Why I Dance

My secret dream: To perform spoken word in front of a large audience and move them. I haven't actually done it (yet), but a couple of years ago, when I was in Chicago, I prepared a piece to (maybe) take to the Green Mill. Here's what I wrote, here's what I still feel:

No one ever bothers to ask why we dance- isn’t that a funny thing? Humans have been dancing from the beginning of ‘sapien’ until 2015 and it is never a question of why- it just is. Babies dance from the minute they can hold themselves upright to the tune of the their momma’s favorite song. Some of them just keep going, dancing until their bones are brittle and their progeny wonders if they should help grandpa back to his chair before he breaks his hip. Oh, but grandpa don’t care. Dancing isn’t only for the young, it’s not only for the old. It’s for the “Oh! This beat is so good, that if I don’t I get my groove on right now, I will burst!” kind of people. You know who I’m talking about- the good people who tap their toes against the floor on the train, the people who sway their hips to that fantastic song in the store, the people who say “forget it!” and just start dancing in the street! It is celebration, it is triumph, and it is love. My dance teacher once said “people look their most beautiful when they dance, when they forget themselves,” and, wouldn’t you know it, dance doesn’t know the difference between African and Indian, European or South American. It only hears the beat, sounds the horn, and invites all living, breathing people to partake in its intoxicating rhythm. But, I can’t speak for grandpa, or for baby, or for the billions of people in between who dance. I can only talk about when I dance and why I dance.

Why do I dance? Was I born to dance? Did God put a little dancing microchip in my feet before He sent me down here? Do I have a brand in my armpit that says “dancer!”? …..I don’t think so. I do know that my mother watched in awe as her baby (that’s me) that just learned how to stand was bouncing to the Hindi song playing in the living room. I know the extraordinary sensation of letting go of my hands and feet and body for the first time and feeling absolute joy. I know the exquisite rush of performing a carefully practiced south Indian dance for the first time, feeling like I'm the only one in the room, and loving it. I know the thrill of twirling so fast I think I’m about to fall or become sick- the world is spinning by me one blurry-still-life at a time and it is beautiful! Oh, and I know that sweet ache of salsa music that grabs me by the hips and moves me all over town!

Why do I dance? I dance as a way to move through the world, through time and space. I dance as a way to get from Point A to Point B, and I also dance when every atom in my body is throbbing to the beat of the music because if I don’t dance this very minute, I am literally going against my nature.  I dance as a way to make sense of my hands and my fingers, my knees, and my toes, as a way to use my neck and my eyes that honors their complexity and their simplicity. I dance as a way to create: waves in the air, music from the earth, and something out of nothing. I dance as way to share my soul, my energy, my love to the world. Dance is the way I connect to that current that electrifies us all, the way I give my body a rest from trying to be human and just let it be.

I dance because life is too short for walking or standing in the periphery and clapping along. And I hope when I’m 80, I am still in the center of a crowd doing the twirling and not the clapping, feeling the music and not my cumbersome limbs. I dance now because movement is life, and when I finally do die, and they cremate my body, I hope one hundred Sufi mystics spread my dust in the desert as they dance, and the wind whispers, “she danced through life.”