Dancing is a special kind of freedom, a kind of madness. I used to meet up at the empty dance studio with a few dance friends and improvise in the dark room. No lights on. Just moving. When you care about how it looks, it’s performing. When you don’t, it’s therapy.

When I teach, I sometimes try to get back to that dark room. I try to find the warm bodies that feel it the way that I used to. (I say “used to” because I seldom give myself the space anymore.) There have been a few, and they aren’t the “best” dancers. They aren’t the most competitive, and likely they are the most fragile creatures. But they feel it, like a pulse. Like a heartbeat.

I am not a great teacher. I don’t know that a lot of students will have fond memories of me. But I want to give them the space to feel, hard as that is in a public school setting. The space to find that spirit moving within them. The space to awaken something that has been lying dormant in their soul. This is the source of artistry. It is artistry that propels the technique, I think. It is this impulse that drives effort, like an addict is drawn back to a drug, time and time again. I think that’s why so many artists fall into bad habits—because we try to fill the empty space when we aren’t dancing. Because when we aren’t dancing we don’t feel fully alive. So we might turn to drink or food or sex to fill the empty places. Or we might just fall into a chasm of anxiety and depression and forget everything that ever gave us joy to begin with.

When I was in middle school, my dance studio began contracting with a choreographer from Texas. He would come in once a year and set an original piece on us kids. Later, they brought in other guest choreographers, but he is the most memorable to me. Looking back, you could tell that he had his problems. Rumor has it that he struggled with alcoholism. Such is the flaw in many great artists:  Hemingway, Van Gogh, and too many musicians to mention.

His skin was a dark, rich brown, and he had a big, bright smile and a passion that radiated from his pores. I can still smell the musky hot sweat evaporating from our skin—glorious. He made us feel something –this was the most important thing to him. Each master class he gave included us sitting in a split while we improvised arms and facial expressions. This was always performed to “The Promise” by Tracy Chapman.

Certain songs, even after all these years, make me think of him:  “The Promise”, “My Skin” by Natalie Merchant, “Hanging by a Thread” by Jann Arden, and “Din Daa Daa” by George Kranz. (Will my students remember me from different songs?) His jazz choreography was shaped partly by Frank Hatchett, who he assisted for many years, but his lyrical style was uniquely his own.

All the salt inside my body ruins

Everyone I come close to

My hands are barely holding up my head

This teacher made me feel like something special, and I tried so hard to impress him, like I did all my teachers. He would point to me as an example of emotional expression, even as a young girl. It’s amazing to me how motivating a little pat on the back can be. Even a chubby kid like me thought I could change the world with my dancing. Because of him, I grew up believing the art of dance was important—something to aspire to. “Dance is my life!” I would decree to my mother. “Dance is not your life; dance is part of your life, Leia,” I remember her saying.

He passed away at his home in July of 2007. He was 47. That’s all I know. I haven’t found a cause of death, and I don’t guess it matters. You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Or so I am told.

I’m so tired of looking at my feet

All the secrets that I keep

My heart is barely hanging by a thread

There was another flawed but memorable dance person in my life. He was a professor of rhythm tap and artist-in-residence at the university I attended until he was fired for reasons unknown to me. I remember seeing him in the parking lot of the Warwick West apartment complex where I lived a year or so after he was dismissed from the university, so he must’ve lived there too. The time that I saw him there, outside of the dance studio setting, he looked terrible—so depressed and miserable, so different from the man who dressed in brightly colored suits that matched his tap shoes.

I loved him so much that I traveled to take classes he taught outside the university, at a little studio in the heart of the city. That studio was run by another passionate lover of dance who has now since passed away, but she is another story entirely. This tap professor even gave me a few private lessons when I could scrape up the money to pay him. I felt a connection with him because he, too, had that something special in his soul. I’d like to think he recognized that something in me.

Because he mattered to me, his opinion could heal or hurt me. I remember once, in his class at the university, he didn’t even look at me perform—he just looked down the whole time. I mustered up the courage to confront him after class, and he told me that “I didn’t look at you because I was listening to you.” This could’ve been just a lousy excuse for not paying attention to a student, but I accepted it. “Bring your feet up under you. Dance like a lady,” he would tell me.

Later, another teacher told me it was alright to “bring that funk” to my tap dancing style. I waver back and forth between the two now.

The professor died of heart failure in the summer of 2015. He was 58.

Oh, look at me, at all I’ve done

I’ve lost so many things I so dearly loved

I miss you all

I wish I was with you now

I wish I was

Do all dancers, like dogs, go to heaven? My faith says that grace is freely given to those who believe, and I pray that’s true. I hope we have believed hard enough. We will need that grace to get to our heaven. And I hope our heaven has a dark and empty dance studio. With space to be free. Mad. Alive.