Hidden Souls

According to Martha Graham, the pioneer of modern dance, “dancing is the hidden language of the soul.”

I`m troubled by this. I thought I had quite a nice soul; prone to spurts of laziness and self-obsession, yes, but also relatively honourable and lacking in big, black, festering holes. Mine was never going to be a top notch soul - it won`t go down in history as one of the great souls of all time - but overall I was pretty happy with my lot: I thought I had a perfectly workable, decent soul. You wouldn`t parade it around with great pride, but at the same time you wouldn`t be ashamed to be seen out with it in public. (That`s all you can really hope for from a soul, these days. And from a boyfriend, incidentally.)

If Martha is right, though – and I see no reason to assume that she is not right, as she clearly knew a lot about the language of souls and whatnot, which has mystified poets and writers and artists since a time when there was no tv to watch – my soul sucks. It sucks really, really hard. My soul, by this measurement, is embarrassing, uncoordinated and prone to fits of giggling. My soul kicks other souls in the shins and hits the speakers attached to the ceiling and cannot – no matter how hard it tries – do anything even approaching what the teacher is telling it to do. My soul is – through the medium of dance – trying very, very hard to tell the world that it is absolutely useless at everything and possibly a little bit simple.

I`ve worked out – through trial and error – that I`m comfortable with any dancing that only demands me to wiggle my hips and shoulders; discos, clubs and even the occasional rave have been harmlessly attended and wiggled through over the years. The minute I have to start moving my limbs, however, it all goes to pot. I`m built (as a friend once pointed out) like a Tim Burton character, and all of my limbs are “too long and not attached properly, like a badly constructed toy spider.” Worse, because of my height, I firmly believe that by the time a brain impulse has reached, say, my feet or my hands, most of the message has been lost, like an extended game of Chinese whispers. My limbs spend most of the time they should be dancing hissing “what? What? Can you say that again? I didn`t get any of that.”

Unfortunately, my rubbish and ungainly soul must be particularly gobby, because I love any kind of dancing. And so – because of a desire to meet people and build strength so that I can stand up on that darned surfboard and simultaneously find yet more ways to make myself ridiculous – on Tuesday I joined the local ballet class.

It went well to start with. Seven years of ballet as a young child with the outrageously cartoonesque Miss Buller – eighty years old, silver haired, pink leotarded, posh voiced, extremely resilient walking stick, extremely bad temper – and I knew exactly how to look like I was warming up properly so that I didn`t get smacked with a thin piece of wood. I also “defy and undermine all the physical logistics of ballet” – Miss Buller`s words, not mine - by looking quite a lot like a ballet dancer until I start to actually do any ballet (“how,” she once said to my mum, “anyone can be built for such elegance and lack it so badly is something I will never understand”). So I was greeted with enthusiasm by the ridiculously flexible teacher, until she realised that my clumsiness and lack of grace was probably going to force her health and safety insurance through the roof.

It was great fun, though: my ugly little soul managed to stomp its way through 45 minutes of huffing and puffing and sniggering, looking a lot like a giraffe skating on ice. And – while they didn`t specifically ask me to come back – they didn`t specifically ask me not to either, so all in all I think it was an outrageous success (even if there is now a three metre radius around me everytime I try and do a leg kick).

My soul wasn`t quite done though – it still had a few more things to say – so yesterday I went to the local Hip Hop class. Unlike ballet, I do not look even vaguely like I would be good at Hip Hopping (or whatever the verb form of it is); the teacher was laughing before I`d even got into the room and put my fluffy baby blue slippers on (everyone else was wearing baggy jeans and yellow trainers). I then spent 45 minutes with my tongue stuck between my teeth, desperately trying to encourage my legs and arms to do something other than flail, and recognising an expression on my teacher`s face that I hadn`t seen in quite a while: complete incredulity at my crapness (I`m an adult, and thus I have learned to stop attempting things I can`t do). He kept slowing down, coming over and showing me a basic foot step and arm punch (my arms do not punch, incidentally: there is something wrong with them), but there was absolutely nothing hip about my hopping at all; if Bambi tied a bandana around his head and headed out into the `Hood, he`d still look cooler and more coordinated than me, and he`d probably annoy the other deer less (they weren`t happy with how my lack of hipness was dragging all their hoppiness down to my level).

I`m going back next week, obviously: to both of them. I`ve managed 28 years without grace and street cred, so I see no reason why I should let their absence stop me doing something I both enjoy and find very funny.
Plus, I`m trying so hard at the moment to improve my language abilities, that I think I need to also pay attention to what my soul is trying to say. The poor thing is clearly having just as many problems communicating with the world as my brain is.

I think, though, if Martha had any kind of say about it, I know what her opinion would be. “Dancing is the hidden language of the soul,” she would say, gracefully and yet funkily gliding around me, adjusting my limbs and then smacking them briskly with a walking stick. And then she would stop and smile sadly. “But some souls,” she would add, more pointedly than she probably needed to, “are probably supposed to stay hidden.”

And mine, I think, is almost definitely one of them.