The other night I danced and danced and danced until my head was spinning, my legs were aching and my face was more sweat than skin. Bodies are built to move and mine has been squatting over a keyboard for way too long. My duff shoulder has stopped me doing the things I usually love – if you know me, you know that hard tough exercise has been my way out of the head nonsense, into the pure free flow of being. But then, I have to wonder, maybe it wasn’t really what my body wanted. Maybe my body itself had called a halt, yearning for something more organic, more connected.
I thought I wouldn’t be able to move freely but it was fine, just fine. The music picked me up and threw me around the room, a feckless, reckless love affair with sound and body and space. Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms were the core. Curious thing, way back when I met Roth and took a class in London, I didn’t like it. To read about that experience click here. How mad was I? How repressed and out of my body was I? You know, it took Penninghame to allow me to let go enough to really inhabit my body in dance (we did some 5 Rhythms work there too).
Now I’m sitting here thinking, damn, I could do with a hot sweaty three whole hours of Roth, I really could. And there’s a sadness that I won’t ever meet Gabrielle again, that I missed that opportunity to connect. Back then I cared what people thought – I worried that I looked okay, that I looked ‘cool’, that I was keeping to the beat, doing it right. Now I only care about what my body wants to do, where it wants to lead me, what shapes it wants to make with limbs and hair and hips and spine. I let body take the reins while mind grumbles off into a corner and sulks, there’s no place for it here.
All the forms are good, all the waves, but best of all is Chaos – the anarchic beauty of no rules, of total freedom, of deep real authenticity.
I want to go deeper.
A room is fine but I have a vision of firelight, of starlight, of dancing like a maenad, bare feet on grass. There’s water nearby so that, when the dance is done, I could float, arms embracing the silky darkness, eyes stargazing, heart earthbeating. Held. Embraced.
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash