Some months ago, spontaneously, I posted on facebook that my new motto is “Just Dance.” At the time I was thinking that “I don’t get enough exercise, I don’t have much ‘fun’ in my life, I’m just a blob who sits in a chair.” The phrase “Just Dance” – get out of the chair and move – was the reply from my inner wisdom.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about what, exactly, it could mean to “Just Dance.”

While I have occasionally performed as “a dancer” (I feel it’s presumptuous of me to apply that title to myself), what I really mean by dancing is to simply move spontaneously to music, doing so with attention, but not consciously. In this mode, even if I’m dancing to music I have not heard before, my awareness anticipates rhythm changes, flourishes, and other aspects of the music that can be responded to, or, better, embodied by a danced move.

In the last few days I’ve been thinking about how I might apply that mindset – with attention, but not with a conscious-driven carefulness – to other things I do. I think I might be on to something.

There are a number of good things about getting older. The first thing that comes to mind is getting to a point at which you really don’t care much (at least not compared to how much you cared decades ago) about what other people think about you. Once you comprehend, in a visceral way, your own mortality, it becomes much easier, even necessary, to express yourself as you see fit with little regard to what others may think.

And so, a few years ago, I got the courage to start practicing Middle Eastern dance, often unfairly called belly-dance. It is challenging, beautiful (when done well), and my favorite part – it has lots of sparkly bits!

There is a worldwide community of belly-dancers, and several styles – “cabaret” (the stereotypical belly-dance style that most Americans probably think of when they hear the word belly-dance), tribal (in its purest form a group improvisation in which a ‘leader’ uses subtle cues of hand and arm movements that the other dancers ‘follow’), and fusions of traditional Middle Eastern dance movements with multiple dance styles, including flamenco, samba, tango, Polynesian, ballet, modern dance, and others.

I admire a large number of well-known (in the belly-dance community) dancers – Heather Stants, Tamalyn Dallal, Amar Gamal, Sharon Kihara are a few – but if I’m asked to pick a favorite, my choice is easy. Her name is Mira Betz and her style is her own. Her dancing is stunningly beautiful, except for when it’s charmingly humorous. More importantly, she is an excellent teacher and feels her most important duty as a teacher is to encourage students to develop their own unique style, as she has done, not just in dance but throughout life.

Mira Betz will be teaching at a week-long retreat near a beach in Mexico in November 2010. I would love to go, but our family’s financial situation will need to improve somewhat before that’s possible. I also need to get serious again about belly-dance to justify it. (There’s time; it could happen.) In promoting that event, the organizers put together this mashup of Mira’s dancing. This is what inspires me:
[youtube 8bMV6D7WCsg]

An invaluable benefit of being employed at Middlebury College is the opportunity to audit college classes. My job in particular has duties that can be done at any time, day or evening, so my schedule and supervisors have allowed me to use this opportunity a few times over the years.

During Fall 2009, I audited Dance 163, From Africa to America – Movement from the Core. I expect that a few of my posts here will allude to some lessons I learned in that class; this is the first.

A few times during the course, Christal Brown (the instructor who, among many other accomplishments, founded INSPIRIT, a dance troupe based in NYC) said things like “the best dancers have no idea who they are – they literally just stand there until someone tells them to move.” Or another example: a dancer or choreographer must “negate the self to embody the product.”

A creative work has its own life. In bringing a creative work from conception to reality, a dancer or artist must set aside their own limitations and expectations, either of themselves or of what the work ‘should’ be, and ‘serve the work.’

Most of my dance experience has been self-created in my living room. At the best of those times I have been so focused on embodying the music that ‘I lost myself in it.’ I think that is probably at least part of “negating the self” that Christal spoke of.

I also think ‘negating the self’ could mean losing purpose. It is the self that wants to accomplish, earn, succeed – all purposes that exist outside of an activity. To best embody a creative work, think not of what awards might be won, but only of what serves the work.

In Mark Rowlands’ interview on the CBC (see previous post), he said, When things have purposes, the purpose typically lies outside the activity … We do all these things, but there’s very little that has value in itself.

Dance has value in itself.