From age five to age 17, I took dance classes after school at least two days a week. Even as homework and sports and going to the beach with my friends started vying for more of my time, I continued to wiggle into tights and a leotard every Monday and Wednesday with just enough time to make it to Virginia Dell for 6:15pm ballet, tap and/or jazz, depending on the year.
Admittedly, the older I got, the more likely it was that I’d go straight from the beach to the studio with salt in my hair and do a quick change in the closet just before class started, but the point is I always made it. For those of you who’ve only known me as an adult, this probably comes as a huge surprise. Not the fact that I over-scheduled myself from a young age but that I was, for several years, a ballerina.
If you’ve seen me simply attempt to walk, you know I’m a distinctly uncoordinated individual. I trip over myself and any inanimate object, real or imaginary, in my path. My legs have semi-permanent bruises, and my most recent major injury came from sleeping on a plane. All of that to say, no, I was not a very good or graceful ballerina.
Even from a young age, I wasn’t prepared for the part. For starters, I didn’t like wearing pink or being girly. I enjoyed the stage and performing, but after my first recital, I remember standing in the dressing room with my mom trying to scrub the makeup off my face. As I looked at myself in the bulb-framed vanity mirror, resembling a raccoon now more than one of the children in The King & I, I asked my mom why women do this every day. But I kept doing it for years, well past the time that I realized I’d never be a prima ballerina or a Rockette.
When I was in middle school, I remember getting in a fight because a classmate said dance wasn’t a sport. That made no sense to me. Sure, it’s artful, but how could something that causes me to sweat and blister and develop muscular tone not be a sport? How could women who hide their broken toes behind tape and a stiff smile not be athletes?
It takes a very specific kind of strength to keep moving and smiling through injuries, which every dancer I know has done. And unlike other athletic endeavors, you don’t get to swear or sit on the bench when things go wrong. How could you when the show must go on? Looking at it now, I realize it’s probably the best training a young woman can get for society and its expectations for women—no matter what happens, we’re first and foremost expected to smile.
I was reminded of my dance days recently at The Class. If you’ve never been, it’s a workout class by Taryn Toomey that takes a typical bootcamp setup and extends every activity beyond what you reasonably thought you could do prior. So you’ll do a round of burpees or some other sort of cardio and then hold a bridge pose well past the point of exhaustion. But through the pain, you don’t have to smile. You get to scream. In fact, you’re encouraged to. So it’s no surprise that these female-dominated classes tend to feel like training for Xena Warrior Princess.
One of my favorite parts of The Class, other than it’s the best place in New York to scream right after the top of the Williamsburg Bridge, is the dance respite you get between sequences where you can just groove around on your mat. It’s like that Twitter thread about what women would do if men were given a curfew. We’d do ludicrous things like walk in the park at night alone or enter parking garages without keys between our fingers. And we’d go out just to sweat and dance with each other and with the rhythm of the music. Personally, I’d run almost exclusively at night, and I’d dance very very badly.
If you’ve never tried it before, there’s something incredibly freeing in dancing badly. When I went to Bonnaroo this past summer, I flailed about during one of the (three) Phish sets. Sure, I was moving with the beat of the music, but the ways my arms and body shimmied and shook could barely be described as dancing. Innocent (i.e. sober) onlookers might have used “seizure” or “possessed” had they been paying attention.
When the song was over —again, it was Phish, so I’m not exactly sure the song was over — I turned to a friend and said, “Wow that felt good. I’ve been suppressing that for a really long time.” He laughed, but I was for once very serious. I don’t often let myself dance badly, especially not in front of people. And I’d needed that set to let something go and take myself a bit less seriously.
I think everyone should learn how to dance. There’s few more lessons more important than learning to control your core and limbs and few things more joyous than to love music and feel it flow through you.
But I also think everyone should learn to give themselves permission to dance badly. To realize that, in dance and in life, the best part of learning proper technique is that once you learn the rules, you get to break them. Then, and only then, can new, interesting things emerge, even if it’s just an immediate acceptance of your klutzy self.
(And maybe a newfound love of Phish. Shh…don’t tell anyone.)