I’m in my bedroom. The lights are off, and the music is loud enough to make the doors of my bookcases shake. I’m about to dance. My dancing is more like flailing at a punching bag. The bag in this case is a 4x4ft piece of plywood, precariously positioned in the middle of my room. The board is surrounded by my bed, a chair, a television stand, and my desk. While flailing I’m conscious that if I lose my balance, I should aim my fall towards the chair or bed and not the desk or television.
I’m not happy. This was a time in my life that things weren’t going the way I thought they should have been going. There was grief in the loss of friendships – the pain and confusion that comes along with such things, and yes, anger. I was wanting for someone to hear me – to know that my voice in all this mattered, too. My world had been turned upside down, and I was not happy about it.
There was a particular energy that came along with all this. It was new to me at the time. It came from way down deep. It was a lot. I decided to put it towards my dancing. It became the fuel of the expression I found in tap dance during that time.
Anger. Take that energy and pound it into the floor.
Anger. Take that feeling and use it to move your body.
Anger. Take that fuel and dance until you’re too tired to be angry anymore.
Given the context, dancing it out was not a bad idea. If I hurt anyone, it would be me. That felt safer than expressing the anger I had more publicly. It would be more than 20 years later before I would share these stories publicly in the award-winning documentary short film Identity, and the live show Rising to the Tap (upon which the short film is based). Anger doesn’t naturally rise up in me when I re-tell the stories – that’s a telling sign.
Anger is…
My experience of anger is tiring. It’s almost like a sugar high. A flood of energy comes from down deep, flows through the entire body – every inch of it – and then dissipates, leaving the body to rest and recuperate.
I don’t know the actual chemical reaction that happens in the body – be it adrenaline or cortisol or some other chemical. I do know that it can be quick, blinding, and leaves one to put the pieces back together on their own.
The blinding nature of anger is interesting. Fits of rage, folks saying, “I don’t know what came over me,” and the like, indicate anger’s ability to go from the spirit of a person directly to the body, skipping the mind, or any other faculty in the person that would prevent its expression. While it may be possible to remain aware of one’s words and actions while angry it seems to be the less likely scenario.
It is this same characteristic that begs the question, “Do I trust myself to be angry?” That is, do I trust myself to still do what is good and right while fueled by anger? An important question, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I had been able to channel my pain and anger into my dancing. This, one might say, is one way art makes hard things bearable, even good. But I was hurting myself in the meantime. The power with which I would hit the floor, the kind of energy that pulsed through my body, both wore me down. Beautiful? Maybe. Good? Definitely not.
But it was easy. What else was I going to do with all this stuff that was inside me? Expressing how I felt was the easiest thing. There was too much to sit and work through. There was too much to piece apart. Just get it out. Use the fuel. Just try to do good with it. Thank God I had a form of practice in which I could take it and make something of it.
But there was a problem. Being a one-trick wonder wasn’t where I was aiming as a dancer. I am an artist after all, and part of being an artist is having a voice that doesn’t only say one thing. Imagine coming to show and performance after performance is an expression of anger. Maybe that works for some, but not for me. I got tired of being angry. I didn’t want that to be the only fuel I could tap into. Yet, having made of habit of going there – remembering the pain, grief, and confusion – it was hard to go anywhere else.
The amount of time and concerted effort it took for me to learn to attach to other emotions like joy was comical. Joy felt categorically different. Instead of this intense and overwhelming energy there was calm. Instead of a mandate towards action there was an invitation. Instead of blinding focus required for safety there was the opportunity of stillness and a broader vision. I didn’t know what to do with any of these at first. It was all foreign.
An Invitation to Ease
One of the biggest lessons happened during a practice session in Boston. I was in the back room of a local dance studio working on a step. The step had all the attributes of an angry step – lots of sounds, plenty of motion, flurries of notes, dynamics on the loud side. But as I practiced, it felt easy. There wasn’t the fuel like before. Nothing was welling up inside of me that required expression in the step, and yet the step was happening. I was confused. It doesn’t work this way. This shouldn’t be happening.
One of the ways I used to measure the value of a set was the amount of energy it took to bring to life. And anger was the quickest fuel for that energy. It felt like this one wasn’t taking any energy, and yet showed up without a problem.
My confusion was set to rest when I heard a deep, booming voice, come from behind me saying, “Yeah…easy…” It was Jimmy Slyde. The wise grandfather of the tap dance community had heard me and walked in. The studio was a local haunt of his and he was known to make seemingly random visits. But as with most things Jimmy Slyde, the randomness of it all was more timed than one would realize, and the timing seemed to always be good.
“Yeah…easy…”
I stopped, and turned, saying, “Is that right? It feels too easy.”
“That’s the point,” he replied, “it’s supposed to be easy.”
In an instant I had permission to chase a new feeling. Instead of pointing towards resistance and leaning on anger as the fuel to get me through, I could discover another way.
This of course would require a kind of reorganization of my practice – the way I approached steps, technique, what I practiced, and even the music I listened to would all have to change. It required me to decide to put away anger, too. Not that it couldn’t show up now and then…but it was not the mode which would undergird my practice, craft, or expressions. If the feeling I had while practicing that step in that back room in Boston was possible everywhere else, I wanted that. If a practice filled with ease was possible, I would be willing to put away anger.
I had stumbled upon the knowledge that a practice of ease was indeed possible, but doubted. It was confirmed by someone I knew and trusted. Now it was up to me to continue to pursue it.
You know we’re not just talking about tap dancing, right?
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