Not so tiny dancer

I have always hated dancing, ever since Morag McIntosh and I ran out of our ballet class at the age of 7 and vowed we would never go back. I still feel woefully self-conscious dancing, even if we’re just talking about standing in a crowded club and jiggling a bit. I hate it, I can’t relax, everyone’s looking, I hate it I hate it I HATE IT. Did I mention that I don’t like dancing?

I love to watch people dance, though, if they’re good. In fact, let’s watch some good dancing now:

I’d love to dance like that, but I can’t. Not even close.

My aversion to dancing began long before my weight gain. I just never liked it. And yet somehow, over the last eight years, it has become all about weight. I blamed my complete absence of any sense of rhythm on the fact that I am overweight and cannot move quickly enough. I blamed my inability to perform certain steps on the fact that I am carrying too much weight to be flexible. It’s all about being fat, you see. Fat = bad at dancing. Thin = good at dancing.

Dancing is supposed to be a good way of improving your general grace and balance, and I am woefully lacking in both, so I decided to take up bellydancing. I chose bellydancing because, as everyone knows, it is fat friendly. You NEED a belly to bellydance. Bellydancing is for fat people! Everyone knows that! So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I walked into the classroom last Saturday to discover that everyone else in the class was a stick. Seriously. They were lovely women but not only was there no one as big as me, there was no one who had a belly, and that includes the instructor. She had a belly in the same way as Kate Winslet is considered to be a plus sized actress. It was as if I had nicked all of the bellies and shoved them under my top.

Looking at myself in the mirror sort of made me want to cry and run out the room, but I’d paid for the term in advance so I was buggered if I was giving up. And it’s just as well I didn’t, because when we started dancing, I could see that we were all actually pretty much at the same level, and by “level” I mean “utterly shit”. Think of Shakira. Now imagine her standing in for Michael Jackson in Thriller. That’s what we looked like as the instructor sashayed backwards and forwards in front of us, arms wafting delicately in and out, wiggling her no-belly, with the rest of us stamping and crashing about behind her, arms out like sticks, rolling precariously every time we stood on tiptoe.

We were crap. I was crap. The others were crap. It was just… crap. We all looked dreadful. It was great.

I found this strangely comforting. I took even more comfort in the fact that at the end of the class, when we were stretching, I was the only person who was able to bend over and put the palms of my hands flat on the floor without bending at the knee. YES! Me! The token porketeer! TAKE IT BITCHES!

I don’t know why I think that weight has anything to do with dancing, or with flexibility. At the Jamaican Dancehall classes I used to go to there were at least six or seven girls in the class who were much bigger than me; a couple of them would probably have been classed as morbidly obese, and they were fantastic dancers: 100% on the beat, fantastic sense of rhythm, they looked fabulous when they danced. One of them could do the splits. For some reason I had assumed that only thin people could do the splits. Because it’s like every other physical activity, isn’t it? If you aren’t thin then you can’t be fit, and if you aren’t fit then you can’t be any good at sport - and that’s borne out by the fact that these days professional dance is, with a few exceptions, the province of the ultra-skinny. Look at Cyd Charisse in that video - she was considered to be very thin indeed back then, and I would kill for her figure, but there’s no way a woman her size would get anywhere in professional ballet now.  I mean, yes, she may be an electrifying dancer - but can you count her vertebrae?  Can you see her ribs?  You can’t even see her knee bones!  What a fatso!

Anyway, I still hate dancing. I don’t feel good doing it, I don’t feel sexy or pretty. If we’re talking about taking joy in physical movement, I get more out of boxing or rowing. But I’m sticking with it because I want to get better - I’d really like to be more graceful - and the way to get better at dancing is not to come back when you’ve lost weight, it’s to grit your teeth and keep practising. I am determined to get it into my stupid head that it is not because I’m fat that I feel this way. It’s because I’m not very good at dancing, just like lots of thin people aren’t. LISTEN TO ME HEAD.