Dancer

I Am Not Spectacle, But All Spirit

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I believe I was born both a dancer and a poet. Movement came first — my body was my instrument before I had words for any of it.

When I was six years old, a gymnasium in Tacoma, Washington gave me my first real floor. A Head Start program on a Wednesday. Batons, jump ropes, hula hoops. A record player spinning music into the air. A teacher who taught us interpretive dance.

I was already a dancer. I just needed permission to speak. I believe that gymnasium is one of the reasons I became a teaching artist — using the arts to reach students, because the arts reached me.

Movement was in my blood before I understood that. My father played piano by ear — gospel, R&B, blues. My sister ran a dance group called the Afro-ettes, a bevy of teenage girls who brought our culture alive with African steps, music and garb. I wasn’t old enough to be a member, but I watched. I absorbed. I filed it somewhere deep.

At home, life was loud and crowded and hard in the ways poverty makes things hard. I was the fourth of five children — easy to lose in plain sight. We were all dancers and athletes. It was in the blood. But to me, dancing meant something more. It meant finding myself.

I was lost in the numbers. Overlooked, or when noticed, misunderstood. Bullied. But in my body, moving, I could always find myself again. In high school and college I was cast as a dancer in musicals. I could dance but I could not sing.

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I am still a dancer. The last six years have made it challenging to move — cancer, chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant that changed my body in ways I’m still learning to name. But that has never changed what I am.

I used to shut any dance down — last person on the floor, every time. I have nothing against wallflowers. I have just never been one. When the music comes on, I know exactly what to do.

Now I give myself one song, maybe two. The body has real limitations — asthma, creaky bones, tight muscles. The cost of more is too great to pay.

But my hope is to whirl with wild abandon again.

My dance was never for show — though if people want to watch, or join the whirling dervish of how I pray, they are welcome. I am not spectacle. I am spirit. I am not here to be ogled or objectified.

I am holy. And I am doing my best to be whole.

Ode to Dance
Glenis Redmond

You taught me
never to be a wallflower,
but a wild one —
never wait until asked,
make no bones about it,
get the party started,
be the first to take the floor.
You taught me how to lose myself in you:
circles of arms, legs and hips.
You dared me
to walk into a school dance
wrapped in my mama's homemade original —
gold lamé, head to toe,
Raritan Club, off Highway 25.
Not just to cut the rug,
but serve it.
A woman in the restroom
said it loud enough to land —
"She's cocky."
She did not know
I come from people who believe
if you gonna show up,
you better show out.

We made it look like we were born dancing.
They did not see the hours,
the sweat, the choreography
built from nothing but will.
Snake — you go this way,
I'll go that way.
Freak out.
Spin. Split.
James Brown in a cold sweat.
Errick always sang, but
Michael Jackson was my man.
Nine years old, I was certain
he was my Dancing Machine.

I studied my craft from television,
watching Darcel, the lead dancer
on Solid Gold.
Mimicked the mimes,
Shields and Yarnell —
stuck in a box, tug of war,
the wind-up doll dance.
Worshipped Debbie Allen's
cane-thumping speech on Fame.

Dance, you taught me how to be fully me.
Not to listen to those who think dance
is a prelude to the bedroom.
My muse runs deeper —
a petition, a prayer,
how to speak to God
not with words
but with my whole self.

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