Dreaming of Dancing

by Pamelagrace Beatty

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I dreamed of being a ballet dancer.  Mom took us to see the ballet once a year or so. I fell in love with the grace of the dancers’ movement, the lovely music, the scenes on the stage and the pretty ballerina dresses, even the tutus. It took me going three times before I noticed the guys never danced on their toes, only the women. I did wonder why the men got away with just leaping and twirling.  Why didn’t they have to suffer like the women?  I knew toe dancing was painful.  Still, I wanted to dance on my toes.

Each summer I pleaded with my mom to send me to ballet school.  She said we didn’t have the money.  She did allow me to buy the tennis shoes that looked like espadrilles and I could wrap the ties around my ankles and pretend I was wearing ballet shoes.  One day she got tired of my pleas and told me, “We can’t afford real ballet lessons, but you can take modern dance at the YWCA.  I’ll take you up there and you can see if you would like it.” I didn’t know what modern dance was, but I agreed to check it out.  When we got to the Y, the class was in session.  The dancers wore black leotards and tights not pretty little tutus.  They were barefoot, no ballet slippers.  They had been told to run around pretending they were trees. Where was the graceful, swan like arms and pointed toes? I was utterly unimpressed. This was definitely not ballet.  I passed on modern dance. The ballet shoes in the painting are the shoes I might have worn, had I taken ballet.  They are worn, dirty, beat-up and well used. They bear the marks of the woman who loved ballet dancing.

My last year in high school my mom told me about an unusual dance teacher, Martha Nishitani.  She had been the only modern dance studio in Seattle in the late 50s.  Many of her dance students went on to become professional dancers with well-known dance companies. I was curious about her and braved the two-hour bus ride to her studio (riding buses was never a favorite thing of mine) to study under her.  Ms. Nishitani was petite and crisp.  Her movement was not like the women I saw pretending to be trees. She had complex patterns and rhythms that intrigued me.  I only studied under her that one summer, but I loved it.  The next year I went off to college and summoned up the courage to audition for the dance company. I had no clue what I was doing because I choreographed my dance on the spot. I got in. I was thrilled. Since then and even up to now, improvising choreography is still my strength.  I also fell in love with modern dance. I found I loved dancing and I especially loved performing! I danced all four years in college.

I stopped dancing once I moved from New York, where I took African dance and nearly permanently disabled myself.  I picked it up again in 1980 in New York.  I learned a friend, Debra Floyd, was teaching dance. A new relationship with dance opened up for me. I loved dancing in Debra’s classes so much that even though I was working full-time, I took four nightly classes a week!  We also performed for an audience of our friends twice a year.  Debra formed us into a tightly knit group. When dancing, nothing else mattered.  Work was forgotten.  Upsets were forgotten.  All that mattered was pointing the toe, holding the back straight, breathing, oh, and getting the choreography right.

In dance I was among friends.  If I came in feeling low, I would be happily greeted by my friends and someone would make room for me to stand next to them.  If my hair was purple (which it was once, by accident of course) my dance friends smiled and said, “Oh interesting. I like it.”  Whereas my work colleagues said, “Are you going to sue your stylist?”  No matter what, I knew I was accepted for who I was in dance.  I wasn’t the best in the class, but it didn’t matter.  Our dance teacher had a knack for giving us the parts that played to what we did well. I spent many happy hours blissfully dancing until Debra moved to D.C.  Her legacy was that I continued to dance, became very good at choreography and solo performances.  I taught dance to older women after I moved to Seattle and discovered there were no dance classes that understood an older woman’s body in dance.  To my amazement, I reconnected with my friend and teacher, Debra after the corona virus shelter-in-place started, and learned she does cardio dance via Zoom.  So, twice a week I dance with her new class of dancers and it is wonderful.  We have come full circle.