Depression and Dance

For quite some time I’ve noticed that my mental health and my ability to enjoy dancing interact in bizarre and often unpredictable ways. Movement is often quite good for depression and anxiety, particularly movement that requires just enough though to get you out of your head. Dance in particular has a way of turning into a kind of exhilarating protest against depression, and during some of my very worst times it has been the only way that I can find enjoyment in my life.

But oftentimes depression itself can keep you from finding any enjoyment in the activity because you’re second guessing yourself, you’re comparing yourself to others, and for me, I was even looking at how skinny other women looked in their nice dresses or cute shorts rather than paying any attention to my dancing at all.

I’ve often been left in a space where I contemplate going out to dance utterly uncertain whether it will save me from a bad day or leave me spiraling downwards even further. So why is it that sometimes dance is a lifesaver and sometimes it’s destruction? Perhaps even further complicating the matter is that I’ve noticed recently when I go out to dance and I’m in a decent mood, I am a much better dancer. I have better dances and because of increased confidence and the ability to play around with my partners, I simply have more fun. It’s left me questioning whether I was even capable of improving beyond a certain point when I was in the midst of depression.

As one of my coping mechanisms, dancing has been incredibly helpful. But how on earth do I figure out when it’s a good idea to hit the dance floor and when I should try to avoid it? How do I feel good about dancing when I’m down if I know that I’m not going to be my best dancer self? What is the point of dancing if there’s all this ridiculous complicated bullcrap going through my mind in a kind of calculus of “will I be ok” every time I go out?

These questions hit on one of the most difficult elements of depression across the board: it can be deeply unpredictable, and coping mechanisms are often unreliable. I keep dancing because oftentimes it’s the best I’ve got. Sometimes, the high from a good night of dance can keep me going for a week, looking forward to the next time I’ll get it. Considering the fact that when I’m in a bad place nearly anything can send me into a shame spiral, it’s certainly worth the risk if there’s even a chance that I might get the positive benefits.

The longer I’m depressed, the easier it becomes to match coping mechanism to mood, and paying attention to what sets off certain bad spirals can do a lot to make things like dance a more positive thing overall. I’ve started to get the feel for whether I have the energy to become fiercely pissed off at my depression and drop everything to dance, or whether I am trapped in my head and exhausted. For me, going out alone is the best idea when I’m in a bad place because it means I never have to try to converse, I just have to dance. This is part of using coping methods effectively: figuring out when and how to use them.

Part of learning coping skills is also learning when to abort the mission. This is one of the difficulties of using something that you love as a way to improve your mood. You don’t want to abort the mission. You want to find the good dance, the happy moment, the high. That isn’t always possible, and accepting that is hugely helpful to cutting off bad spirals. Sometimes you will go out and it won’t feel good and you’ll just have to leave.

But what about the interaction of my ability to dance and my depression? Well of course i’m better when I’m not body checking every few seconds. The dance that I do is about fun, so of course I can embody the feeling of swing music significantly better when i’m not in a mood directly antithetical to it. But that doesn’t mean that I’m a bad dancer or that I’m not learning anything when I dance in the midst of depression. It means that I’m learning how to navigate my body, learning steps, learning how to follow better, even if I can’t get into the musicality in the same way. I can focus on a different set of skills here. And in many ways that is fun. It’s a practice of getting out of my head and working on discrete skills rather than trying to work on the more artistic aspects of dance.

It is a fallacy of depression that one should only do things if one will be good or perfect at them, or that one must always be their very very best (or keep trying to be better always). Sometimes it’s ok to simply do something for fun with no eye to improvement (gasp). Sometimes it’s ok to just be where you are today rather than trying to be better or the best version of you. Improvement is a great goal, but it doesn’t need to always be the goal. In this case, I probably am improving something when I dance while depressed: my coping skills and my ability to manage my emotions. Points for me!

Swing dancing is really an expression of energy, body, and connection. These things are all incredibly hard when you’re depressed but when you can capture them they can go huge lengths to making things better. That’s why it’s just easier to dance when you’re in a better place, but why it’s so important to keep trying when things are bad. That’s also why it’s so complicated: all of these elements are deeply out of whack in the midst of depression and can change at any time. But this might also be a case where overthinking isn’t helpful: checking in with my emotions before I head out for the night, learning to accept where I am and  leaving early if I need to may be all the more tools I need in this toolkit.

Because seriously: I love dancing. I’m not giving it up to my mental illness anymore.

