I Could Fall In Love Again

This morning I went to Sunday Tribal Jam, which would be my first dance class since, like, August. Everything I thought would happen did happen: I forgot how to stand in angled formation: I remembered how to three-quarter shimmy: I got sore arms merely from holding them up, let alone doing anything with them: I heard a lot of music I like but haven’t listened lately; I realized how very sway-backed my swayed back really is; I made all sorts of crazy sex faces during stretch, and I had the kind of deeply ridiculous and deeply satisfying conversation that only a studio full of sweaty barefoot enthusiasts can engender:

“Okay, so the three is behind the one?”

“Yes, but make sure you fill in the gaps between the two and the five if you’re the four.”

“And is it five-six-seven-EIGHT or is it five-SIX-seven-EIGHT?

“I thought it was five-SIX-seven-EIGHT.”

“The way I know how to do it is one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, and then one-TWO-three-FOUR-five-SIX-seven-EIGHT.”

“No, wait–five-six-seven-EIGHT, right?”

“I don’t get it.”

“It goes five-SIX-seven-EIGHT because you do quarters first and then halves.”

“Ooooooohhhhhhhhhh. Quarters and then halves.”

“Yeah, just make sure that you’re right between one and two if you’re the three.”

I have forgotten most of what I ever knew about tribal style, surely (“Quarters? Halves? QUARTERS? HALVES?”) but what became immediately apparent despite the frustration of feeling like a beginner again and the incipient soreness that I know is going to kill tomorrow is just how good dancing is for my body. My body loves to dance, loves to stretch and bend and stamp its feet. It likes using every part of itself including the brain, and it even sort of likes being sore and sweaty and crazy-haired, listening to music and alternating between furrowing its brow and smiling sillily. Dancing—whether it’s in class or on the dancefloor or out in the middle of the street at Cuba Carnival or in the kitchen at seven-thirty on a Thursday night waiting for the pasta water to boil—is just so good.

I know not everyone will agree with me on this but I secretly think that dancing is good for everyone, like that human beings just have this weird need for dance, and, as it follows, music. I thought about that this afternoon on the bus with my bags full of market veggies and I thought about it last night coming back from Petone, where I’d seen (and danced to!) a bunch of free live music at the Jackson Street Festival. I mean, I get that a lot of people don’t like to dance or think they can’t dance (passing a group of Irish dancers on our way to see the Ukulele Orchestra, Alice said “SEE? That’s why we can’t dance! We can only hop up and down! We can’t move side to side! SEE?”) or just think dancing is kind of dumb, but I will not be swayed. I think everyone should do it, early and often, whenever possible, to whatever kind of music happens to be playing.

Speaking of, it was kind of great last night wandering around Petone, going from a ukulele version of a Cyndi Lauper song (“We have no past, we won’t reach back, keep with me forward all through the night…”) to some funky funksters that always remind me of my first couple of weeks in Wellington in 2006 because I saw them at the Southern Cross with all the kids from the hostel, to the booty-shaking (literally, in my case) loud bangy drummy batucada band to the absolutely dreamy Woolshed Sessions, on whom I now have a big gigantic collective crush.

And those are all really different bands and sounds and feels, and yet I felt like I loved them all equally and enthusiastically last night, just like I love torso rotations and Beyonce-inspired grinding equally. Isn’t it kind of amazing, I said to Alice and her friend Dave last night in the car on the way back to Wellington, that our hearts have enough room for all of that? For synthesizers and banjos and loud jangly guitars and doumbeks and soft sad cellos; joke bands and symphonies and singing in the car; the raspy angry voices scraping away at the loss of the world and the creamy pure voices lapping around our ankles? There’s never enough, there’s always more, there’s always a little more room.

“I could fall in love again, I could fall in love again, but I think I’ve fallen in love too many times now,” the beautiful red-ruffled-shirt-wearing Age Pryor sang to me last night, right in my direction, possibly directly to me depending on how I squint. Does he feel that way too about music and dancing, do you think? Do you feel that way?