I hate this so much I want to do it forever

on dancing till the end of days and mum being a gay icon

I am feeling so well that on Saturday night I went dancing. Not clubbing but the sober Rainbow Rhythms style dancing I wrote about in Help Me!

Five Rhythms is a kind of therapeutic dancing. It was invented by a woman called Gabrielle Roth, a New Yorker who believed moving was a way to access inner wisdom, healing, and spiritual growth.

It might be all deep and spiritual but it is also deeply mortifying the first time you go. There are weird people primal screaming and skipping and swaying around like they are in a Kate Bush video. You hope they are on drugs but they aren’t.

The first time I went, in 2014, I hated it so much I knew I wanted to do it for the rest of my life.

I went from being ‘oh my God, who are these people?’ to being one of those people who was curling up and sobbing in the corner, screaming and stomping to some rage-filled music before fluttering around the room like a butterfly high on life.

It was liberating and for a few years I could not get enough of it.

Then it stopped - as so much did - with Covid.

By the time classes opened up in real life again, my energy wasn’t good enough to get across town so this Saturday was my first one in a couple of years.

It was with the same teacher I went to all those years ago. Her name is Sue Rickards and she is, as my neighbour Gary puts it, ‘The Real Deal’. You know she is the real deal because she is somehow very ordinary while also exuding a pure gold light.

Sue’s schtick is very much that you come to dance no matter how you are. You come when you are miserable, you come when you are ecstatic, you come when you are in love, you come when you are heartbroken… You dance through all your feelings, until, usually, you leave a different person to the one who walked in.

It’s a mixed crowd, age-wise. I’d say mid thirties to - in one case - eighties. I mean I don’t know if she was that old but she seemed very old while also looking like a little girl. Her eyes danced and her feet skipped.

At one point she came up to me and hugged me like we’d known each other all our lives. ‘I like the way your hips move,’ she said to me. ‘I liked the way your feet move!’ I said to her. She asked my friend Mary if she had done ballet. Mary said she had. ‘So did I,’ said the woman. You could tell.

The grace, the life, the aliveness.

It was the same with two men who looked well into their seventies. I danced with one of them to some kind of angry techno track; we both jumped up and down and started growling and then laughing. I had to stop before he did, I was out of breath.

On the way home Gary, my neighbour, said he wants to be dancing until he is in his nineties. ‘I want to be the oldest person in the room,’ he said. ‘I want to be like your mum.’ Mum doesn’t dance but at 78 she does yoga at home and struts up and down the street looking like a ginger Joan Collins. ‘Your mother is a gay icon,’ Gary says. Recently Mum and I bumped into another neighbour, who looked at both of us and seemed confused. ‘But your mother is so glamorous….’ she said.

Anyway.

On Saturday I regretted every single dance I did not do with Sue over the last few years. I wasn’t well enough to travel from East to North London but then a bit of me wonders if I’d made the effort, would gentle dancing, or even just sitting in the room with other humans with music, have healed me a bit?

There was a woman who spoke at the end. She wanted to explain why she was sitting on the side. She had a back injury ten years ago and she finds it hard to be on her feet, so she dances from the chair. ‘I didn’t want you to think I was snooty,’ she said, smiling. I was in awe of her spirit.

I felt so grateful my body is now well enough to get on a train and jump up and down with a 70-year-old.

What a privilege to have a body that can dance.

What a joy.

I hope I never forget.

xxxx

Here is some DANCEspiration!

PS This is a Coldplay video with Dick Van Dyke celebrating his 100th birthday. He is still dancing. It is incredible.

And here is an article about Eileen Kramer, a dancer who died last year at 108. She was dancing till the end.

And Bjork wearing a black sparkly sheet on her head saying she is going to keep raving till she is 90.