Why do we dance? Or at least, why do I dance?

When I first started to think about this particular article, I was contemplating going back and making it historical. I mean really going back; I believe that there are language and musical specialists out there who claim that the earliest forms of language were tonal and motion based. So perhaps if we were to observe earliest wo/man communicating it might appear to us somewhat like a musical!

That is something I will have to research to find out more, and maybe there will be an article about that in the future. While I work on that, though, I thought I might try to articulate some of the more immediate reasons why we dance. 

Well, why I dance, to start with.

My first thought is, because I can. Once the music starts it is automatic, unconscious. I grew up with dance. Not in the way that some people have – there was no tap school or parent taking me to classes – but every Friday Mum would finish cleaning the house and turn the music up, and we would just move, whirling around the living room. My mum can dance, (she did some ballroom, and still loves it) and watching her glow as she cha-cha’d around the coffee table, shaking away the weekly blues, will always stay with me. So moving to the rhythm has always been a part of me.

I’ve tried other forms of dance before. Jazz, when I was little. Hiphop when I got a little older. One or two others. But they never stuck, never felt good in the same way just moving to the music did, never brought that same glow to the edge of things. Perhaps it was the dance, perhaps the teacher, or the class themselves, whatever the case they didn’t last for me.

I started bellydance as a moral support for a friend who was a bit nervous about going alone. Since I have no shame and am unlikely to get nervous in a beginners-try-out type situation, I offered to keep her company. Three years later, and I am still dancing.

Belly dance offers a different view, or it has in my experience. The atmosphere is different, the attitude is different, the movement feels more to me like a female form of expression. Perhaps it’s not just the bellydance, but the group I dance with that has also affected my reaction. When I walk into a class I can’t help but smile, the knots that drag at my back start to ease. After spending the day as someone else in my professional life, I can start to remember me. As I warm up, concerns are lost in laughter, in the pull of muscle and the shine of shared activity. Bellydance appeals to me also because it lacks the bitchery (hope no one is offended by that word but it is the most accurate) that so plagues every female group-oriented activity. Each woman is truly positive, happy to see her fellow dancers express themselves. There aren’t the snide compliment-come-insults, the eyebrow lifts, the subtle snubs. (At least not intentionally. Even I shove my foot down my oesophagus occasionally!) We are 16 to 60, we are size 6 to 20, we are homemakers and career oriented and everything and in between, but two nights a week we shimmy it all away. We all learn to isolate those muscles, to dance those steps, and we forget that we aren’t supermodels and learn to be a little more comfortable in our own beauty. It’s a covert lesson, some times we get bogged down in life and forget, but it’s a simple lesson underlying each class. The celebration of the female, the person, the movement – this is the joy in bellydance for me.

Picture curtesy - Karen Box

Written by Cara Kwiecien