Dancing through Life

Dancing is more than something I do, it is my way of being in the world. I danced before I could walk. One of my earliest and happiest memories is standing on my dad’s feet, holding his hands while he practiced the Cha Cha cha after he and my mom won dance classes in a radio contest.  I remember copying what my big sister learned in ballet class and the unbearable time waiting until I finally turned 5 to start taking class. Once I was old enough to use the record player, I danced to Nancy Sinatra and the Beatles, learned the Twist from watching American Bandstand and got funky with the Soooouuuuul Train.  

On the cusp of womanhood, my changing body was the subject of the wrong kind of attention and I learned I had been considered for the Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker by a scout who judged me “too plump”.  I gave up ballet the summer before I was to matriculate to toe shoes.  My mom suggested I might like to try a bellydance class at the YMCA. She and my dad had enjoyed seeing bellydancers in Boston when they were newlyweds.  

 Bellydance took me in and taught me to feel beautiful as a woman. In my college years, my feminist values felt incompatible with the ignorant reactions to the dance and I moved on to other dance forms.  I’ve enjoyed social dance in the nightclubs of Montreal, square, contradance and International folk dance in Amherst and taken classes in every form of dance I can find.  I  took up tap and American clogging, Cajun, West African and Caribbean dance. I've studied trance and meditative dance and drumming and practice every day.

One day while meditating when my now 22 year old son was a napping toddler, I got the message: Dance is the answer, now go find the question. I’ve chosen to dance the path of life and it’s working. I found my way back to bellydance in the mid 1990’s. Embracing the Divine Feminine feels like coming home. In my personal life and as a healer I have learned that dancing, in addition to being the best exercise and reducing the chances of demetia,  induces a profound sense of well-being and has the power to ease sadness and depression.  

When my little boy Dimitri died…and everybody was crying… Me, I got up and I danced. They said, "Zorba is mad." But it was the dancing — only the dancing that stopped the pain. –Zorba, in Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

 Around the time of a recent significant birthday, I made peace with ballet by attending a welcoming and challenging class with Roger Blum at Smith College. Ballet is strict, beautiful and delicious. It is a vital foundation for every other form of dance. Ballet was my first love and it seduced, betrayed and seduced me again with its grace, the tenderness of live musical accompaniment and a waltz turn so beautiful I cried.

Dancing feels good and is good for you. A young woman once described to me how she felt sitting in the elementary school auditorium when a dancer said “Come dance with me, you can do it”.
That's what I want to do.
                                             

When I was invited to join the Crescent Dancers Middle Eastern Dance Troupe in 2002 I had just been appointed to the Shutesbury Board of Library Trustees and had a toddler and a new home in addition to my job as an acupressurist. It took encouragement from the troupe and my husband Frank to convince me I could do it. I am grateful for this.

    American Cabaret style dancers get their dance names from their teachers or choose one themselves. My name came to me over time. It is a combination of a fondly remembered high school abbreviation of my  name "Ka Tra" applied to my online username "Happydancermom", it contained within it the word my kids used for my mom "ama" and an additional bonus which would let my Zionist grandfather sleep in peace was when I heard at a Passover Seder "Ha' Adama", the fruit of the earth. Presto "Hadama". A dancer sometimes takes on a last name which indicates her affiliation of sisterhood.  For example "Al Wadi" means "of the water".  I learned from reading "When the Women Were Drummers" by my Guru Layne Redmond that there was an actual Goddess of Libraries. "Seshat- foremost in the House of Books" gave me chills and, having committed myself to the cause of libraries I now am known as Hadama Seshat.