Losing a Love: Sexism is Pushing Me Away from Dancing

I’ve been feeling really frustrated for some time now and I’m uncertain of what to do. I’ve been noticing some serious problems in a community that I really care about and want to be a part of, and I’m uncertain of how to address them. This is a post about swing dancing and about sexism, and if you think that those two things don’t happen together then you should probably go away right now because I’m not particularly interested in trying to convince anyone that they do exist. What I do want to do is talk about how to react when someone mentions that your scene has a problem with sexism and that it’s bothering them. Two caveats: I don’t travel much for dance, so this post is limited to my local dance scene, and I have not done much by way of digging into other people’s experiences so this is primarily my own experience. However I think that if anyone in the lindy scene is treated as I have been, then it’s a problem.

 

I have noticed from the very first time that I began swing dancing that there was a problem with sexism in my community. The examples of this are too numerous to list in full, but to begin, there is the extremely gendered nature of the lead/follow roles. Some people might suggest that it isn’t sexist to have separate roles, but any time all the people in one gender feel pressure to do one thing and all the people of another gender feel pressure to do another thing, and there is exactly 0 space for nonbinary people, I start to worry. When it’s perfectly acceptable in a class for the instructor to say “guys” for leads and “girls” for follows, even when there are female leads in the class, I get really worried.

 

In addition to the fact that the two roles are gendered, it seems from my experience that they are also weighted differently. In competition, the male’s name is always called first, and he wears the number: he is considered “the couple”. This may seem small, but it is symbolic of a larger hierarchy in which leads tend to get more attention, praise, and time than follows. Follows are generally given short shrift during lessons, particularly in beginning dance classes which focus a lot on teaching leads particular moves. In the vast majority of the classes that I have been in, the male partner of the teacher duo speaks far more often than the female, and dominates the class. More often than not, he speaks exclusively to the leads. Therefore leads get most of the class time focused on them.

 

I have also heard following described in a derogatory fashion many, many times. I’ve done it myself. I’ve seen it stereotyped as easier, lazy, unimportant, or as not contributing. I’ve heard follows referred to as trailers. Leads are told that they’re there to “show off” their follow, as if she’s an object. And as an odd pairing with this, follows are told that they’re “always right” and that leads are “stupid” in a bizarre mimicry of the putting women on a pedestal while treating them like they can’t do anything.

 

And even beyond the gendered nature of the roles and the prioritizing of one over the other, there is absolutely policing of heterosexuality and gender roles in the dance community. Some people might say that everyone is free to choose the role that they prefer, but there is a great deal of rhetoric that men are more suited to lead, and when all of your gender is choosing one thing, you absolutely get jokes or comments when you choose something else. And when you look at who dances with whom, it’s highly gendered. Sometimes women will dance with other women. That is true. Generally it’s their close friends, and when there aren’t enough men around. Men very rarely dance with each other, and a bizarre kind of fetishization takes place when they do: they get cat-called, or watched like no one else does. Men who follow get a lot of attention, but not really for the quality of their dancing, simply for being different, exciting, and “sexy”. Certain styles of dancing are considered feminine, and others masculine (seriously, try being a fly on the wall when an instructor asks guys to do hip swivels. 90% of the men look highly uncomfortable, and the instructor treats them like they’re physically incapable of moving their hips. I realize that women are typically more flexible through their hips but it’s not like we all need to be Nina Gilkenson here folks).

 

Perhaps worse than anything, some of the leaders of our community repeatedly make inappropriate and misogynistic comments and are still hero worshipped. I have even talked to other follows who have been groped while dancing with some of the leaders of our community and no one will bring it up or ask people to change their behaviors. I have absolutely had non-accidental boob and butt grabs happen to me while dancing and that is 100% Not OK. That is harassment. Plain and simple.

 

And yet there is absolutely no system in place to address concerns like this. When I have been grabbed or made to feel uncomfortable, there is no one for me to speak to about it, and I rarely feel as if there is a system in place at events for me to deal with or process it. It could be as easy as instituting a harassment policy in classes, events, or social dances, so that if someone is being inappropriate, there is someone to tell. And in addition to the lack of any oversight about harassment, the reaction when I have mentioned that things might be a little off has been…unwelcoming to say the least. When I try to bring up sexism in the dance community, every single tired old excuse for sexism gets trotted out in front of me.

 

I’m told that’s just the way things are, or that people just happen to feel more comfortable in the same role as the rest of their gender. I’m told that it’s an overreaction, that I’m the “PC Police”. I’m told that men are naturally better at leading, and women are naturally better at following. I’m told that men and women’s bodies move different ways so we can’t expect them to do the same things. I never hear discussion of these issues unless I bring them up, and when I bring them up there is so much defensiveness that I start to wonder if I’m hallucinating all these things that make me feel so uncomfortable and if I should just give up.

