I am a Black dancing body

 I have always been a dancer.  I was a dancer age of three when I bobbed around my mother's kitchen with a giant teddy bear to the effervescent beats of Janet Jackson's Escapade.  I was a dancer at age six when my mother enrolled me in ballet and tap classes.  Yet, somewhere in the 12 years of my ballet training my awareness of myself changed.  I wasn't merely a dancer, I was a Black dancing body in a white dominated space.

It practically goes without saying that the world of Western Concert dance is inextricably tied to a very specific physical ideal.  And generally studios are lined with mirrors so that the dancer's body can be analyzed from virtually all angles.  Traditionally, a proper dancer has a long limbed slender body with long legs and large highly arched feet.  While my prepubescent body barely fit this ideal, after puberty shot me full of estrogen, my body resembled more of that of a stripper or video vixen than a prima ballerina.

Although body concerns are a common issue for women in general, and many female dancers especially, my body image issues were compounded because my body was racialized.  Often, I was told not to "stick out [my] butt"from many well meaning teachers.  As an adult, it seems rather odd to me that none of them ever considered the fact that I hadn't been intentionally projecting my lower back.  Rather, my body was merely shaped slightly differently.  AS it were, this seemingly innocuous comment led me to become increasingly self-counscious.

As instructed, I began to tuck my pelvis underneath me in order to decrease the appearance of the arch in my lower back.  Although tucking my pelvis may have made for a better line, it also greatly impeded my dance training.  While there are times that one will find this pelvic contraction necessary, consistently holding the body this way greatly limits mobility and throws off the balance.  Suffice it to say, if one cannot move their limbs freely without feeling as though she will fall over, dancing in any style becomes virtually impossible.  

At other times, I was praised for my dancing but was told that I needed to "do something" with my kinky hair in order to advance into higher level classes.  My love for dance led me to try and conform as best I could to these standards, but it never fully worked.  Eventually, I just gave trying to fit into the ballet mode.  Instead, as an act of equal parts rebellion and self-discovery, I took up West African based dances.

For several years I studied Sunu, Wolosodon and Manjani and other dances from Senegambia and Guinea.  Instead of being merely a visual spectacle, I began to see dance as a form of communication between the dancer, musician and audience.  Simultaneously, I began to take Afro-Caribbean based dance forms.  As I learned Samba and the dances of the Orishas, I began to see dance as a form of embodied history.  While, I didn't recognize any of movements, some of the music sounded vaguely familiar to the praise breaks I heard in church while growing up.

As a grew further into young adulthood and began to make my way around the New York club scene, I added winding, and twerking movement vocabularies into my repertoire.  I was briefly introduced to the house dance vocabulary on my 26th birthday.  Initially, I couldn't seem to catch the rhythm, but after a few drinks, I began to embody the "fall and recover" style of moving; albeit without the fancy footwork. 

Last year, I learned how to combine many of these styles when I became a certified Zumba instructor.  Though Zumba is viewed by many to merely be a kind of Latin Jazzercise, I've discovered something else in it.  Every class, I watch as people shrug off their inhibitions, shut off their thought streams and connect with themselves.  

This is the type of space that seems to have always been the most accepting of the Black dancing body--where we are serving somewhat as entertainers and inviting others to explore themselves through our bodies.  And this isn't inherently problematic.  However, personally, I feel that the line between artist and entertainer lies in the intent of the performer.  Someone who acts to incite the excitment in others--to me, that's an entertainer.  Someone who acts to incite the joy in themselves--that's an artist. 

Last week, I came across this video of Omari Mizarahi and I was immediately transfixed.  As he himself explains, he embodies various forms of dance styles and model like poses in order to best express himself as a Vogue artist.  The result is an articulate, exciting, intellegent and insighful look at the Black dancing body.