I am not an emotional being by nature. I am very thought driven and it is not until I have had time to really think about a situation that I attach some form of emotion to it, if any. I wrote about this before. However, there are four things that as a general rule can illicit huge emotional reactions from me. They are prose and poetry, movies, music and dance. All four of them are able to beautifully illustrate things that quite often I find I am unable to express myself. Even though growing up I was heavily into math, chemistry, physics, computers etc and they turn me on to no end since they are so rational, it would be safe to say the reason that I was also equally into dance, writing and acting was because it gave me an outlet to express emotions I cannot express in my day to day living. Out of the four, dance does this most effectively.
Dance has always had a special place in my life. When I was younger, if I was not herding by friends together to put on some play, we spent our lunch hour choreographing some dance number. I would be able to lose myself in the music and the motion. I was able to escape the pain that was my childhood and enter new realms. Acting had and continues to have the same affect on me but not to the same extreme as dance. Even if there is no music to accompany the dance, you can carry yourself off into an unheard rhythm. Your body becomes the rhythm, it becomes the base line. You flow from one beat, one motion into the next. It is not unlike the process of ice turning to water turning to vapor. You can transcend states of being. It is like the process of pressure being built up along a fault line waiting for a release and then followed by the wonderful release of an earthquake or the forceful eruption of magma from a volcano turning in a beautiful red lava flow.
Dance can tell stories from the worst tragedy to a wonderful comedy. It can lift you up and it can bring you down. As I sit here now trying to express all the wonders that is dance, I do not think I could ever adequately illustrate the power that it has for me. Dance saved my life. So did acting when it came to escaping pain and trauma and finding a constructive way to deal with the crap that happened to me as a child instead of turning to other options such as drugs. However, dance did so in more ways than one.
A dance teacher I had for quite a while had Lupus. Now she wasn’t only my dance teacher. Her husband was my grade 11 English teacher. Her oldest son was one of my best friends in high school. When I was going through some of my darkest moments in high school, my English teacher would always write little notes on the back of my papers or my poetry letting me know that I was not alone in what I was experiencing. He also went as far to share with me the struggle he and his family had with his wife’s debilitating illness. It wasn’t until after high school that she became my dance teacher. She taught dance for many years until the Lupus really took hold. And then she spent most of 20 years in and out of hospital. She was told that she would never walk away. Not only did she walk again but she taught dance right up until a couple weeks before her death, right before she lost her final battle with Lupus. It was her love of dance that propelled her to walk and dance again.
She was also instrumental in my diagnosis of Lupus. One year the pain got so bad I missed close to a month of dance. When you dance over 8 hours a week, missing a month is a lot. I came to her after the month and told her that I had to drop out, I could not move anymore. It felt as if knives were being dug into every single joint in my body and nothing was working for the pain. She asked if I had ever been diagnosed with any muscular or skeletal disorders and I began to name a list the length of my arm. She told me that I am a very gifted dancer. She sees me shine when I dance and she sees the release it gives me. She told me that she cannot do without me in her class. She told me that I need to sit down with my doctor and say look, since I was 15 you and a whole whack of doctors have diagnosed me with this and that and this and that, don’t you think it can all be one thing? So that is what I did. My doctor went hmmm wow I can’t believe we missed this, I am sending you to a Rheumatologist and that started the road to a final diagnosis of Lupus. Dance saved my life. Eventually I was able to return to class and finish out the year. Unfortunately, that is the same year that the complications of Lupus took the life of my dance teacher. Thinking about this now brings tears to my eyes. She inspired me in more ways than I could ever express. She gave me the strength to get out of my wheelchair three years ago after I suffered my stroke. She was an amazing woman that brought so much joy and love to this planet. I was very fortunate to have her in my life.
So given the above, it is no wonder that I love, LOVE So You Think You Can Dance. I cannot watch a single episode without crying. Tonight was no exception. Normally I will cry once maybe twice during an episode. Tonight I cried more times than I can count. The recaps of a couple of the dancer’s journeys made me cry as I could relate to the obstacles that they faced to be where they are now. Two of the dance numbers made me cry. The first number which was a beautifully choreographed hip/hop number about a couple that couldn’t get to sleep because they had unresolved issues to work through from the day. It spoke to me on a very personal level. My relationship ended a month ago today. Maybe one of the contributing factors was because we broke my number one rule a few too many times about never going to bed angry and that is what that dance number was about. The other was a Bollywood number to Jai Ho. Jai Ho is one of my pick me up songs. If I am in a down mood, I crank it up as loud as I can and do the silliest dance either in my chair as I am working or all around the house. The dance was alive and loving and upbeat and beautiful. There was one particular move about 30 seconds into the song that just made me break down in tears because of the sheer joy of the number.
I cannot type anymore. I have not even come close to expressing all that dance is to me. And for now I am going to stop as the tears are starting to flow again. Both tears of pain and tears of joy. So in ending, here is a poem that I wrote the night before my dance teacher’s celebration of life. Her husband, my former English teacher, read it during the ceremony. As we (her students and close friends) were meeting in her dance studio before the service, someone saw the poem. It touched her so much that she took it from me and blew it up so that it could be turned into a poster so that everyone had a chance to not only hear it but read it. As well (because my dance teacher had such an impact on the local community) it was printed in the local newspaper. This poem was my first published piece.
Catherine’s Dance
The day she was born the dance took stage,
A courageous spirit that would never age.
It moved in all aspects of her life,
Her love and her compassion, her pain and her strife.
The dance was apparent when she did succeed,
But there was a time when it seemed to recede.
When she could not move and it always seemed night,
The dance still raged on, fighting to see the
light.
It leaped and it turned trying to break free,
Emerge from the shadows for everyone to see.
Out of the dark, the dance broke its chains
Like the sun breaking through the clouds and the rain.
Her dance continued to move until the very end
Surrounding all of her family and friends.
She lived a life, which inspired all she did meet:
A mother, a wife, a teacher; she did not miss a beat.
Although she is gone and she will be missed very much,
Her dance lives on in all that she did touch.
julia sherred
thank you for sharing that with me.
it was a beautiful entry and a beautiful poem.
what terrible and beautiful things we must deal with, and it’s only because we have these things that we can bear with it.