 

And that’s a huge problem to me. If someone in your movement takes the time to say that they feel something is wrong, that they feel uncomfortable or unwelcome in some manner, the response that they’re just making it up or overreacting is not the right response. Even if they are overreacting, you should still take the time to listen to their concerns and do your best to address whatever is making them uncomfortable. But when you gaslight, or get defensive, it alienates them and anyone else who might have had similar feelings. It illustrates that you’re more concerned about saving face and being right than you are about ensuring the comfort of the people in your community.

 

If leaders in the community, particularly instructors and those who organize dances, took the time to listen to some of the concerns, they might realize that the ways we can address some of this sexism are things that are fairly easy to institute and would generally improve the community even if sexism weren’t a problem. It absolutely wouldn’t hurt anything or destroy all gender roles or result in a breakdown of all order. It would simply allow more flexibility for everyone to learn all parts of the dance and challenge themselves.

 

Some suggestions:

 

1. Start out beginner dance classes as ambi: switching between lead and follow. If not beginner classes, then at least have ambi classes as an option.

2. Start a series of classes for intermediate to advanced dancers to learn the other part.

3. During social dances, announce one song a night that’s the gender bender song: everyone dance a different part or with a different gender than you typically would.

4. Try starting some dialogues, particularly in more advanced classes, about why people feel comfortable in particular roles and how we can make more roles comfortable.

5. Try to teach across genders: have a female teacher try to teach to the males, or vice versa.

6. Use gender neutral language when teaching.

 

I have a hard time imagining negative consequences to these actions, and if someone has thoughts about negative consequences please let me know. I can however imagine a lot of positive consequences. Each of us has individual talents. Some of them might be more likely to fall in one gender or another, but we all have talents, and if we were to be able to choose our role based upon which one we’re better at and feel more comfortable doing, rather than our gender, I imagine we’d all enjoy ourselves more. In addition, having an understanding of both parts of the dance can only make us better dancers. It increases our number of potential partners. It could help to desexualize many dances (which in my mind is a good thing: I don’t think dances should be sexualized unless both partners want it to be). If nothing else they will make us more aware of ourselves and each other, and improve our dancing by allowing us to understand more parts of the dance. So why do people react in such a negative way? Why are people so defensive about sexism in dancing?

 

To me, this illustrates that some people have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are, or that some people are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of breaking down some of the gender roles and power structures that currently exist in dancing. I’m not entirely sure why, and I’m not sure what they gain by keeping things the way they are. But every time I bring up one of my concerns and am told that people are just joking, or to loosen up, or that I’m overreacting, I become less and less interested in returning to the dances around town. I enjoy myself less and less. I know that dance communities pride themselves on being welcoming and thus may not like to hear that someone feels unwelcome, but one of the most important things to do in order to be welcoming is to listen.

 

And I’m speaking up: I am losing something that makes me extremely happy because I feel unwelcome and ignored due to my gender. I feel like I’ve been actively told to shut up when I bring up these concerns. This is not the way to handle concerns in a community, and it means that you are actively losing someone who wanted to be part of your community. I realize that I have very little power and that whether or not I continue to dance means very little to anyone but me, but I know that I am not the only one who feels this way. If something doesn’t change, you will continue to alienate people. I have no desire to attack anyone, name names, or point fingers. This is likely no one’s fault, but is rather a vestige of the past. All I ask is for some changes, or at least some acceptance that there might be a problem and that we could improve.

Dancing, Empowerment and Space

So yesterday I wrote about the privilege of having space, and yesterday I finally managed to get out and REALLY go dancing. There have been a few times in the last month where I’ve gone to dance events and haven’t really asked people to dance and generally just been a soggy blanket of “I’m too lazy everyone do the work for me”, and thus didn’t get dances in and didn’t get the benefits of dancing that I love so much. But last night I had a “fuck it I’m dancing” attitude, had some FANTASTIC dances, and really just let loose during some of the line dances (which I love because I feel no shame when I’m surrounded by other people looking just as foolish as I am).

 

And as I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that I love about dancing is that it requires that I take up space. It demands that I take up my own space, that I choose who shares that space with me, that I creatively interpret space, and thus MAKE space my own. It makes me bigger. It puts me in control of my body and the space that it occupies. As someone who is often part of groups (women, the mentally ill) that don’t get the privilege of space, or who are kicked out of other spaces, this feels fantastic.

