This weekend I attended a performance of South African music (?) and dance. I had heard (from an African dancer) that it is helpful in African dance to have more than a little extra heft on the back end. As a woman with ample seating space, I wondered if there was someplace local where I could learn African dance. I went online looking for such.
I came upon a discussion among African American dancers about the state of dance for communities of color in this primarily white state. It’s insider baseball so I don’t pretend to understand the nuances of their discussion, but a few things struck me as odd: astatement along the lines of – how can an African American dance with an Asian? (So I’m thinking… what does this mean? what is the problem here? This happens every evening in clubs around town.)
Another was charges of racism because of the way dance is or is not covered in the media and its lack of visibility in the community. I don’t disagree with the idea that the media is impacted by racism, but really, how many people are reading dance reviews? How many people are actually paying money to go see dance of any kind? Is it racism that people aren’t going? Or is it just that people would rather watch sports?
This exchange was all the more interesting because earlier in the week I had listened to an interview on the radio with an Asian-Indian dancer who talked about how hard it was to dance with other people of color, collaboratively, collectively.
She also spoke of how her formal Indian dance training influenced her body movement – and how she broke out of it to understand how her body really moved as a woman. It got me thinking about rhythm. How might our cultural rhythm create us as people–inhibit or expand us? When we listen a great deal to rhythms of other culures, does it change some fundamental internal aspect of our being?
I traveled once… to Lithuania. While there I ate lots of beets (yummy). I wondered how I might be different on a cellular level, on an energetic level, on a thought level, if I had been built by beets rather than by corn (the staple homegrown food of my area). I wonder the same about rhythm.
