Sunday Morning Dance

I just have to sit this one out. My breath is coming fast, my lower back beginning to ache, the music for the moment has shifted from inspiring to not so exciting. This week the music playlist comes from Ken, or Chad, or perhaps Susan. Next week a different member of the Dance Coop will provide the sound environment, but I don't keep track. I am not one of the contributors, nor really one of the sustainers of this Conscious Dance Community. I am just so grateful that this community of loving folks--all ages, abilities and sizes--comes together on its own, without my having to gather the group, create a lesson plan, or focus the flow on a particular theme. I have done so much initiating of movement events over the decades. It is a pleasure to let it be taken care of by others. I relax into the invitations to move any way I want, any way my body wants, or just rest my body for a while, but not too long.

Today, like most Sunday mornings in this moving worship, my body wants to recall how it felt decades ago--glorious, slinky, voluptuous, delicate, vigorous.

So I pull myself up again, stretch my shoulders and back briefly, then relinquish the driver's seat to my physical wisdom. I watch the world go by as my body slides and twirls out into the middle of the studio, confident. No longer doubting that it knows how to take care of itself, I allow it to skip all the well practiced patterns of warming up--allow all the ideas of how a dancer should prepare himself to fall away. I simply pick up speed, zipping in and out between the other dancing bodies.

I smile at the familiar faces I slide between. I don't know their names, most of them, and haven't participated in the occasional social events where I might have struck up conversations revealing where they work, what they do for a living, how many kids they have. Here, they are, for me, simply playmates in a game of rhythmic syncopation, or obstructions around which I can create an ornate spatial design, or sources of some nuanced gestures--movement to mirror and make mine.

This relating to people as moving bodies rather than personalities gives me a joy I have a hard time explaining. It is not that I don't value their individuality, their unique and human identities. In fact, it is the opposite. I so value how unique they are beneath their personalities that I aim my dance directly to that deepest level.

Weaving swiftly backwards through the crowd, I feel a hand, then a forearm slow me down. Leaning into that contact, my weight joins his weight in a seamless flow. My unseen partner matches my careening trajectory only long enough for our bodies to recognize the unity, then tugs down on my shoulder. It is Brad, of course. I cannot mistake his confidence in initiating this partnership mid-flight.

In the next split second, still moving back toward the corner of the studio, my body grabs momentum from the shoulder tug, twists, winds up, and hurls itself up and around his waist. I catch a glimpse of his tousled hair and lopsided, satisfied grin as my arms lock around his torso. My weight thrusts through his pelvic structure. His ready legs ground into the floor. Spinning in his arms, tipping my toes to the ceiling, for a moment I'm flying, suspended, soaring upside down. I flip, my feet find the floor, and I become the support for a dozen of his little hops. For a few measures of increasing musical intensity, he taps vigorously up and down my back, and I prance in a giddy pleasure response.

Contact Improvisation comes back to me easily. I am not so frightened by the potential for injury as I was a decade ago when I took some classes from Brad. And for some reason I cannot name, today I'm free of the fear of my own erotic responses to so much tactile stimulation in the context of dancing pleasure. I'm also free of the fear of a potential backlash of loneliness after an exhilarating experience of body to body connection like this. It

has happened before, but today I am determined there will be no such backlash. I let myself connect, fully, here and now.

In five minutes, or perhaps fifteen, I dance away from him, find my notebook and pen, take a swig of water, then kneel in a corner out of the way of the swirl of dancers to write what happened.