A Thread

The feel of the smooth black floor beneath my feet, the mirrored walls surrounding me, and space all around – I was in a dance studio for the first time in more than seven years and a half years, and there was almost no fear inside me. To be put back into such a familiar space came a feeling of freedom. I had forgotten what it felt like to dance, to make my body do movements that had been memorized by my muscles and joints years ago. While I did have to think with my mind in order to follow the teacher and my fellow classmates, it was my body that took over. I had forgotten that I even knew how to do a flat back, but, of course, it had been programmed into my body. How many times had I’d done a flat back in the twenty years I danced? How many times had I looked to the ceiling and beyond and with rounded arms above my head, opened them as if to welcome heaven? How many times had it been drilled into my head that the only way to control the whole body is to have control of my core, to engage my stomach muscles, to breathe? And I learned that when you’re standing on your feet, your legs stretched straight, your body doubled over so the top of your head is as close to the floor as possible, and the teacher says to release, you release – you release your neck muscles, you breathe deeply into the stretch, and you nod your head yes and shake your head no to prove that you’re indeed released.

The hour on Friday night at the Juneau Dance Unlimited studio flew by. I didn’t want it to end. I stretched muscles and joints and parts of my body that hadn’t been awakened in years. When we moved across the floor, I wanted the studio to be twenty times longer – one always ends up running into the corner. I felt a confidence in dancing that I never really felt when I was in high school and dancing five times a week. I don’t even know if I loved it then. I think the love grew over time when I had a chance to process how much dance meant to me, how much I missed it when it was no longer an option, and how much it brought to my life, like discipline and stability and structure. Dancing, or more specifically, the school I went to – Steffi Nossen – gave me a whole world that existed outside of school and family. It gave me a changing room and a studio, mirrors surrounded by light bulbs, costumes, frenzy, flowers, the stage. It also gave me fear of my teachers’ disapproval, of not living up to expectations, of never being good enough. But above all, it gave me beauty. When I look back with my rose-tinted glasses, I recall the good dances, the perfect lighting and music, the moments I shined.

I didn’t back then when I was actually dancing and performing, but now, as an adult, I have stress dreams about being on stage and not knowing what I’m supposed to do. That would’ve never happened in real life.

Dancing was always a thread in my life – from age four to eighteen, through college, and in Hong Kong when I used to commute an hour and a half each way to get from Tuen Mun to the dance studio at the Fringe in Central. In Wrangell, when there were no dance classes for me to take, I created classes for children, but that only lasted a year. While I think I can finally acknowledge that fact that I can teach some things, when it comes to the realm of dancing, I am a perpetual student. I want to be told what to do for warm up, I want choreography to land on me, I want to be encouraged.

I’m so happy that now, after a long hiatus, the thread can finally continue again.