Jazz Dance 101 Was a Mistake, and It Changed Everything

It was my last semester of college. I picked arguably the most trivial class off the course catalogue, Introduction to Jazz Dance, and it changed everything.

The funny part is, I didn’t even know what jazz dance was. I thought I did, as a die-hard Chicago fan. I was pretty sure I was born for it, all awkward angles and lots of hips. Besides, Catherine Zeta-Jones is Welsh. I’m Welsh. That was my entire thought process when signing up for the class. After years of books, I just wanted to use the National Merit Foundation’s money on a skill I would never use again, and test out if I could pull off a fedora.

When I arrived to the first class, there were students stretching. I don’t mean light toe-touches. I mean they were keeping their ears warm with their thighs. I wanted to blend, so I laid my legs on the floor in front of me, hunched, and twinkled my fingers like they were casting a spell on my toes.

Mid spell-cast the most compact Italian woman you’ve ever seen burst through the studio door. Think Fiat. She had a huge mane of black hair and so much energy that I scooted back a few feet just to keep safe distance. “Hello beautiful people!”

She asked us to circle up and share how much dance experience we had, and why we had chosen to take Introduction to Jazz Dance. The first girl looked nervous, so I shot her a look of solidarity. Don’t worry girl, I’ve got no experience either. Only, she opened her mouth and said, “I’ve been dancing since I was three, but I took the summer off, and I’m just worried that I’ll be really rusty.”

I snatched my look of solidarity back and traded it for the expression of a stunned, betrayed cow. I stole a glance at the syllabus. This was Intro to Jazz Dance, right? As in, we’re all strangers to jazz dance, hello nice to meet you jazz dance?

The more people shared, the less confident I was that I understood what the class was, until it was my inevitable turn.

“Hi, I’m Katie. I love latin dance, love to salsa, did a little swing, but um, I’m guessing maybe that doesn’t apply here and uh…I signed up for jazz dance because I love old music, like 20’s and 30’s and you know, like…Fosse?” I wheeled my fingers around in a half-Fosse, half-bad-party-magician move. The faces of the experienced dancers in the circle suddenly became uncomfortable. “But um, I’m beginning to think,” my eyes narrowed, “…maybe that isn’t what this is?”

“Not exactly, but that’s okay!” the instructor announced. I would write “announced enthusiastically” but I should just establish now that everything she said contained a shocking amount of enthusiasm. I refuse to repeat an adverb as many times as it would be necessary to use “enthusiastically” in this piece.

I called a dancer friend after class and told her what happened, and she started laughing into the phone. “Oh, Katie. That’s not what jazz dance is.”

“Well what the hell is it then?”

“It’s like what the Golden Girls do.”

The Golden Girls she was referring to are not Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and Sophia. I would’ve nailed that class. The Golden Girls she was referring to are the basketball dance team at Florida State University. And that’s when I knew I had made a huge miscalculation.

She was still explaining through her laughter. “You know, like high kicks? Lots of fast turns?”

“Yep, I…I get it now. Um. Well. It’s just one semester, right?”

The past year had been the hardest year of my life. Or rather, the culmination of a lot of hard years of living. Things I had run away from for twenty-one years were finally catching up with me. It was the year I realized how small I had become.

I don’t need to explain particulars, because at the heart of it, it’s a universal story. Hurt makes us withdraw inside of ourselves, each successive injury driving us further and further from our edges, away from our skin and our nerves. Over twenty-one years I had shrunk until I was just a kernel at my very center, observing life from a safe distance. I watched myself interact with the world. I chose which words would reach me, and which ones I’d let float over my body. I chose which touches I’d feel, and which ones wouldn’t even register. I chose which memories to preserve, and which to delete. The clinical term is disassociation, and to me, it felt like a superpower. I felt strong, capable of taking care of myself, able to make it through anything.

Only you can’t actually delete your life. You can drag experiences into the little trash can in the corner, and pretend they’re not there, but you can never empty the trash can.

That year, the trash had finally become full. It wouldn’t take any more experiences. In fact, it wanted to spill them all out onto my current experiences, and mix them all together. History was blending with the present, and I didn’t feel in control anymore. I didn’t feel strong, or capable, and I wasn’t making it through.

That’s the woman I was when the Fiat barreled through the door that first class. That’s why she took me so off guard. How was she so alive? How did she take up that much space?

Fiat wasn’t just full and present, she seemed determined that we would be full and present too. (So pushy.)

The class would start out with an exercise that invariably made me question all the life choices that had led me to that moment, like “star arms” — reaching out to each corner of the room in rapid succession. But then, just when I was wanting to give up out of pure awkwardness, her instructions would become existential.

“Take up space! Stop being so small!” she yelled. “Really reach! Hang on, stop the class. Stop the class. We gotta talk.” She waited for stillness. “Listen, the whole world out there tells you to take up less space. Not in here. Not in this studio. In here, we learn to take up all the space we can. You deserve to take up space.”

And then I was star-arming as if it didn’t make me look incredibly stupid, which it did. I was star-arming like I deserved those four corners.

One class she put on a Lana del Rey song and declared that we would move only by rotating our joints. Free-style. This was a new nightmare I hadn’t even considered. I was barely committing, rotating my wrists and ankles around like they were mildly cramping.

“Yeah! Come on!” she was cheering. Like I said, unflagging enthusiasm. When she realized some of us were holding back, she paused class. “Your whole life society tells you how to move. What’s acceptable and not acceptable. So you move that way your whole life, never considering all the endless other possibilities contained within your body. Why limit yourself? Why not move a different way? Who cares what they think? Explore every possibility!”

Three times a week I walked into her class, and before I could notice, it had changed from being a horrendous scheduling mistake to being the safest place I had. Everything that happened outside the studio I could take inside the studio to work it out. This crazy woman had me wanting to fight back. Wanting to take up space. Wanting to get strong. Wanting to feel again.

And for the first time in my life, I had to. Dance demanded that I inhabit the body I was in. There was no ignoring the pain of floor work, or losing focus mid-turn. For an hour and fifteen minutes, three times a week, I had to be present.

It was everything. It was the sweat, the hardwood, the Bruno Mars and the spandex. Most of all, it was the people. Fiat had managed to create a space of unconditional acceptance.

One class, she outdid herself with a truly bizarre exercise. We had to approach each other in pairs, bring our hands an inch away in a frozen pre-high five, hold eye contact and stillness for a few moments, then break and continue to the other side of the circle. We rolled our eyes and nervous-giggled for the first few minutes, but something a little magic started happening. She was teaching us to connect with each other. To stop, to see, and to be seen.

“This, this is the most important thing of all. When you move through your day, pause to connect. We have to connect. It’s what it means to be human.”

And then, one class, during an endless round of crunches (eight more my tuckus, Fiat), I got angry. I got angry about the overflowing garbage in the trash can. And instead of trying to compress it down to fit more in, I kicked over the trash can. I let myself be angry. And I decided to fight.

I committed to every odd piece of choreography that class. I fought to land the counts, I fought the fast tempo, I fought the fatigue in my legs. I fought to take up as much space as I could, and I fought to take myself seriously. And when I left the studio that day, I didn’t stop fighting.

That semester I stretched to fill myself again, reaching back into the tips of my fingers and the backs of my knees, the lobes of my ears and the curves of my heels. There was pain there. But what I also discovered at the edges of my skin was joy. So much joy. It turns out the same nerves that feel pain also feel pleasure.

I fell in love with life again that semester. I learned to dance in trash.