the movement sways me
into boundaries
of profanity
vulgarity
defeat
I bang my soul up against the harsh words
we speak to one another
my spine shrinks
as I dip into a safer space
a retreat
to a time when men did not call me bitches
closing my eyes, I imagine
my enthusiasm for life
conjures more
than the anticipation of a blow job
wishing I could jump a little higher
up into the protection
of indigenous grandmas and griots
circles of trust
communities of accountability
longing for the time when
rocking hips conjured celebrations of life
of sacredness
I bend low to the earth
via the concrete
I visualize the green that used to be here
under my jumping toes
giving thanks for the life
of the dance
for continuity despite obstructions of sanctuary
A man one day had one eye. Puss gathered in and around it. His smile was crooked and gave way to broken, yellow teeth. He asked me to dance in his living room. He said for $75 that I couldn’t beat that. I wondered at his absurdity. I wondered at why I still danced there. I had drawn a circle on the ground with water from my Deer Park bottle. I danced inside the circle, and he never entered it. He stood from afar hurling perverted comments at me. I kept dancing. I asked him if his own daughter, who he said was a singer, (and who was apparently older than me), performed naked for $75. He ignored the question. I kept dancing.
This encounter disturbed me, angered me for a long time. Why did he have to taint my sacred dance ritual with his trifling jabber? Why didn’t he recognize my goddess-powered, divine, from-the-heavens dance praise worship! How dare he disrespect me. WOULD HE TALK TO HIS MAMA LIKE THAT!?!? I went on like this for days. Angry at anyone who even looked like they would say something nasty while I danced. It took so much energy to always be on guard with my movement.
I gradually came to a space of acceptance of his role in the evolution of my movement. We are all reflections of each other. Whatever I see in him, whatever is ugly and shameful in him, I must first recognize within. This is the painful, extremely essential boundary I had to breakthrough to release the anger and rededicate my dance to its higher purpose. I am not dancing to be “better” than anyone; I am not dancing to pass judgment on others. I began to ask deeper questions, (and still as I write this, I am asking), what in me attracts people who carry that energy? What fears or judgments have I preconditioned in my brain and serve as magnets for that which I despise, which I detest?
I thought of all the drunk and high people who are always the first to speak or “dance” with me on the streets. Their sentiments (not always vulgar or perverse) connect on some very basic level to the source of my movement. They are not afraid of me. They embrace the dance more willingly than most sober people passing by. They celebrate me in a humorous, strung-out sort of way. There is something very real and beautiful, very indigenous to our exchange in those brief interludes. Those times when they are more than just mumbling drunks and I more than just a dancer on the corner. These moments are our sacred portals of transformations, the delicate threshold when we hold the power to share our truth with someone else. How many of us take advantage of the opportunity to really share?
Before I could honor such a sacred bond, ephemeral as it might be, I had to first see myself in every one of them, even in the heart of the man pleading with me to dance in his living room. I had to make peace with the truth that many will come to share in the divine gifts of my dance; just as the tree does not discriminate with its shade, so too is my dance a universal gift of love. A token of appreciation for the good, the ugly, the beautiful, the disgraceful—and every other manifestation of myself I may or may not want to accept.
Photos from preview of Sunday Buffet, a play by Zaccai Free and Binahkaye Joy; here I am performing the character of Breezy Eve, the church crackhead, as she morphs into a dancing priestess.
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