That Connection I Feel With The Women I Dance With

We were dancing in a trio,  Emily, Callie and me.  Julz our teacher was watching and as she often does, dancing along with us in her mind.

I came into the lead  and at a certain moment in the song, I hear Julz quietly say “now”.   The thought to do a complicated move that I’m not very good at came into my mind.  I wanted to do it, but didn’t know how to signal to Emily and Callie that I was going to do it.  I wasn’t even completely sure how to do it.  But I knew it would have been perfect for that moment in the song.

ATS, the kind of Bellydancing  we do, is improv.  So when someone chooses to step into the lead,  they have to be clear in signaling the move they are going to do and do it well enough so the other dancers can follow.

When the song ended and we talked about how we danced, I found  that Julz had been thinking about the same move I was when I heard her say “now.”  “It was like telepathy,” I told her.  I could see the move in my mind, but I didn’t have the confidence to do it.

The next day Emily emailed all of us the article in the NY Times You Think, So You Can Dance? Science Is on It by Margaret Fuhrer.  It’s about the neuroscience of Dance.

“The idea of dance as something primal and elemental, hard wired into brains, will ring true to dancers-or anyone who has had a transcendent experience on the dance floor.  Neuroscience has even begun to explain one of the most spiritual aspects of dance: it’s ability to create a sense of connection within a group.”  Fuhrer writes.

Researchers have found that  many different parts of the brain are activated when we dance,  “sensory, motor, cognitive, social, emotional, rhythmic, creative” and they are all communicating with each other.  When people are dancing together the brain patterns of the individual dancers begin to “sync up“.

This suggests,  Fuhrer writes, that dance may be creating connections “not just with, but also between our brains”.  Researcher and dancer Julia C Basso has been discussing the possibility that it may even help us get along better with others.

A few weeks ago our dance group had our annual dinner.  This year we met at Julz’s house and as always, everyone brought something to eat.  We had dinner then sat around in the back yard talking.

There are eight of us and the thing that brings us all together is dance. We don’t get to talk to each other much, just a few minutes before and after class.  Some of us have similarities in out lives that overlap and we get together outside of class.   But except for dance, we all lead lives that are more different than they are similar.

Yet as we sat in a circle, talking in Julz’s backyard,  each of us listening without interrupting, interested and curious about each, I felt a level of comfort that was new to me when in a group of people this size.

I have always thought that the care we show for one another comes from the need of each other to dance.  We can’t do the kind of dancing we do alone.  But for a long time, I’ve also felt a connection between us that I couldn’t explain  with words.

This morning as I sat on the back porch drinking a cup of tea, I watched a flock of blackbirds swoop through my field of vision between the apple and paper birch trees.  Their flight looked like a dance, as each body moves at the same speed and turns at the same moment, altering the shape their individual bodies create together.

That kind of un-choreographed timing and precision of movement is something we strive for in my Bellydancing class.  We even call it “flock of birds”.

It’s not as if me and the women I dance with were friends who came together to dance.  Our relationship to each other was formed through dance.

So it makes sense to me that the ineffable feeling, which I experience while dancing, but also during that annual dinner  is just what Basso is finding in her research.

Not that I needed science to prove what I’m feeling, but I have been curious about it.  And as Scientist and Dancer Elinor Harrison says in the article, “It’s the science justifying this embodied knowledge dancers have.”