Sage and center

A lesson learned dancing

Since I was fourteen I have danced almost every week. It began at Madrona Mindbody in my native Port Townsend, a Soul motion community, free for any under the age of eighteen. Later when I came to college I found the Dance Co-op here, Five rhythms from which Soul motion sprung. Every week I dance. A practice unbroken.

In the soul motion space there was a boy, Sage,  and his father who used to come. Pale, pale blond hair, and a curled lip that looked pulled up in a permanent contortion, Sage was not like other boys. I was later told he was autistic, although not in the way I’m used to thinking of autistic. He couldn’t speak, sat only when his father told him to, mind in some other world.

His heart was here though. Each Sunday morning as the music began to play he would charge down into the space and then stand rocking, sometimes he would make a low happy gurgling. Slowly he would calm down, and just stand sometimes obsessively rubbing his hands or his feet together. Sometimes swaying slightly with the music.

I was a little off-put at first, fascinated, unsure, but as each week he continued to come I grew used to him, and even began to enjoy him. As we danced he would come to certain people and put his hand on some part of their body - often shoulder or back - and just stand there.

It was on the fifth or sixth week that he first came up to me, touched me, and stood. I turned to dance with him, include him in my dance, but he walked away. That’s when I really began watching.

Sage was fascinated by certain dances - the dancers who I could see where holding something special, dancing some emotion or power. When he came up to someone and they stopped, lost their dance and changed to another, he lost interest. A few would continue to dance their dance and he would stay.

So the next time Sage came, I didn’t stop dancing, it’s hard to keep your dance, especially my dance that spins and moves about, when someone is standing there touching you. After a moment I would feel the dance begin to go and Sage feeling it would move away.

I never fully mastered the art of keeping Sage, but in my dance practice since then, I have always remembered him. My tendency when someone comes near and wants to dance is to switch tracks, to flow into their dance and abandon my own. At the same time when I approach another to dance, I’m always surprised when they flow into mine.

Slowly I’ve come to realize that if they come to me there is something about my dance that attracts them - if I come to them there is something about their dance that draws me - and neither need change. The most beautiful dances are when two people, centered in themselves, can dance their own dance together, two parts making something greater than a whole.

Slowly I’ve come to realize that when I change my dance, the forces of nature lose interest. The beautiful women and Autistic boys have some innate sense of my center and respond to it even as I discover it. To keep them I have to dance my own dance.

***********

It’s a Wednesday and the pattern of the day is bleak. I woke  late but determined to get everything done today, ate breakfast, checked my computer and headed out into the rain. A facebook video - police officers giving presents to people they pulled over - was making me inexplicably happy, and walking rather than riding my bike I was able to pick up litter and enjoy the rain rather than squint my way through it - Suddenly I found myself full of joy.

But then as I came to metal shop I found it closed, my plans to finish my sword poofed and a little joy faded. Back to the computer lab I reread all the ethnobotany homework due tomorrow and a bleakness came on, harder for having surpassed the joy. I worked a while, went home, tried to work longer as my eyes hazed my brain went numb. I don’t like research papers.

Finally evening, I head off to dance. I go put my things in the corner and a girl I don't know smiles at me - that knowing smile of a shared experience - and I remember that I DJd last week and she recognizes me. The Joy rises, I expect it to echo the morning. I enjoy it while I can.

I change and come in to the dance, eyes slowly adjusting to the dim. This dance is different from Madrona. We're all young, and dancing with one another is a little more dangerous than dancing with old ladies as I had been accustomed. We're all young and any attempt to dance might be interpreted as a come on, a sexualization of a place that is to be safe. So I don’t dance duo, I try not to be overt, dance is inherently erotic for me, but I hold it in my own dance, alternating between soul motion’s dance intimate - dancing with yourself, and dance collective - dancing with the entire group.

There are people though, who dance beautifully, dance some power or energy that Sage would have come up and touched. People who I want to be close to, want desperately to share their dance with mine - people who I want to go up and touch.

