I never wanted to be anything lucrative, like a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant. In fact I never even wanted to have a desk job, office job, or anything remotely requiring me to sit still for long periods of time. My friends always amaze me because most of them have an aim in mind, a career that they chase with all their being, even going so far as to move to countries that don't speak any of their languages. I don't think I'll ever be able to say how much I admire these people for these things.
I myself never had that kind of ambition. The truth is that the only things I've ever had a passion strong enough to follow are the sort of things that aren't viable in the long run. I wanted to be a ballerina, a singer, an actress, a dancer, a writer, a performer known as an all-rounder because of being great in several different things. These are all things that take a ridiculous amount of time and effort to do anything with, and that put me off for a long time. That and the fact that, in all honesty, I was never particularly good at any of the above, except at writing.
I was a terrible ballerina as a child, my body kept growing and growing and growing which made controlling it rather difficult. When I hit 12 and had my grade 5 ballet exam, I had finally stopped growing and developed my technique so well that everyone expected me to get a Distinction [ie. an A]. Instead I fell flat on my ass during an adage exercise. No, really, I'm not using an expression there - I lost my balance and fell smack on my bottom. I was so mortified and my nerves were so badly shaken that I couldn't do anything right afterwards throughout the exam, and ended up failing. Everyone was shocked. My confidence while dancing ballet never recovered, and I always felt like shit in my ballet lessons afterwards. Add to that the fact that I hit puberty and became boobed and wide-hipped quickly, which is a humongous no-no in a ballerina [or was back then], and you have the death of my ballet dreams.
I turned to jazz dance instead, and enjoyed it tremendously. Unlike ballet, it was actually fun. I could so see myself pulling out all the stops in amazing routines on world-famous stages in the future! Unfortunately, once again my size and shape came under fire. This wasn't blatantly apparent until after 2 years at the same school, when the head and my then-teacher looked at me and congratulated me in front of the whole class on my weight loss. The only reason I lost any weight that summer was that I had been sick with glandular fever/mononucleosis/Epstein-Barr virus for 2 months, 2 weeks of which I spent being unable to eat more than a fistful of food three times a day. It also had to be liquidised. The weight I lost wasn't even fat, because I was by no means chubby; I lost muscle mass, because fever day and night for a month turns you into a decrepit thing with jelly-legs and jelly-arms, unable to walk more than 5 metres without collapsing into a chair. Fun times.
I stopped dancing that same year because I couldn't afford it, which was a terrible shame because I had finally become one of the best in class. But it was a blessing: I escaped the pressure to lose weight, be skinny, be the best, and all the other crap that comes with the most serious of dance training.
Fast forward 4 or 5 years to when my friend Hannah became obsessed with bellydance and convinced me to try it out, and you have the beginning of my ongoing love affair. I began American Tribal Style belly dance, and loved the movements but wished there was more room for creativity, along with moves carried out with the left side of the body [strange as it may sound, ATS, Tribal Improv, and Tribal Fusion almost always work with the right side of the body, and I have no idea why]. Then I started Tribal Improv, which had more combinations to sink my teeth into. TI is great fun and a fantastic challenge to coordination and reflexes, because it's a follow-the-leader style of dance: one person leads, deciding on what moves to use on the spot and indicating by pre-arranged signals [yips, hands flicks, head turns, and more] what comes next so that the rest of the dance troupe knows what moves to perform. The faster the music, the quicker you have to react so that the audience doesn't realise you're not actually doing a full choreography. And nobody notices that we do this, which adds to the fun - we're totally winging it, and it's our secret! We learned and grew together, became perfectly synchronised, put on a couple of shows and took part in the first regular burlesque show on the island. Dancing was good to us, and life became better.
There is a 'but'. The problem with TI is that you need a troupe, and unfortunately life got in the way of ours: our director moved country [the lovely Hannah again!], the girl who took over fell in love and got pregnant [we all joked that she'd have twins if she ever got pregnant; 9 months later she fulfilled our prophecy], another girl moved country, and when I finally took over the classes I had to give it up or risk failing the second year of my BA. So we went our separate dancing ways, which was awful: in any form of bellydance, the people dancing together become like family - that's how it started out after all, with women dancing together while doing chores, and men dancing together while doing their thing, and everybody dancing at weddings [albeit with a lot of self-censoring]. I cannot stress enough how different this is to ballet and jazz, which are dominated by one-upping and competition, creating a tense atmosphere that stops you enjoying yourself to the full when you're dancing, because somewhere inside you're thinking 'I have to be better than the others!'. In bellydance we don't do that. We each revel in what we can do well, applaud each other on the things done well [you should see and hear the reactions in our classes when a bellydancer does a perfect belly roll!], and we all encourage each other when facing a baffling move. I am proud to say that I found the sisters I never had, and to this day even though we no longer dance together and in some cases haven't seen each other in years, we support each other in all we do.
This means that when bellydancing, I associate it with all my bellydancing friends and feel love, which makes me dance with love, which in turn adds an element to the dancing that I have yet to see in other types of dance. This love isn't just about the bond between dancers though. It's also about loving your body and yourself. There is no pressure to be fatless, toned, muscular, as small as possible, and all that crap, in bellydance. Whatever way, shape, or form you have, it's great, because it's your body, your instrument, and you are dancing. Whether you're an apple, an hourglass, a pear, a banana, your shape is perfect. Whether you're huge, or large, or medium, or small, or tiny, your size is perfect. A piano is no better than a flute for being bigger, a violin is no better than a harp for being smaller; they are different instruments and together create complex and beautiful music. Nowadays in fact, I can see that I dance well, because I'm no longer busy worrying about being the thinnest I can't possibly be, or being better than the rest. [There had to be a moral to the story, didn't there.]
And now I'm finally doing one of my favourite styles of bellydance, called Tribal Fusion, a style based on flamenco and bellydance, seasoned with hip-hop and a bunch of other dance forms. This style doesn't use improvisation, so there's a lot more room for creativity than the others I've learned, and that sets me gleefully a-glow.
So I may not be performing at the West End, and I may even have stopped performing locally at all, but I'm dancing and I'm loving every second of it. I've always felt the most alive while dancing, putting my heart and soul into even the tiniest of movements, letting the music take over and becoming part of it, using my head to make my body do beautiful things, and I couldn't ever give it up again. That would be like cutting off a limb.
Sincerely,
Macs
PS. Here are some links for you to see the different bellydance styles I mentioned.
Tribal Fusion:
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