MOVEMENT


Why I dance


Charlotte discovers that intimacy is sometimes best found where there are no words – on the dance floor.


by Charlotte Young A


couple of years ago I attended a talk for parents called, ‘Porn, the internet and young people’.


After lots of gut-churning details about the way the industry dictates to us on so many levels, even if you don’t watch it, the speaker concluded her presentation with, “We need to make intimacy as magnetic as porn. That’s what’s going to change things for our young people. The only problem is – I don’t know how.” I don’t know either. But ever since


then, I’ve been tracking intimacy with my magnifying glass and it’s a tricky one – a bit like the word ‘soul’ – nebulous and simpler to say what it isn’t. Words can get in the way sometimes, which is why it’s easier to describe and amplify intimacy in a place where there are no words – on the dance floor – where the body does the talking.


DANCING WITH MY EYES SHUT The ‘consciousness movement dance floor’, where the only steps to follow are your own, is a place I discovered some fifteen years ago in Melbourne,


78 MARCH | APRIL 2018


then in the UK, Belgium and back in the Southern Hemisphere again. The book that led me there was written by New Yorker, Gabrielle Roth, who created the 5Rhythms. These days there are countless classes of conscious movement with different names and flavours: Movement Medicine, Soul Motion, Dancing Freedom, Open Floor – to name just a few. For the first year, I danced in the


corner with my eyes shut, which you’re not ‘meant’ to do (not conscious enough!), but thankfully I didn’t know this. I needed that year to get intimate with myself and it was way too distracting if my eyes were open. I was getting to know ‘the soft animal of my body’ [Mary Oliver] and how I loved to move, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol.


A DANCING ‘HIGH’ And then, I admit, once I’d discovered how light I felt when I was dancing, I used it in the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol in my youth – to get out of my head, to escape, and to connect with others in a different, edgier way. There’s


a definite high to be had when you allow your body to be collected by the music so your mind can’t keep up and you dance yourself into a trance. For years, I danced weekly, the same dance of release, the build-up, the glorious peak and the fun slide down the other side into a satisfied collapse. When the facilitator invited us to move with a partner or in a group, I felt like I was learning a new language: unsure and fumbling – but alive. It was up to me and the partner if our bodies touched. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. These were the initial baby steps towards intimacy with another. The giant step came during my


first weekend workshop, which was an intense learning curve where my mindful witness sprang into being, in awe and in judgment of my dancing self and how she could be in the moment, brimming over with life force. Mostly though, I was witness to and in the experience of love. In love with self and others. Dancing bodies held in safety by an


experienced facilitator, create a field of love. It sounds so hippy to wax lyrical


IMAGE: SKYE STUDIOS


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