 

And it got me thinking. One of the most powerful things that a minority group has is often its culture: the particular things that they use to co-opt space. More often than not these are art forms, because that is what they have access to. And one of the most powerful of these is dance. When people’s spaces and rights are taken away from them, one of the things that they almost always manage to find a way to do is dance. One of the myths about the origins of Irish dancing is that it originated when individuals were held captive and didn’t want their captors to know that they were expressing themselves, so they danced in such a way that if a guard looked in and only saw their upper body, it wouldn’t be apparent they were dancing. It was a way to co-opt the space and make it their own, a form of rebellion.

 

Or to look at the evolution of the Lindy Hop itself, it was often a way for all-black communities to break into the ballroom culture that they were barred from in white communities. It was a way taking the concepts of music and dance, but making them into something that a particular minority community did as a way of expressing its roots and its feelings to separate it from the majority community: the lindy hop of black ballrooms was NOT the dances of the white ballrooms (as told in Frankie Manning’s autobiography).

 

Now of course these dances then get overtaken by a majority culture that often exoticizes them (lindy hop was included in revues and shows as a cultural or exotic dance for a time), but the beauty of it is that no majority culture can ever take away the ability of another culture to move their bodies in space. When lindy hop was overtaken by primarily white dancers, things like hip hop started to emerge in its place. When hip hop got taken over by white dancers, we see crunking and other variations. And while I have never been an African-American dancing, I have been a woman dancing and I can guess that it feels damn empowering to choose how you move your body and to express yourself in a way that is uniquely your own, taking up space, reforming space, and interacting with others in a space that you choose to give them. Dancing is a form of empowerment.

 

There’s also a reason that you can “battle” with dancing: it’s about space and about who takes up the most space. It’s about who is the biggest. However for me, competition has never been the heart of dancing. The heart of dancing has always been about welcoming others into your space and about creating more space for yourself. My problems often don’t get space: they’re invisible (unless you talk to yourself and then you get shut away in spaces like mental hospitals). Taking space for myself is like taking space for my problems too and it feels GREAT.

 

(Photo credit to Ben Hejkel. If you can find me, props)

What Lindy Means To Me

So for those people who don’t know me personally and have just stumbled upon this blog out of the internet wasteland, I have a completely new topic to introduce. I am a lindy hopper. I swing dance. I LOVE swing dancing. I’ve been starting to get engaged with some lindy blogs, and I want to share a bit of my feelings and thoughts about dance, since it’s also a part of who I am and something that I feel is important and should be shared.

So as I was reading some blog posts, I came across one that was about things that good lindy hoppers do/ways to get better at lindy. And one of those things was “Develop a unique voice and perspective on dance. You’ll need to figure out what this means to you. I can only promise that this is usually a difficult process. But hey, you’re looking for hard things to work on and making your own discoveries now, right?”

I have lots of thoughts and feelings about dancing and why it’s so important to me, but I want to make some of them more coherent, figure out my unique perspective on dance. So that’s the goal of this blog: why do I dance, why do I feel dancing is important, what does dancing mean to you, and how do I view my progress in dancing so far?

So the first thing that swing means to me is something that I absolutely did not understand at first, but is something that has come to mean the world to me. It’s something that I first started to experience with taiko, and since have found even more of in swing. Lindy hop lets me be big.

You might be giving me a funny look right now because that makes no sense. Justified. To explain: I spend a lot of my time trying to be small. Sometimes this is emotionally. I try not to bring up things that bother me. I try to mold myself to what other people want, what might please them. More often than not, it’s physical: as someone with an eating disorder, my life has been consumed by the concept of smaller for four years. It has been my goal, my overwhelming certainty that I need to take up less space in this world. I have nearly killed myself trying to be smaller.

You cannot dance without taking up space. You cannot follow without making your body solid in certain ways, with being willing to move into and out of space and fill spaces. Dance is the expression of self in space. To be a good dancer, you have to be willing to make your body an extension of your self, a part of your identity, and then use it to fill up space.

And it’s enjoyable. Taking up space with my self can make me smile. That is the hugest gift that dancing has given me, and I think that it’s one of the most important things that it does for many people. We rarely are encouraged or allowed to express joy or self with our bodies. We’re not really told to jump up and down with glee. Sexuality is fairly repressed in this country. Bodies are hardly celebrated, and are rarely viewed as an integral part of self (see my post about tattoos). So think about how revolutionary it is to get a bunch of people in a room together, tell them that their bodies are a form of art, and that they can be joyous while being big and beautiful and expressing themselves in a purely physical manner. And it’s not dirty. It’s not bad. It’s completely platonic for most people. Holy. Shit.

