A Dance Blog Post

One of my favorite things is dancing. Two of my favorite dances are Blues and Lindy Hop, they have their differences and similarities but I've noticed that I use Lindy Hop to kind of shout my happiness and I use Blues to figure out what is going on in my head. Ever since I broke my foot (about two years ago [being stupid and not listening to my body]) I've had a different relationship with Lindy Hop, there hasn't been that reckless abandon, that pure bliss that I used to find when dancing lindy. Aaaaand I'm not nearly as cocky confident as I was pre-break.

Now a couple of weeks ago I was dancing with a friend and after the dance I asked him what I could do to dance better. After thinking about it for a while, an interesting look came on his face and out of all the things I expected him to say, he said maybe the one thing I never would have thought of: look up more. He said that there is a lot of joy in dancing, I should share that, look up more. It doesn't have to be a fast song, even the slow ones have joy. or something like that

Here was me, asking for dance advice, and here was this guy who didn't know much about what was going on in my life, giving me so much more. A lot has happened in the past couple of months that has made being 'sad' pretty natural, and I was ignoring, even silencing the joy in my life and in my dancing. More than that though, when I dance I pretty much avoid eye contact. Eye contact is scary, intimidating even, it's personal, and avoiding eye contact means I get to stay in my own head space, it means using the dance to think about how I feel. I get told that I'm a good follow, and while I think I'm good at listening to what a lead wants me to do, I kind of forgot that in a dance I'm not the only one with 'stuff' to figure out, i'm not the only one 'talking'.

Gear Shift:
My new years resolution is to be happy more than I'm sad. That doesn't mean I plan to be pigheaded in my happiness but I want to make an extra effort that even when I'm sad, to have some extra happy stored up, sitting just under the surface, because right now I think it's the other way around, and even when I'm happy I've got this extra sad stored up, just under the surface. I think I'm ready to try a little harder to flip that around. I think the best place to start is in my dancing, with this eye contact thing. Most of my sadness comes from tricking myself that I'm alone, isolated, 'unique' in my sadness, and making eye contact is admitting that I am not alone, noticing that I am not the only person in the entire world trying to tell a story.

Dancing is already pretty personal, but for some reason eye contact feels like sharing so much more. Eye contact means seeing that I'm being heard, seeing that I'm listening, seeing whether or not it's just a dance for the other person. Because maybe I'm not being heard. How much are they feeling? How much of my soul are they really getting? How much of their soul am I really comprehending? Maybe I'm putting too much pressure on three minutes, but if a hug can make you feel less alone, imagine what a dance could do, a really really good dance, then imagine a dance with eye contact. A sad story can be told with joy, when it's not told alone. (and not all of my stories are sad)

so yeah, eye contact.