White moves in African dance class

WHITE MOVES
From The Palest
Dancer In The Class
By Kim Sevcik

By heritage, I am the whitest of white girls - descended from a line of Lithuanian hat makers, Czech stationers, Polish accountants, and Austrian bankers; raised in an aluminum-sided house in Chicago on a diet of pot roast and Neil Diamond. My background never felt particularly right nor particularly wrong. And I never really questioned it. Until I discovered African dance.

I came to African dance in the unlikeliest way. On a listless afternoon, a friend lay on my bed, flipping through one of those motley community education catalogs that offer courses in flirting and soap making.

"Afrobics," she read aloud. "That sounds interesting." It was the early '90s, and as far as I was concerned, any relative of aerobics, no matter what its ethnic claim, belonged in the storage bin of history along with Flashdance sweatshirts and oat-bran pretzels. "Thanks anyway," I said when she proposed signing up.

She wasn't deterred. Two weeks later she came home flushed and raving about the first class. "Just try it once," she pleaded. Afrobics was taught by a six-foot- tall Nubian princess named Karen. Her dreads were tied back with a swatch of kente cloth, her sinuous hips wrapped in elephant-print fabric; the rest of us, meanwhile, wore leotards and biking shorts. A drummer sat beside her, a djembe drum clasped between his knees. There were no dumbbells, no mats, no magenta rubber steps in sight.

The first day of African dance, I felt as though I'd finally found a lover who understood my sexuality after years spent with one who was more concerned with his own. Since age five, I had been sashaying and tour jetéing across dozens of scuffed wooden floors, locking my pelvis and stiffening my chest. But on that sultry May evening in that swamp of a high school gym, it became clear that I had been denying my instincts all along - forcing my body, against its better judgment, to contract when it really wanted to expand. I learned to unhinge my pelvis instead, to throw my head back and arms out, to work with my hips and breasts for once, not against them. And that effusive physicality is exactly what African dance is about.

I left the class a convert, proselytizing to anyone who would listen. "Better than sex," was my repeated sales pitch. OK, so I sensationalized. But African dance and sex do share a similar kind of abandon. You have to be willing to give yourself over, to throw in your whole body and soul like a Baptist gunning for salvation. And because African dance is often rooted in religious ceremony and community celebration, it is both utterly carnal and profoundly spiritual. While you gyrate or open your neck and chest to the sky, you might also be giving thanks to the gods for a bumper crop of squash.

Despite my astringent cultural background, despite all those years of fluttering around on toe shoes, I've always felt more fluid in body and in spirit than your average white girl. Fluidity counts for a lot in African dance, and because I found myself one of the best dancers in Karen's all-white class, I became convinced I was a natural, that the movement was somehow in my blood. I began to feel less and less of a connection with what my genes and my upbringing told me I was and more and more of an affinity for what I was not.

A year after my private cultural revolution, I moved to New York. It took less than a week to find a dance studio that offered not only African dance but Afro-Haitian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian. At least half of the students were black - some African-American, others were from Guinea, the Caribbean, and Kenya. I was in heaven.

Until I actually attended a class. And found that suddenly, like a star minor-league player drafted into the majors, I had gone from being the best dancer to being the worst. In Karen's class, I had felt liberated and sensual. In my new surroundings, I felt like a stick figure surrounded by Matisse nymphs. The black women around me were not only stronger and more graceful and more pliant than I - they laughed when they danced; they clapped and whooped and closed their eyes - they were exuberant and uninhibited in a way that suggested a connection to these movements, this music, that I would never have.

Giving praise to the drummers at the end of a class, dipping down to touch the floor, and then their hearts, they reached across an ocean, with the weight of centuries behind them. No matter how powerful the gesture seems, it is not my own. In the end, I feel like I am only mimicking them. It dawns on me, eventually, that I have developed a false sense of ownership over African dance - that I have mistaken a deep attraction to it for a deep connection. The thought makes me a little sad. A little envious.

I haven't stopped dancing. As long as my body allows it, I never will. But now I'm clear on where I stand: I'm a traveler in these regions. And that's OK. At least I'm not simply a tourist, nose pressed to the glass, gaping at what I see but never understanding.