If you’re going to be a good swing dancer, you have to be willing to extend your movements, to raise your hands over your head, to show all of your body and make it appear bigger than it is, because if you want to compete you need to have a presence. That is the antithesis of what I’ve done for many years, and very much not something women are encouraged to do very often.  It is SO POWERFUL in my mind, and is so often overlooked as one of the joys and beauties of lindy. It’s often discussed in the lindy scene that there are some sexist overtones with the lead/follow dynamic, but in my mind the expression of beauty and self through the body is so empowering to anyone who does it that it trumps anything else that might be going on (which is not to say we shouldn’t discuss the sexist bits).

In addition to this there’s another really important piece of dance that relates to my mental health. Honestly I think that swing is the perfect therapy for me, and that many of the thing I love about it have illustrated how to move forward in my life. Anyway. Whoosh. Yeah that’s the second thing. Whoosh. In case you haven’t noticed, my brain has its own vocabulary for lindy hop, and it might take some getting used to. Whoosh is about trust. Whoosh is the feeling that you get when you’re doing a really good swing out and your partner catches you and you hit that moment of movement that’s just…whoosh. You can’t stop yourself at this point. Your momentum is already going. It’s almost out of control. It’s almost a little scary if you don’t trust your partner to catch you or put you back where you started. It’s exhilarating. It’s exciting. And it doesn’t work without taking the plunge to prepare your body and then let it go.

Obviously you want to be in control of your body throughout the entire dance, but there are moments when you give yourself to the momentum of your body. I think this happens particularly often for followers, since a good follower will follow their momentum wherever it goes (still working on this). And that means that you have to be willing to prepare yourself (have your footwork right, have good balance), but then simply trust your body to end up in the right spot, to follow its momentum. In swingouts, it also means trusting your partner a great deal. It means that in many ways you give up control. While you still get to choose where and how you move your body, you let someone (or something) else tweak it or shape it or work with it. When you try to control too much your dancing is rigid and you can’t follow well at all. When you let go of some of your control and simply let your body react and trust that you have prepared well, you get whoosh. Which is REALLY FUN.

Another place where I’ve found whoosh is on roller coasters. You trust that everyone has done their prep right, that you’re safe, you put yourself in a scary situation, but when you let the fear happen and wash over you, you get the whoosh of fun and speed and movement.

The idea of letting go of control in order to succeed, in order to trust, in order to trust MY BODY of all things is CRAZY to me. It’s difficult. It’s terrifying. It’s hard to trust others, it’s hard to trust the world in general. But it’s a skill that’s necessary. It’s the kind of leap of faith that pisses me off in many situations (because I think faith is not rational and thus shouldn’t be trusted) but that is so necessary in relationships, and often when making difficult decisions in life. If I could make that same kind of leap of faith with my recovery, and fall into the whoosh of it instead of holding on to the control and the fear, I have no doubt that I would be healthy. I’m sure this is true of all sorts of bad habits that people have. We can learn a lot from the whoosh of swing. We can also learn a lot about relationships from it: sometimes you have to trust your partner.

Speaking of relationships, one of the other things I love about lindy is the dynamic of follower and leader and how if you’re going to be a good dancer (or so I’m told) it often has to be like a good relationship: it’s not one person speaking and the other listening. It’s each person listening to the other, and molding the shape of the momentum in the dance together. It’s about a suggestion, and then taking that suggestion and building on it. I’m loving learning how to do that. I spend a lot of time trying to be aware of the other person while also being aware of myself and expressing myself. It’s a lot to keep track of at once, but so is life. It’s good brain training.

This is getting to be a really long post, and I think these are my main points. I may come back to swing thoughts later on, but for now I’ll just leave you with some of my swing dancing goal:

1.Work on tandem Charleston. Learn how to distinguish a lead into that from a lead into a turn. Stop stepping on people’s feet.

2.Listen to more music. Get the feel of it back.

3.Work on my bal.

4.Ask more people to dance more of the time.

5.Start working exercise back into my routine (slowly. I promise mom, very slowly) so that I can keep up my stamina at dances.

6.Go to more classes for added practice.

7.Practice on my own: triple stepping through turns.

8.Take more solo dance classes. Overcome paranoia of mirrors at said classes. Overcome paranoia of people seeing me dance without a lead.