When I hear music, even if I am in my car or in the grocery store, I want to move. I want to swim in it and be carried along with the melodic line. I want to accent how I am moving either with the beats of the music, in counterpoint or answer to it. I can feel these impulses even when my body is completely still.
This desire to move in music was exacerbated by dance training but it pre-existed that training. There was always music in my parents’ home. There was Aretha Franklin, Jim Croce, and the Beatles. There was Chopin, Mozart, and Sibelius. There was Pavarotti, Carreras, and Kathleen Battle.
Even in utero, my mother took me to the ballet and there was that music too. There were also the rhythms – of the concert hall, of her breath, of her heart. In our East Harlem neighborhood there was boom-box salsa and disco, bottles breaking, and coded street calls from friend to friend.
“You don’t dance like a white girl,” the neighborhood kids would say suspiciously. How could I when I grew up hearing all the street music the other kids did? When I went to the same block and rec-room parties, mirrored the others who were moving when I felt it too?
“Maybe she’s not white inside,” they would say.
I was so relieved to be given a pass in this way. I knew that being white meant leaving the house wearing wrinkly hand-me-down clothes and letting your sneakers get dirty. I knew it meant being scared on the street even if nobody was messing with you. It meant eating bland food without hot sauce on it. It meant you had no chance at all at being cool. It didn’t matter that your father looked like Robert Redford.
I knew I still had whiteness inside. I knew what to do if another girl or group of girls challenged me to defuse things. I would walk tall and strong and not look to the right or left. If I knew them and anyone in the group liked me, I could hazard some back-talk or crack back. But I knew I was weak inside – I was too scared and soft to fight back physically if someone punched me. And I couldn’t play Double Dutch. The ropes went too fast, slapped the concrete too hard, and I couldn’t slide in and out without getting tangled up.
I was a tolerated outsider in my own neighborhood. But there was another world I would discover at about six years old. One in a clean, open, wood-floored space with lots of light. One where I could be a princess, or a fairy, or a ballerina. I could be as otherworldly as I felt and that was ok there. I didn’t have to be a real person at all.