Not so tiny dancer

This is just so cool. One of my private icons has always been the dancing ballerina from Fantasia. I always loved the grace, beauty, humor, self acceptance and sexiness she presented. (Don't tell me that alligator was just hungry!) Now, here are the real live versions.

I always wanted to dance. A song will play, and I'll feel my body respond. My feet tap. My shoulders sway. I want to leap and shimmy, and somehow I never manage to dance like no one's watching, even when no one is watching. When I was a little girl dreaming of being ballerina, it was made clear that fat girls don't do ballet. In my deeply immature moments, I've blamed my overwhelming klutziness on never having had dance classes.

I can't think of an activity that grounds a person more in their body than dance, that makes a person feel comfortable moving -- even when the movements are challenging and painful, and fat people need this. Movement is too large a part of being healthy. Cultural attitudes towards fat encourage fat people to divorce the mental and the emotional from the physical. You damn near must to keep a sense of self worth if you listen or read the crap that's issued daily about fat and size from our well-intentioned but cruel friends and families to the conformity demanding media. But that separation between the mental and physical promotes disuse of the body.

The article states,"But something strange happens when the troupe takes the stage. Classical and modern dance often give the impression of human beings flying, freed of the earth. The usual female dancers are like nymphs, the men like Greek statues. They soar, spin, leap and reach for the sky. Because of the size of the dancers in Mr. Mas’s troupe, however, the work of Danza Voluminosa conveys something more earthy and human. Fat people move differently, he said, and the choreography must change. “We are more mountainous,” he said with a smile.

The dancers’ movements are often slower than those of their slender colleagues. These dancers favor limbs swinging in pendulous arcs and wavelike motions that seem to ripple through their bodies. They seem to grip the floor rather than abandon it, keeping a low center of gravity, often crouching or dancing while kneeling or lying on the ground.

And when their dance becomes frenetic, the sheer weight of the dancers thudding across the stage conveys an excitement akin to a stampede, something out of control and wild, yet made of human flesh and blood. It can be a riveting sight."

Fat people do move differently, and differently doesn't have to mean worse. My body can be one more tool I use in self-expression. I think in dance, one has to view their body as both a tool for creativity and a work of art. I think that's an attitude we all need.

dance, obesity