This week is the Prince George Dance Festival where dancers from all over Northern British Columbia come together to perform and be adjudicated. I belong to a team of adult dancers. We are usually the only ones competing in our categories, but we work for months to prepare for our adjudication. We hang out in the change room marked “dancers” and we are, indeed, dancers. Our ages range from mid-twenties to 73.
I am a passable dancer. I’m not a great dancer, but I am a reliable one. I usually get to where I need to be so that I don’t mess things up for people trying to dance around me, and, after two or three hundred rehearsals I can usually avoid stepping on people while they’re trying to get to where they need to go.
Last night, I was a terrible dancer, but not because I totally blew it on stage (I did totally blow it on stage). I was a terrible dancer because I was not a gracious one.
Let’s not dwell on the details. Let’s just say that I got snarled up in the first formation and never got my groove back, which led to a cascading Jenga-crash of errors and missteps on my part that culminated in me getting the wrong foot forward on the exit, causing the dancer in front of me to step on said foot which resulted in my near-pratt-fall only rescued by windmilling arms and a truly graceless scramble.
But it’s the aftermath of that disastrous three minutes that plays in my mind like a needle skipping on a record*.
In the excited scrum after we got off stage—and there is always an excited scrum because we’re adult dancers** and every performance feels like a miracle***—where high-fives were being traded, I refused. I left the high-fives hanging because I felt that I didn’t deserve them. We were being adjudicated and I’d let my team down, really hard. Instead of high-fiving, I told them why I didn’t deserve it, in great detail exaggerated by my sense of humiliation and guilt, and I packed up before the team photo and left.
Now, as I was making the long drive home, listening to CBC radio which was doing a feature on child prodigies—not exactly the best subject matter for a 50-year-old amateur dancer who has just humiliated herself on stage, I can tell you—I played the horrible three minutes of disaster over and over, picking apart every endless nanosecond of delayed movement, misplaced pose and wrong-footed flailing. Round and round it went in my head, while some 10-year-old pianist played Bach on the radio (actually, it was on a harpsichord. Grammar joke badum dum shing)  and the announcer explained how the 10-year-old is also a neurosurgeon and a deep-sea explorer, whereas I am a middle-aged, underperforming loser who can’t do a three-step turn without breaking her own ankles.
Then, as Bach finished peppering my brain with his incessant rattling of “all the notes that will fit and then 50 more,” and something choral and haunting came on (performed by toddlers who are also astronauts and internationally recognized masters of origami), I started to get a grip. I started to disassociate from my humiliation and, as is usually the case with my brain, a layer of attention peeled off and rose up above the noise and, from up there a voice (It’s not my voice. It’s sort of like if Morgan Freeman were a woman) asked me:
What would you tell your students to do with this?
I would tell them to reflect. What went wrong? What could you fix next time? What did you learn from this experience that you can use to make you better at being a dancer and, more importantly, at being a human being?
That hanging high-five, man. That damn hanging high-five. Thanks, Female Morgan Freeman, for ruining a perfectly good wallow with that image of the hanging high-five.
So, the toddler astronaut choral origamists finished their piece and the announcer began a rant (it’s late-night CBC, so the “rant” was a gentle and mellifluous rumination) about how only an adult tenor can sing an adult aria, and I began to run myself through the reflection numbers.
What went wrong?
I made a bad choice in the moment that caused me to be late for a formation. Then I let that rattle me instead of being in the moment of each step and doing what I was there to do, which was to connect with the audience and with my fellow dancers. Instead, I felt the bubble of self-consciousness close around me and I lost all of those connections. I didn’t trust the connection.
In that bubble of self-consciousness that I carried into the post-performance scrum, I was unable to see the team as a team. I was unable to recognize that it’s not about me. It’s about the team. Yes, I screwed up, but the team did really well (We scored a first, and got some really nice, encouraging feedback from the very tough adjudicator). I focused on the fact that I thought I didn’t deserve a high-five. I forgot that the person offering it did. It wasn’t about her congratulating me; it was about me sharing in our collective accomplishment.
What could I fix next time?
Trust the process. We have rehearsed that formation 1000 times. I know it works. I should have trusted it to work instead of second-guessing.
