heart beat. The shape of my life somehow shifted.
As if to fit me a little better.
Making it easier last night to dance with love for John and Kara to “The whole of the Moon.”
Even though Tim Rogers didn’t sing it. He was too funked up.
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