Dancing Together

I looked so long and tall in the mirror I was beginning to think it was a fun house mirror.  But then, the next time I went to Bellydancing class, and I wasn’t in such a great mood, I looked short and squat.

It was then I decided it must be my frame of mind, not the mirrors that determine how I look.

The full legnth mirrors take up the whole front wall of our new classroom and even after dancing in this new space for a couple of months, they still sometimes confuse me.

Now there are so many more places to look and some much more to see.

We dance six feet apart.  The fitness room in the old factory is sanitized before and after class.    The ceilings are as high as you might imagine in an old factory and the air filtered. There are no more than eight of us there at a time.

When I first went back to class I was surprised at how well I was doing.

Practicing in my studio alone in some ways freed me up.  And in other ways it allowed me to progress unchecked.  Meaning that what I thought I was doing right, I was really doing wrong.

For a few classes, I felt like I was right back at the beginning.

But I’m learning that this feeling, is a part of learning.  Just when I get comfortable with something, there’s something new to learn about it.  And sometimes that makes me feel like I’m not good enough.  But then, it’s also what helps keep it interesting.

It’s not as if I’ll get to a certain point and the be done.   It’s in the doing.

I haven’t written about Bellydancing in a while.  I think like a lot of things during this time, I’ve been just catching up with the new reality of it.

At first, I missed the old space where we used to be able to dance with just an arms-length or so between us.   Now when I think about the senior center where we used to dance, it feels like a flashback in an old WWII movie. The time of innocence from before the war.

It makes me appreciate the women I dance with, our commitment to dance, and each other even more.  As if we survived something together.

Today in class we’ll be Dancing In The Flow.  This is a whole class of just dancing, no lessons, not even any talking, just dancing.  I texted my teacher Julz a song by Rachid Taha called Wahdi that I found I like dancing to in my studio.

She wrote back that she and Kathleen, my other teacher, danced to it and loved it.  Julz will put it into the play list for Dancing In The Flow  tonight.

That felt really good to me.

This song is new to Julz who listens to music all the time and knows it so well. I like being able to bring something new to the class.  It’s another way of  showing up.  And I can’t wait to dance to Wahdi with everyone else.

 

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