soulscape

I’ve realized that sometimes when people from my church meet me, they expect me to be an outgoing, center-of-attention type of guy, because they see me dancing on stage often. Others expect me to be shameless, because, hey if you can get in front of all those people and dance, then you must be a 100% extrovert with all the chutzpah in the world. True, many performers ARE the center-of-attention types. Many of them got personality to spare, sometimes a little too much personality. But as performers, we’re just like the rest of the population, we all do it for different reasons. We all have different things driving us and making us tick.

Dance for me was always an escape. In fact, I was as shy as can be growing up. Even after I got to college, I remained extremely introverted. One of my first hip hop “mentors” once reminisced that I was the “shyest guy” when he first met me, and that I had changed so much from that. Why I was so introverted and shy, that’s for another post. There are always deep reasons for something like that, and I had (or have) my reasons. It basically came down to fear, of course. Fear of everything around me, of people.

Yet when I went to my first “dance”, I was excited before I even got there. The music, as loud as they play it at dances and parties, overwhelmed me. The music was like an ocean, and I wanted to dive in with all my body and soul. You see when you throw yourself so wholly into something, you literally get lost in it, and you give yourself a reason not to think of everything else around you. People think dancing is a “hey look at me” experience — for me it was just the opposite. I was going away.

It was perfect, because usually at a party or a club, the lights are usually low, and I would find a nice corner with space. I would imagine a musician can relate. Go find a secluded place and play your guitar. Or a painter — it is just you, your brush, your canvas, your world.

Even now, when I go somewhere, some one might say, “hey this is Alan, he’s a dancer and choreographer.” No matter where it is, the inevitable request is that I bust a few moves. The assumption is the same, I dance and therefore I must love that aspect of being an entertainer. Many times, even though now I’ve changed, that old me comes back — the shy me. I laugh it off, politely decline. It’s not that I don’t want to dance, but it has to be the right environment: the right music, other people dancing and having fun, a safe place for me to let go.

I worry a little bit that talking about dancing so deeply and personally might come off wrong, that I might seem a little too “into” my dancing. But hey, I am talking about something that has played such an incredible role in my life for 12-15 years. When you’re in desperate places, you tend to grasp onto the few things that make sense to you, that make you feel good. And in many places in my life, dancing was that one thing that made sense, that felt good. It still does, and I feel blessed for that.