Praha 13, or In Which I Go To Dance Class and Try to Express Sexy

Before I dig into this entry, I need to send an urgent message to my immediate family. CALL ME NEXT TIME, OKAY? ESPECIALLY WHEN I TELL YOU I'LL BE AWAKE ANYWAY. That said, I'm glad everything is okay and went well. I'll call him this weekend.

Now, to our regularly scheduled programming:

Those who’ve known me a long time will tell you that I am no dancer. I can contra dance, but only because it’s more like walking and stomping than actually dancing. I can do contact improvisation, but only because anything counts as contact improv. But when it comes to a dance form that not only requires the use of my feet, but the use of my arms, hips, shoulders, neck and abdomen, I look like a short-circuited robot. I have long held that I will not dance around anyone but my sister, who has promised not to laugh at me, and the rest of my family. I do weddings, I do Bar Mitzvahs. I do not do clubs and parties.

I took ballet for one terrible summer. The teacher made us sit in straddles with our feet braced against the wall, while she used her shin to push on our backs to make our legs go wider. I have never had that much flexibility in my legs, even though I did gymnastics – and loved it – for about six years. After some time, I decided I didn’t care about dancing. I could sing, and write, and do martial arts, and that was enough.

But here, I met Ellen. Ellen loves to dance the way I love to sing. She’ll take any excuse to get up and move, take any opportunity to watch others dance; yet she’s got fairly limited formal dance training. She still looks amazing on the dance floor. She doesn’t watch anyone while she dances – she’s too into the music, too into the miracle of her own body moving – so I’m actually okay dancing around her. That makes two people I can dance around – huzzah!

The other night, Ellen and I cranked up our combined collection of Arabic and Israeli music and danced like fools for at least a full hour after dinner. We taught each other Israeli folk dances from when we were kids, and I got to do contact-improvish things like leaping up on to the furniture and suspending myself from the countertops. It was fun, and we were both panting and sweating at the end of it.

Ellen invited me to come check out this bellydance class with her up the street. It was the one button she could’ve pushed. I’ve always – always – wanted to learn to bellydance. It’s fun, it’s sexy, and best of all, it’s not a dance meant for skinny girls. Ballerinas aren’t meant to bellydance. To bellydance, you need to be willing to celebrate curves and rolls and flesh. I went with her – the first class was free, so what did I have to lose?

There were six women in the class – three who spoke Czech, and had obviously been in the class for awhile, Ellen, me, and a student from another country, who spoke English with a strong accent that I recognized as Finnish. It was her first class too. The teacher started to warm us up, and I kept up okay. Then she said a long string of words ending in something that sounded like “choreographea (KO-reh-o-GRA-feh)” and started to piece a dance together.

At that point, I stopped watching the teacher for a moment, and tried to see myself in the mirror. I shouldn’t have. I looked like a robot with few bad wires. My brain wasn’t getting the message to the rest of my body, and instead of twisting and rolling and intricately shimmy-ing, I jerked and twisted and felt completely disconnected from myself. I looked like I was in pain. After that, I kept looking at the teacher.

It felt good to get out and work hard for awhile, but it was embarrassing, let me tell you, especially when the teacher figured out that the three of us in the back only spoke English and Finnish and told us, “You need express - how do you say – sexy? Sexy express. No smiling, sexy.” Believe me, I was as far from feeling sexy as I ever have been. But I tried. Give me that.

I still really want to learn to bellydance, which is why I think I’m going to go back each week with Ellen (who loved it, by the way. She thinks I take myself too seriously.) But I wonder: I would’ve never had the guts to do that in the States.

Maybe there’s something to this being-abroad stuff. Maybe I got the courage to step out of my comfort zone because I’m already so far gone from it that I might as well go a little farther. Maybe it’s because Prague is not Northampton, and it’s unlikely that I’ll run into the dance teacher on the street, in the store, or while getting coffee. Maybe it’s because I really want to come home and say I learned to bellydance in Central Eastern Europe.

Expressing sexy, however – that’s going to take awhile.