I can also trust my connection to fellow dancers and the community we’ve built together. The point of being a team is that we are there to support each other. We are not all going to be “on” all the time. I would never berate or criticize a team member for missing a step. I would tell them that mistakes are part of the game and that just getting our middle-aged asses up on that stage is an act of courage. I would remind them of all the stuff that went right. I would not treat them the way I treated myself. I would celebrate what we did as a team.
This is what I will fix next time. No matter how horrible I feel, I will remember (even if I have to do it by mechanical habit until I get better at reframing my self-consciousness) to feel joy for the team, to express the joy that I feel in being part of a team. I can be gracious because graciousness is the right thing to do, and hopefully, I will get better at living in that space, with my own fears and anxieties framed and made manageable by the grace of the team.
What did I learn from this experience that will make me better at dancing and better at being a human being?
I am reminded that learning is a verb, that it is a process and that I do trust that process, even if I don’t always feel it in the moment. I was reminded that what happens in a moment, even when I’m being “graded,” is not a definition of who I am but a signpost of where I am at one point on an endless arc of development.
 I learned that when I say these exact words to my students and I mean them, honestly and deep down into my pedagogical soul, I can communicate that belief much more authentically if I accept that advice myself, if I stop just saying it at them and live it with them.
I learned to be a student. That means a lot of things.
I learned that all of the moments count, not just the ones with the mistakes in them. I know this in my head, but I sometimes forget it in my living, breathing self. Dancing, like learning, is about the flow from stillness to movement and back again, from rise to fall, from place to place, through space. It is not about a single moment. This is why it’s hard to photograph dancing. If it is indeed about motion, I cannot fixate on a single moment abstracted from the whole, any more than I would advise a student to fixate on one assignment, one exam, one comment in the flow of their education. If this is true and if I can make myself breathe into that motion, then the moments when I wasn’t tripping or turning the wrong way also count, they also matter. I can spend some time letting my mind spill through those stretches when I felt the energy of the audience urging us on, when I saw my fellow dancer break out into a big smile and I couldn’t help but smile too because a smile doesn’t stop at the limits of the face making it. That energy is a part of the flowing toward something new that carries us all onward. I can accept that or reject it. I choose to accept it.
I learned (again… and again… and again, because being is a river not a freeze-frame) that I am a happier, better person when I am part of a team, and when I can recognize that it is not always my job to be helping others get over the barriers of their own self-consciousness, but that sometimes it’s my job to accept support and to trust that the team will carry me along until I can carry myself. That’s a hard one. That’s the one that calls for a rethinking of who I think I am and what I think I’m here for.
I learned (again… and again… and again, because truth is a verb) that reflection is a powerful tool to help us to understand our feelings in the moment, to reframe them and make them something that we can use instead of something that knocks us out of our groove.
I learned (again… and again… and again, because I keep returning to the space of challenge to find it transformed) that graciousness isn’t just a social nicety, but is a strong current of care for the whole that will carry us all along and buoy us all up when we get tired and forget we are all sea creatures together.
I learned that I love to dance, and I love my team, and I love teaching and I love being a learner. I love to be a joyful mess, and I remember that joy is not the stillness of happiness or satisfaction but a verb, a leaping, and falling, a recovering, moving through space with all the people.
NOTES:
*Record: a vinyl disc used to record music and played by placing a needle into the grooves etched on its surface. If acquired from obscure places, a means of solidifying one’s hipster cred.
**Adult dancers: a mix of the following: former studio brats aged out of company classes or diverted by Life away from dance; grown-up people who always wanted to dance as kids but never did because of Life or finances or lack of opportunity and now are dancing because they are grown-up and can decide for themselves where to put their cash and time; grown-up people looking for a social way to get fit; terrified grown-up people who for some reason subject themselves to flailing and confusion because they are adrenaline junkies; joyful messes.
***Miracle: not because we are underdogs or because we don’t think that we can do it, so it’s a huge surprise when we do and we must therefore give the credit to some disembodied and mysteriously motivated entity. No, it’s a miracle in the sense of wonder, a thing that happens not because of anything any one of us did but because something grew up between us and changed us. Like if an angel just sort of turned out to be there all along and it has our face, each one of us.