I have always danced. My first dance class was when I was three years old and could hardly speak properly, and there I was, in my dance teacher’s studio, for my very first ballet class.
(My age, it should be noted, was hardly unique: I was only one among thousands of chubby little middle-class toddler girls around the country bundled up in pink little tutus and sent to trip over their feet at the barre.)
But it’s not until these last two years that I’ve become a dancer. True, I took a lesson a week for years on end, I performed annually in group dances and solos, and I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t do the splits.
(Of course, my memory is also notoriously terrible, so do take this with a grain of salt.)
But back then, if you’d asked me what I loved about dance, I would’ve answered…well, I don’t know what I would have admitted to. Because really, the reason I liked dancing was that my teacher was nice and always told me I was good at it. (I wasn’t, not really. Mediocre, at best.) Perhaps I would’ve said that, too, because I cared so little. Or perhaps I would’ve considered that a far too ignoble reason and bs’d some response about art instead.
(That bs response, by and by, would’ve likely gone something along the lines of “because it’s the purest form of expression and understandable across language and cultural barriers.” I admit I’ve never understood such reasoning, though. After all, though it’s true, such a claim is made about music, fine art, and even math, so I don’t know how much stock I really put into it.)
Now, I dance every day at home. I spend hours practicing my turns, going up and down on relevé to improve my balance, standing with my foot poised above my head as I work on my homework in my attempts to stretch. I’ve learned so many new forms of dance in my own time, beyond just the ballet and Chinese traditional dance that my teacher specializes in, from the Charleston dance to ballroom dance.
But I still have difficulty answering that question.
What do I love about dance? I can hardly say “everything,” for though that’s true, it’s terribly unhelpful. I love the feeling when I master four pirouettes after thousands of fails, not just the accomplishment but also the way I’m so centered, so grounded, when my foot drills into the dance floor. I love doing a layout, holding my body upside down in a moment of breath-stopping perfection. I love going on pointe because even though it’s so damn painful, it’s also so damn beautiful and I feel ever so tall. I love the Charleston dance because it never fails to make me smile from its inexorable jubilation and celebration. I love doing the windmill (翻身, which literally means “flip body”), which is a bit like chaînés where the dancer’s body is sideways, because it feels like I’m floating, barely suspended in midair.
But how am I supposed to explain any of that, much less all of it? So when I’m asked, all I can say is, “It’s just fun. I just like it.” What else can I say?