By Amanda Knox

The first dance lessons I ever took were swing dance lessons in middle school. At the time, Explorer West was still a tiny, start-up, independent middle school that rented out the caboose-end of the then Westside Elementary School building. Our class numbered an intimate fifteen, almost evenly divided between male (seven) and female (eight). Now, as an adult, I wonder how gleefully conniving it must have been for our first-name-basis teachers to decide to suddenly introduce awkward hand-holding and bunny-hopping into the curriculum.

“It’s not that we didn’t want to dance,” Colin astutely recalls. “It’s that we weren’t willing to.”
Fast forward and you’ll find me at a loss at high school homecomings, tolos, prom…Without regular access to the choreography of, say, MTV music videos, I sang along more than danced along to the DJ’s rehashing of KUBE 93’s afternoon line-up, and limped away in the bunion-bruising black heels I had bought at Payless for the occasion.

Better were the few times I covertly went square dancing with Oma, my Austrian grandmother. Her rotund form wrapped in petticoat and lace, Oma glided even as she skipped and was the coveted partner of the silvered gentlemen cowboys. Little did I know that there’s a code to square dancing, and that’s how you know how to move. Since I didn’t know what “box the gnat,” “load the boat,” and “shoot the star” meant, the few times I participated I merely allowed myself to be hustled through figure eights by gracious male patrons (who were probably just trying to get on Oma’s good side, now that I think about it).

A few years later and a world away in Capanne prison, I was eventually allowed a little MP3 player uploaded with music I liked, including every single Michael Jackson album. Already partial to the younger Roma prisoners, I was now a favorite dance partner. I couldn’t tell them anything about New York City, but I could share the only other recognized and coveted thing attributable to the U.S.: the King of Pop. Sharing earbuds or taking turns, my Roma cellmate of over a year, Sabrina, painstakingly swiveled me through her own fusion of hip hop and belly dancing. I have Sabrina to thank for the basics that get me across a friend’s improvised dance floor to this day.

Now, ballet.

For the last few weeks I’ve been taking lessons at Velocity Dance Center on Capitol Hill. The instructor, Bryon Carr, a dancer and choreographer trained at Cornish and seasoned in NYC, is goofy, friendly, and attentive. Never one to shout criticisms from the sidelines, he models every movement and takes care to break down every most basic component so that, by the time you’re putting the whole thing together with your own body, you actually feel like you kind of know what you’re doing.

Here’s what I’ve discovered about ballet. There’s a lot of butt clenching. And the natural consequence of the butt clenching is abdominal clenching. Combined, these tensions not only strengthen your core, but, more importantly, keep you from falling over. You also end up holding your arms out to your sides for a really long time. Such “presenting” gestures, characteristic of ballet’s courtly origins, test not only my scrawny arms, but also my willpower. Did I mention foot clenching? That’s the part that throws me through a loop; I thought I was pointing my toes right when, with cramping contortion, I got them to follow the flat plane of the top of my foot. Nope. Turns out that if you’re really pointing your toes, they curl under.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but it’s much harder than it looks.

It’s also a lot of fun. In a fast-paced world where adults neglect to play, dance lessons are my current favorite excuse to get back in touch with my inner, awkward youth—and those neglected glutes. You’ll still feel it days later.