Fuel for the Fire 08/09/2012 9:55am

I want to be a dancer. Is it too late to become a dancer? The shows I took in last night all featured a significant amount of human flesh. Two of them were dance shows, with titles thematically consistent with the topic of this blog: Happy Hour and Sin Eater. The third was The Naked I: Wide Open, a frank and compelling look (literally) at the bodies and (figuratively) minds of a cast of queer, trans, and gender nonconformed (nongender conformed? gender con-non-formed? fluidly gender formed?) people. All of this gave me a lot of time to look at a wide range of human bodies, and think about my own. I'm finding this blog post hard to write. It's taken me over an hour to write what I've written so far, and not just 'cause typing out html code to make links out of show names is a pain in the ass. I think it's because my responses to all the physicality I saw last night were so much more visceral than verbal. I'm trying to translate the tightness in my collar bone and the coiled shame in my gut and the playfulness of my ankles into words, and it's not going so well. Here's the deal: I'm an American woman in the 21st Century, and therefore I have body issues. I ran 10.23 miles on Tuesday evening, and I got home and looked in the mirror and thought not "look at that powerful, joyful machine!" but "look at that curved belly and those wide hips and that weak jaw line." I'm a few pounds heavier than I want to be right now, and I was vividly aware, the whole time I was watching lithe bodies leap and twist, extend and contract last night, of my tummy pushing against the waist band of my jeans. When one of the actors in The Naked I proclaimed that despite years of focused, deliberate effort at changing her thought patterns, she still loathes her body, I felt instant recognition and identification. I don't loathe my body in its entirety, just in sections. Like the section that starts just below my boobs and ends just under my butt. That section, mostly. And it is shocking how much time and energy I dedicate to thinking about it. It's always there, like a low level hum in my brain. So when I go to see dance shows, which are really all about the human body moving through space, without a lot of story or words getting in the way, that hum becomes a cacophony. It's thrilling to see people who have sculpted their bodies into the most perfect vehicles they can possibly be for the expression of emotion and energy. It's thrilling to see people whose bodies are as imperfect as my own using them in amazing, skillful, powerful and beautiful ways. It's inspiring to think that Dancer A's chiseled abs are a mere by-product of her desire to express some kind of human truth, and Dancer B just made my head explode with the genius of her movement, stocky thighs and all. I guess my point is that I don't have to pretend to myself that I'm not constantly aware of and preoccupied by this hunk of flesh I occupy while I'm watching dance. I like ideas and plots and words as much as (maybe more than, depending who he is) the next guy, but keeping that hum of bodily awareness/discomfort/sexual energy/tension/hunger/soreness/anxiety stifled can get exhausting, and sometimes it's delicious to just revel in the fact of the corpus--shame, jealousy, inspiration, delight and all. And more than anything, it makes me want to dance too. Because it's much harder to wallow in any one physical or mental sensation too long when you're moving. So thank you to the amazing performers I saw in those three shows last night for making me feel all those things, and for using your bodies to do so. You're all beautiful. Which allows me to think, when it's extra hard to believe, that maybe I am too.