“When a body moves, it’s the most revealing thing. Dance for me for a minute, and I’ll tell you who you are.” – Mikhail Baryshnikov.

In 1966, my father was born in Hyderabad, India. As a student, he performed poorly in front of his teachers. Papa was an athlete and a dancer. In these roles, he performed pretty well. His movement had no genre or discipline- only an appreciation of how it made him feel. Friends and family picked up on this awareness he had of himself. Some watched, others joined. His confidence was both revered and societally questioned. But there was nothing anyone else to do about it because Michael Jackson sounded too good, and the ladies love a man who can dance.

In 2004, your mother and your father had you. As a child, you always wanted a lot of things for yourself. Mainly, you wanted to be smart, and you wanted to be good. Achieving this was hard because you were neither. In 2010, when all your classmates were reading, you still could not spell your last name. But you lied and told everyone that you were reading Harry Potter. And in 2013, you were jealous of your classmate’s snacks. So, you told your teacher you were going to the bathroom, snuck into Heidi’s lunch box, and stole her gushers. You hated this secret world in your head, built on untruths and stolen souvenirs of your relatability. Your web stretched throughout your life, its strands loose and wound together by your secrecy. Only you knew who you were, and you didn’t exactly like that person. You, too, were performing, but no one could watch.

Some secrets are bad, and others are good. When you dance with Dad, it feels like a secret that you are both in on. No one else knew how to impress the crowd like the two of you. This joyful look on your face is genetic, and you have won the lottery. Seldom do you feel so lucky: this happiness is honest. You did not steal it from a lunch box or make it up for clout. Dancing to Bollywood songs at his birthday party, then your birthday party. Your itchy frock billowing while he holds your hand and spins you. Copying his movements is easier because you are his daughter, and something cosmic and musical is tethering his motion to yours.

Your parents acknowledged this energy in you and placed you in Bollywood and Kathak dance classes. For whatever reason, this choice embarrassed you. The class was fun, but it never felt like the real deal. You were not the best, and the ballet studio next door belittled you with their matching leotards, neat lines, and perfectly slicked-back buns. Your movements looked spastic and juvenile compared to theirs. In Kathak, you turn on the blistered heels god gave you. In ballet, you spin on the tip of your store-bought shoe. So you found a new secret, and that was how you danced, jumping and twirling in the privacy of your bedroom and never telling anyone when you had a performance. Dancing makes you feel good. You have recognized that, but can people see this good feeling upon looking at you? It may be too much for them. You think you may look like some distorted or mangled thing. But it’s okay because it’s a secret.

In Hinduism, the sacral chakra is where you hold all of your sexual energy. It sits just below your belly button. It’s the area you grab while looking at yourself judgingly, wondering if you are sexy enough or if the boys in high school want you enough. You are too scared to find out, and your stomach hurts from the insecurity bubbling inside it. Still, you dance in secret. Now, there is something different about the way you are moving. Dancing will always make you feel something, but other people make you feel things, too. At times, you want them to do so. The way you are moving and the look in your eyes suggests you want them to watch you, to see what other people can’t, to feel what you cannot discover without them. 

Sex is like a dance performance with its built-in audience. But it’s different from dancing as some things are out of your control. Hopefully, you are in command of things, but the other person commands you back. They bend and stretch you at their will. They abstract you into their vision. They discard the secrets you are spilling into them and splatter their own all over you. You want to please them so badly. You need to do everything right. Move your hip the right way, say the right sweet nothing, and kiss without losing the rhythm of the other person. There is no rehearsal with sex, only showtime. Your dance teacher isn’t in the room to tell you to stop and do it again after messing up the first fifteen times. You can not take it from the top. And there is not 5, 6, 7, or 8. 

The time spent secluded and frightened in your world made you cautious of hurting others and left you suppressing what you loved from them as well. Sometimes, introspection is parasitic. It strips what little pride you have left and does so slowly and solitarily. Fortunately, dancing is the yang to introspection’s yin. And more time alone gives you more time to dance. More time to understand yourself, to understand that if this makes you feel good, people will realize that too. And this world outside of your own, full of consequences, insults, rejection, and suffering, was also full of opportunities to dance. The feeling of this freedom lingered in your soul like the aftertaste of a night out’s cigarette on your tongue. It infected the girl next to you at the party, making her grin with excitement when she realized that you also love this song. And maybe you will never see her again, but the next time you and she hear that song at the function, she may reminisce about the last time she heard it. How she let her voice get louder, let her drink spill on the floor, and let her enthusiasm push bodies away to make room for herself. She’ll remember how it made her feel good, how it gave her a fleeting friendship, and so will you.  

The next day, you will wake up, your head might be pounding, and your heels might have left a blister on the back of your ankle. You may even feel full of regret, wishing that the cute boy from across the room had kissed you or praying that the one that did forget your name. But you don’t feel obstructed and are no longer keeping yourself a secret. By this point, you have danced enough to recognize that when you adjust the look in your eyes to match the tone of the song or shake your ass to the beat, it feels rather conscious and so aware that finally, your identity feels clear to you and there is no use in hiding it. Dancing is the best release. Dancing is not daunting like how opening yourself to hurt is daunting. Dancing is vulnerable; it is sensitive and, at times, reckless. Dancing is releasing yourself in motion; it is lacking control, all while commanding every movement you make.  All you ever needed was yourself, your body, and perhaps a little room. 

~Nirvika Dhanasri

>>> Hi! I originally wrote this piece for a college magazine. It did not end up getting picked for publication but I am still very proud of it. Not to say that this story was half-assed, but I definitely could have embraced the resources that the magazine offered me more to have made this better. Still, this piece is quite personal and a stubborn part of me can’t imagine it any other way. I think my next story should be about the art of half-assing and still being good enough. Either way, I hoped you enjoyed reading this!