Dancing Historias #1 ~ THE POP
Thank you for being here. I don’t know you yet, and you don’t know me. What I am about to share with you are real stories (historias), pages from my life, from chapters that have always and I hope will forever be coloured by dance. Since I was three years old dance has been my medicine, my love, my addiction, my muse and at times my nemesis. I have stories that will make your hair curl, and stories to make you fall in love. And that’s just one of the things dance has shown me; That I am, and we all are, storytellers. I love to put it in words, so these moments don’t get lost, but my favourite way to tell you a story is with my body. I love the abstraction, the room for error and misinterpretation, the cracks and the flaws, they leave so much space for the light to enter.
But that’s for another time.
I did not know where to begin, and this is not the beginning, but stay with me on this not so linear journey of dancing historias. Come along for the ride, and yell out if you see yourself in these pages. That is, after all the idea of storytelling, to meet ourselves deeper along the road.
This story started with a loud POP, a hideous sound that erupted over the live piano music. With a lurch in my stomach I realised that sound had come from my body. As I felt the delayed onset of limbs moving horrendously out of place, I saw my body crumbling to the floor. SMACK. I fell in a twisted heap on the ground. My vision felt fuzzy and I became unsure of everything. The piano kept playing, some girls looked frantically around and tried to help me. “KEEP GOING”, came the piercing russian bark of my teacher. The girls kept dancing, they spun their pirouettes en pointe distractedly.
I heard a loud sobbing, and realised that too was coming from my body. Tears streamed down my face, panic rose in my chest as the numbness faded, and was replaced by the searing pain coming from my knee. It was swollen like a beach ball and out of place. After what seemed like an eternity the piano music faded and the teacher came to me. Even though I was 14 I was already taller than my then 72 year old teacher, I was already the biggest in my class and felt the hot wave of embarrassment as the teacher and three students struggled to support my body weight. They took me to the front of the class and told me to wait. Somebody called my mum, she lived a 40 minute drive away. I barely remember what was happening, very soon I left my body.
The class continued. I was left alone waiting on the stage, no ice, no blanket, no water, nothing. Just me and my freshly dislocated knee. My soul decided this would be the opportune moment to have an out of body experience for the first time. I felt myself floating, leaving that damaged, embarrassing body on the stage, and taking flight to the roof. As I watched myself and the class playing beneath me,I was horrified by what I saw.
I saw many damaged bodies. One girl, older than me, but less than 18 was seated at the back of the barre. She had to take breaks between sets of plie’s because she was too frail to complete a whole exercise. Her bones protruded from her back and her shoulders, her face looked old and sharp and terribly sad. She kept taking breaks, and the teacher let her. She allowed her to dance and continue in her skeletal state. For the first time I noted something was very wrong with this picture.
My classmates danced on, held together like dolls, coddled in every way, poised and obedient like little girls, younger than their age. No sense of rebelling, no sense of creating, just obeying, and pushing as hard as they could to be the best. What I saw was pure ugliness. The faces of the over controlling mothers pressed up against the glass windows, no doubt talking about the fresh scandal of my injury, and whose child was getting the most feedback that day. The teacher berated a student for both his lack of brains and technique. I saw everyone as puppets dancing helplessly in our teacher’s weird show. As I looked around I knew I could and would never go back there.
An angel arrived at the door, my mother. She was fuming with barely contained rage. I recognsied with a pang it was also not Ok that they had just left me there. We went to the hospital, I don't remember much more. Just that I had dislocated my knee and I was told I could not dance for 3 months at least, and perhaps could never use pointe shoes again. The rest of the day was a blur of tears.
This day was the beginning of a very important journey, the journey back to myself. Having danced in these kinds of environments since I was three my perception of “good and bad” and “right and wrong” behaviour was warped. I wanted to be the best, and I would do anything to achieve it. But that day, when my soul took flight, I got my first taste of freedom.
It wasn’t the dance itself that was wrong, but there was certainly something very wrong about where I was.
The decision to leave that dance school was a blessing, from that moment my story took some new turns.
Life is a series of wake up calls. Injury and sickness are call outs from the universe begging us to recalibrate, to re asses, to ask ourselves if we are truly on our highest path. I was stubborn and determined, so the message had to be strong. I felt it deep in my bones, and although it would be many more years until I had stronger realisations and a new path, this was the beginning of DancingMedicine, the beginning of coming home to myself.
This is one page, will you stay with me through the ups and downs, the twists and turns? Will you stay with yourself on your own journey to healing and bliss?
When you are ready, let’s turn the page….
Words~ Genevieve Rogan 15/4/2020
Genevieve is a kizomba teacher, DancingDedicine healer and women’s embodiment guide. Her journey through life with dance as her biggest teacher has seen her create the souldance methodology of teaching to allow her students to connect with their highest wisdom through dance. To stay updated on her online offerings stay connected through her website and social media platforms
Website ~ www.dancingchange.com
FB~ Genevieve Rogan DancingChange
Insta ~ @Genevieve.dancingchange
Breathing into the ballet lines traced into me throughout a life time ~2020 (the other side of this story)
Photo ~ David Bonnell Sydney Dance Photography