We were on the Stanford campus, in a small room that used to be a nursery school classroom. Most of the people standing around were friends of the band or friends of friends. The female lead singer sang in Turkish but even if I understood Turkish, I doubt I could have made out the lyrics over the boy band’s driving rock beat. From the first chords, my body was in motion. After all, what else is live music, especially live rock and roll, for but to dance to? I looked around at the other people in the room, most of them a decade or two younger than me, as they stood, some swaying to the beat, others stock still. A few took pictures. It was as though they were watching a symphony concert or a televised event.
I had a sense of déjà vu to the Death Cab for Cutie concert I had attended a couple of summers earlier at the outdoor Greek Theatre in Berkeley. There, the number of people over 40 totaled about six, and I was perhaps the only one who wasn’t escorting a gaggle of teenaged children. The crowd was enthusiastic, cheering wildly after each song, singing along with some, but they seemed locked in their heads, or locked out of their bodies. I simply couldn’t fathom how they could just stand there so passively, with only the slightest movement. Were they all so afraid of being noticed? Of doing something other than what the rest of their peers were doing?
It reminded me of another concert I’d gone to a decade earlier in Boston. Roxette, a Swedish rock band, was performing in a small downtown theatre. Most of the audience, including my then-husband and I, were sitting in our seats, tapping our feet or moving our shoulders. Finally, the female singer, Marie Fredericksson, her voice admitting a tiniest bit of frustration, called out to the audience, “Do you wanna dance?” “Yes,” they responded. “Well then you have to stand up and move,” she said, giving us permission to stand in the narrow aisle and dance.
One definite advantage of being older is that I, for one, no longer care what the anonymous “they” think about me. If I want to dance, then I’m going to dance. I’ve always loved dancing, but when I was younger I was too self-conscious, too afraid of other people’s opinions to move to the music, especially without a partner. My husband was even more self-conscious, so for years, I sat on the sidelines, tapping my feet, wishing that I could move body and soul to the beat.
No wonder I felt as though I’d come home the very first time I attended a 5Rhythms class three years ago. I didn’t have to wait for someone to ask me to dance, didn't have to dance with anyone, although I could if we both wanted to. It was just me and the music, but it was also me moving in community. A community of like-minded souls. Finally, I had found my tribe, the dance tribe. Whenever I join a 5 Rhythms class, whether my weekly local or a workshop or a class in another city, in fact, whenever I attend any kind of free-form ecstatic dance class, be it contact improvisation or Soul Motion or Biodanza, I have that sense of connecting with my tribe, that sense of coming home.
But the practice of ecstatic dance was brought me far more than community. It has helped me to know myself on a deeper level, to connect with my emotions and let them flow through me with the movement and the music. Not only have I experienced deep connection with one person and with a whole roomful of people, I have healed deep pain, released deep grief and rage, and expressed deep joy. I have found a level of energy, vitality and stamina that belie my age, that I simply didn’t possess when I was young. And so tonight, when the band started playing, I dropped into my center, let go of any self-consciousness or fears of being judged, and moved to the music, blissfully riding the waves of sound to ecstasy.
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