Not "be amazing," but "be amazed."
Yesterday I took a workshop with
Aziza (sorry, her website can be kinda slow). I don't know why I always expect these giant dance names to be full of themselves and humorless, but she was fun, approachable, and yes, fucking amazing.
For those of you bored by my ever-more-frequent dance postings, I recommend not skipping this one. Aziza's message last night, by which I am so touched, extends beyond dance, I think. It is an excellent recommendation for any human being.
"Be amazed by your own body" was the theme of the evening. What it can do, how you get from pose A to pose B, etc. How to let that passion flow through your dance and out into the audience so they can't help but feel it too. And when you think about it, the human body IS a pretty amazing thing, isn't it? I remember an exercise in my high school anatomy class wherein we had to trace out every single thing that happened in a sequence of events. So, for example, "hear cat, turn head, recognize cat, pick it up" -- we had to trace every organ, nerve pathway, etc. along the route, from the ear to the brain to the neck muscles to the eyes back to the brain to the motor neurons to the arm muscles etc. It was pretty damn involved, let me tell you. And what could be more simple than picking up your favorite pet when she mews at you? Do you ever walk across an uneven patch of ground and marvel at how effortless it is to stay upright? I do.
So this whole "be amazed at yourself" thing struck a chord, and I'm wondering why I never let my usual sense of wonder at the human body flow into my dance before. I often do exhibit the n00b style of dancing which goes "I am doing move A. Now I am doing move B. Now I am doing move C." There's no continuity, no flow. How do you get to move B? Where is the breath, the balance? Feel the transition, feel the flow between the poses and the steps. Where is your consciousness? Is it toward the audience, is it introverted, are you off in fantasy land somewhere?
Time will tell, but I think Aziza's method has reached me where years of being yelled at to "keep your shoulders down! Tuck your tail! Don't drop your elbows!" have not. Where before I have received mechanics, Aziza offered passion. And humor, and joy. The fact that she adores what she does exudes through every pore -- for last night's workshop, she had just arrived after being delayed by nearly a
day on her flight, and on top of that the airline had lost her luggage with all of her clothes, performance makeup, and oh yes, several thousand dollars' worth of costumes. Would you want to get up in front of a roomful of sweaty strangers and dance for two hours (and then be whisked off to a party in your honor afterward)? Let alone insist upon being passionate while you do it? I'm sure most of us would want to lock the door, crawl under our crisp hotel sheets and cry. But she stood up there, all smiles, in someone else's clothes, and told us to love ourselves, to approach our dance with pride yet humility, passion coupled with technique. She had us giggling and twirling and loving it, and was giggling and twirling and loving it right along with us. That's a deeper passion than I've seen in any dancer I've met so far. It was infectious. It was necessary.
Be amazed. Yes.
Labels: belly dance