I don't, but in every subtle way I know, I try and communicate allure - in every way until I fear I'm being blatant, until I feel I'm being male and boorish and back off. Tonight there are two, Fire and one who I think goes by Rachel these days. As I dance I'm aware of their presences in the room, I try not to watch them or echo, I try to focus on my own dance.

And then as I finally find my center, as my body begins to relax into dance, Rachel will walk by - closer than you'd expect? Did she just circle me? - I'll echo, let her know if she’s looking that she’s been seen, that if she should want to dance I’m here, and then she’s off - gone, and I'm left aware of her exact location in the room.

Back to my dance, and Flame will curl near, flashing a smile, off again. I could follow, I could bend into her dance, but I can't, not really. Like Sage she’d sense. I have to be centered.

This night’s DJ is a Five rhythms teacher, and he pauses us, asks us to breath. Soul motion did this every week, and I forget how much I miss it until I have it again. He tells us to focus on a part of my body that calls. I sink into my center, on a male body a little above the bellybutton, and breath.

The music begins again. I keep moving my center, moving from my center. Hips, torso - they play back and forth balancing with balance, and with this man who’s spent years learning how to hold a dance I feel safe, I feel held.

Rachel comes around, I find what movements in my body, in my dance compliment hers. Flame comes by and even as I draw off of her, a leg here, a gesture there, I keep moving from my center - keep my energy, my dance.

And maybe she stays a little longer. Maybe not pressured to dance, not pushed by my change into something other than her dance, it’s okay to be near me. Maybe even with my dance centered and whole, holding an energy that doesn’t falter from her presence - like Sage she’ll come touch.

and beautifully, held here by a five rhythms teacher, dancing from my center, I don’t become frustrated, and it’s okay that she doesn’t, somehow, inexplicably, the joy remains.

********************

Last week, when I got to hold the space, I got to overhear the dance Co-op board discussing their intentions for the space. They talked a little about keeping this a safe space, making sure no one felt sexualized, bullied into dancing, or even looked at in the wrong way. One young man suggested that this be a rule of the space - I was glad to hear others speak against it. I miss partner dancing, miss the intimacy of a shared dance in every smile. I miss the ways I do change against another - not taking their dance, but expanding my own.

At the same time I understand. At soul motion the year and a half before I left for college, there was a woman - Poppy - who wanted to dance with me. I don’t know what it was about her, but she freaked me out. She looked a little like a troll, and danced with everyone. She worked with crystals and was always sending energy people’s way -  and when she got near me it felt like there were cold clammy fingers caressing my body.

She tried to dance with me, I danced away. She followed me, I kept dancing away. For weeks She would seek me out and I would dance on the opposite side of the room. Then she started trying to send energy to me - from across the room she’d stare at me and cup her hands as if filling them with water to splash my way. I put up every shield I knew how. Imagining walls of fire between me and her. she kept doing it.

I thought about telling her to stop but I didn’t want to talk to her. After dance she would sometimes come up and say “I love your scarf - where did you get it?”
and I would say “Thank you. - Birthday gift.” as coldly as I could and walk off.

Finally she came up behind me and touched me. “Tickle tickle tickle - the fairies are tickling you!” She said. I growled, loud, in her face - and walked off. She didn’t bother me after that.

It was during that time that I began to realize that maybe some people don’t want to dance - and maybe it’s sometimes hard to tell - and while I’d like to think that I’d be a little more receptive to someone dancing “no” as much as I had, maybe not, and I had been pursuing Isabelle for two years now - and maybe this was how she felt?

I decided then, not to pursue. I decided that if anyone wanted to dance they would come to me.

But that’s not really fair, and it’s the masculine role to pursue. To let them come to me, to always be dancing in my center hoping that like Sage they’ll come, may just mean that I dance alone. Perhaps it’s better than being Poppy, but it’s not better than having a dance floor full of friends. So I echo, and sometimes meet eyes, and hope to the gods that I’m not making anyone uncomfortable being near me.

I don’t know. Women are unreadable creatures, bizarre machinations of life - acting under no discernible laws of nature - laws of nature in of themselves. All I can do in the face of the wind is hold steady, take my sword in hand and dance, and if the wind sometimes gives direction, the blade moves from my center.