Intimacy On The Dancefloor

When my husband suggested we make Aliyah, I didn't think twice about it. I didn't even think once about it, there was no way I would pick up our five children and move them to a country whose primary goal was to prevent itself from annihilation by hostile neighbours intent on its destruction, all in a language I neither spoke nor understood. At the time, we were living an essentially religious life and my connection with my body, apart from its role as a delivery truck to my babies, was completely nonexistent. One evening a friend suggested I come along to an Israeli Folk dance class in Sydney. I had been a tap dancer till my late teens so she thought I would manage the intermediate class even though they were half way through the year. She was wrong. I spent the next three years chasing legs just to catch one tiny piece of a sequence without tripping over myself and bumping into everyone else even though I was sure they were all going the wrong way!

A few years later when my husband broached the subject of Israel again, I made a deal with him. I would come live in Israel with him if he would come learn Israeli dancing with me; and so it was that we made Aliya just over a year ago. He came to a few classes and subsequently dropped out, he's not a dancer, it's just not his thing and much as I would 'immigrate' just to dance with him, I gave up pushing it and embraced the opportunity to dance three sometimes four times a week and have him stay home and hold the fort. I had a lot of catching up to do.

I remember dancing a solo tap routine from the Broadway musical Cats as a young teenager and experiencing that moment when you 'get' what it means to lose yourself in a performance. It's a transcendent moment that allows you to be something greater than your regular self. In dance it's about complete presence, focus and body centred awareness. You have to lose yourself (your ego, your self consciousness, your fear), to access your greater self - the fearless, expansive part that resides in your centre. That's how I wanted it to be when I danced, not for the performance, but for the sheer bliss of feeling expanded and present. For me dance is a much needed meditation.

Yet to be completely present in a dance with a man who is not your life's partner, presents some challenges. At this point I will dance with anyone who will dance with me, even though I have some partners with whom I feel a particular affection, and with whom our movement, time and rhythm is perfectly weighted and synchronized. The challenge is not in the connection of the body but rather in the connection of the soul, which happens through the meeting of the eyes. When two people are aligned in a movement together and look at each other from the centre of their bliss, intimacy is the natural expression; dancing after all is courting ritual.

The question is not how to prevent that intimacy from expressing itself, because to do that one would have to disengage from their own centre, but rather how to manage it in a grown up world where married men and women dance with other married men and women. If you are able to feel the intimacy and allow it to express itself in the moment, without interpretation or transference it can be as innocent as two friends sharing a joke. For me that is the ultimate way to dance, connected heart to heart in innocence and bliss.

Still it's very hard to separate parts of ourselves, and stay clean in an intimate exchange between two humans. We confuse sex with love, the personal with the universal, our emotional with our intellectual. I watch couples dance together and wonder how they manage to be present with each other without complication. Perhaps it's the fact that I can't communicate in Hebrew to create clear boundaries or perhaps I'm missing something complicated in their partnership, an underlying chemistry that is not immediately revealed. Or perhaps I have to find a gay partner with whom I will be able to play and dance pretending we are secret lovers in an old black and white movie, or perhaps one day the true love of my life will get the jitters and join me in this exciting adventure on the dance floor of a basketball court somewhere in the middle east.