Dancing Through Winter. A study in form and function.

These days of flat gray cold leave me feeling flimsily susceptible to weather-influenced soul grayness. I don't reckon I have Seasonal Affected Disorder full blown, but I get that unsettling neutralizing of energy, with gray fading to darkness at 5pm.

I want to live a life of NOT soul-grayness.

I think I will dance my way through winter.

We go about talking and analyzing, and very often this is the default of how we process and move through life. And maybe we do yoga, slow delicious ways of shaping and stretching our physical capsules and processing living.  But dancing, especially the free form type, or adding spontaneous twirls into a contra dance set form, is a completely unrelated and often untouched way of being a human brain and body. Its like a vigorous self-applied massage. Joy in the human experience expressed. Or an attraction and connection with another expressed. The best kind of dance for me--not always accessible but wonderful when it happens-- is when thought and judgement drop away and it becomes an exuberant meditation. Body moving and warm, unstuck and open.

I've been dancing a lot lately. Swing and blues, dance club beats, organized and coordinated contra. God bless you, Ithaca and your venues.

(Or just my kitchen, solo, the Dishes Dancing Blues.)

I can go to these things with or without a partner. I've been here just long enough I can show up on a dance floor Friday night and know people and have dance friends.

Or dancing alone. This was happening Friday for a while on the beating blinking pumping floor and then I overheard somewhere, "You should dance with the hot 80s girl", and wondered who looked like an 80s girl. Then my friend Big Ben, who, amazingly went to college with me back when I had less color and no talking and no style, and he said "I was just told to dance with you". Ha! (Big Ben loves telling people how unrecognizable from my current self I was when he knew me in college.)

Contra dancing was last night.

Contra is a fascinating form, because its the sort of dance that relies less on self expression and more on a moderated structure. Which means it draws all sorts of characters, especially those who may feel a little self-consciousness about the inner spontaneous movement sense, attractive to people who love mathematics and engineering. I say this because I ask my partners what they do, and its very often engineering or complex biological sciences or the like. The swings and do-see-dos that repeat and move the room of bodies along in a pleasing pattern, all to 8-beat lines of bright music. I love it.

Contra is also an amazing study in types of dancers. The following is only a partial compendium, but I wish to share with you a few profiles.

Sweating Ecstatic Men. These are ones so thrilled to be part of this music and movement, they add aerobic embellishments to their dance, working themselves into a joyous frothing frenzy. One asked me to dance and I said yes; "and since I have many shirts I'm going to go get a new shirt," he said and charged off. He changed shirts between every dance he was sweating that much. Stomping like a clogger at every opportunity, hooting "Yeah!" and "Yes!" as the music made a turn to a new phrase. By the end of the night his eyes were wide, his hair like wet ropes on his face; he was so huge and warm and sticky that after going from him to my partner I assuredly transferred moisture. He shouted "YES!" now with a loud quaver in his voice, as if he were transformed with overpowering contra orgasms.

Then you have The Bosses. Old solid men who've likely been doing this for twice my life time. They will spin you in a controlled tight circle, perfectly on beat, never cracking their gravity for a smile, pushing or pulling you to every move so you needn't think. You never mess anything in those dances, floating and propelled in perfect time.

And finally The Young Grinners. College boys, anything from skinny and limp with petrified eager grins, to smooth moving boys who already have shoulders from working out. You both grin with the novelty of all of this, spinning about a room coordinated with all these people and the music.

Ok gray winter: music and endoprhins and Humanity, here I come.