Psycho Dancer

For two weeks I’ve been anxiously waiting to write an entry called “Psycho Dancer” - ever since I first stumbled upon the course “psicodanza” on the university website. The mere title of the course intrigued me so deeply that I paid my $160 for the semester (an unbelievable bargain by U.S. standards, right?) without any further information. There was no description of the class, no bio of the professor, no testimonials from past students. Just the one word: psicodanza - apparently a registered trademark. Was that really necessary I wonder? Registered trademark? Is there a lot of competition for that name? I haven’t been able to tell anyone about it with a straight face. And frankly I bet the name scares off way more people than it attracts. Psico + danza = the opportunity to delve into painful, embarrassing, and scary parts of ourselves + the possibility to look utterly foolish while doing it. That’s not my perspective, of course. To me, psico + danza = jumping, screaming, and hitting the floor (while imaging one of my co-workers), and calling it dance. That’s what I was hoping for anyway.

The class was partly what I had imagined. I did scream and hit the floor. However, the ratio of "psico" to "danza" was pretty high. We cooperatively recreated a supernova explosion and individually re-enacted our births while the rest of the group sat in a circle and watched. And the teacher talked and told us what she saw. She critiqued our births, told one student she was trying too hard and another that she wasn’t trying hard enough. I guess it’s a good thing that our mothers did most of the work for us or we’d all still be stuck in wombs somewhere. It’s no wonder really that we struggled so much in birthing ourselves. If I have a choice between the womb and a makeshift dance floor in a rundown gym in one of the most polluted cities in the world, I’m choosing the womb. Better get another dancer to play doctor and drag me out of here because I’m not coming willingly.

Julia, the teacher, claims to be eighty years old, and, while her physical appearance makes the claim seem dubious, her resume is so long that, if she’s only eighty, she can’t have slept a night in her life or ever taken a vacation or even once called in sick. The resume reading was a highlight of the class. Julia, presumably to preserve her modesty, did not read the two page document herself but rather passed it to the woman to her left. The woman in the brown corduroy zip-up onesie (which was a tail short of a halloween costume and footies short of pajamas) delivered the information with a reverence and solemn intensity that made me feel underdressed in my little blue shorts and my “May the Forest Be With You” t-shirt. The proceedings were interrupted often by Julia cutting across her sycophant to correct a typo or a mispronunciation, which were frequent as Julia has worked with some of the greatest unpronounceable names in the world.

Julia then asked us to introduce ourselves, which immediately divided the room into two categories: those for whom a self-introduction would suffice, and Julia. It went something like this: we told her who we think we are and then she told us who she thinks we are. My introduction was too short, insufficient. “How are you feeling right now? A bit of nostalgia? It looks like you might be missing home, no? Is this your first time outside your country?” She asked all at once. “Oh no,” I answered. Like a sandwich that needed to be cut in halves if not quarters, her question was too big to even know where to begin, but I knew that the answer was basically, in a word, “no”. “I lived in Santiago de Chile for five months and I’ve spent much of this year traveling in Spain, Chile, and Peru before coming here.” She needed to know more before she could make her proclamation, her decision, her diagnosis.

“And what did you do in Spain?” I had noticed the golden crucifix around her neck, so I took a smug pause to build suspense for an answer I expected would please her, “I walked for two weeks.” I watched a smile form and let her have the satisfaction of saying, “ah, el Camino de Santiago.” I nodded. Still she asked, “And what did you do in Chile?” Given that I had lived there, I thought this needed no explanation. “Well, I have friends there.” With the exasperation of explaining something incredibly obvious to a child, she said, “yes, but what did you do there? How did you fill the hours of the day?” I tried again, “I wrote.” That was the answer. “Ah, you’re a writer.” She said it as if she had been the one who had known this all along and was, in fact, telling me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m a writer. Not a published writer yet.” She wanted to know what I write. “I write about my life.” It sounded awful, too small, too self-interested. “I mean, I write about life, from my perspective.” Ah, that’s better. All the difference in the world. Life from my perspective. I loved the sound of that. I was busy turning the phrase over in my head to make sure it was as brilliant as it first seemed, and to store it for later use, when Julia interrupted my self-satisfaction by declaring, “You think ‘I’m young, I’m good looking, I’m writing.’ Do it. Write something already. What are you waiting for? To be eighty?” I broke like a dam. My self-importance spilled onto the floor around me, leaving behind nothing but a red face. Julia asked me about my blushing. I blushed so many times during the three hour class that she began to call me “my red-faced friend”. It was endearing in a way but also a vicious cycle because I blushed every time she said it. By the end of the class, my body felt great but I had developed a headache from all the blood coming and going.

I’m afraid that in my attempt to exploit the humor in the situation I may be giving the impression that psicodanza is dreadful. Yes, there were uncomfortable moments, frustrating moments, and “you want me to do what?!” moments. But I actually enjoyed it. If I try not to label the emotions or experiences as “good” or “bad”, and instead simply ask myself whether I felt more or less alive at the end of the class than I did at the beginning, the answer is clearly more alive at the end. I’ve been complaining and blaming a lot recently, and - as recently as Wednesday - checking expedia.com for the price of a one-way ticket out of Mexico. The fantasy of going home appeals because Mexico is hard and I like home, and because fantasy is, well, fantasy. The home of my expedia.com daydreams is not so much better because it’s not here but because I’m not there. To break the power of the fantasy, I now consciously choose to be here every morning. I can choose. I could leave tomorrow if I wanted to. So I let myself choose. Not fantasy but a real choice. Do I want to be here today? If the answer is yes, then I can’t very well complain about being here, can I? I’m not a victim; I’m here of my own free will. I wasn’t dragged out of the womb and onto the floor of the Mexico City airport. I signed up for this psycho dance.