Learning to DANCE W hen I was a freshman in college, in the massive experience of culture shock, 1 I made a short dance video for a class final about home. I shot the video with my phone leaned against a makeshift tri- pod of books and chairs. The frame cap- tures a dance studio with mirrors, wood floors, and a ballet barre and 18-year old me using the barre to dance from the left Or When Lessons on Transformation are Lessons on Belonging BY HANNAHMELEOKAIAO AYASSE (which represented being stuck on the idea of home as material/tangible/phys- ical place), moving to the center of the room, and finding the knowledge that through dance and embodiment prac- tices I have come to understand that home is…get ready…“My Body.” While that dance piece erred on overly simplistic, it reflected a central truth that I was touching then and has come into greater clarity in adulthood: home is a
aunt’s house in Berkeley but this isn’t the home I grew up visiting her in. It doesn’t register as the home I feel nos- talgic for. It doesn’t register in my body. When I moved back to the Bay after college, I went through the time warp of gentrification. I wanted to find an adult life, a life tapped into the art scene, a queer life somehow or another. There, I found myself surrounded by no one who felt like “Home Oakland.” I’m still looking. I’m still playing early 2000s hits when I’m homesick 2 . For my 27th birthday party, I had a kickball game. We drank capri-suns. We ate cheez-its and orange slices and someone brought McDonalds. 2 I’m playing T-Pain and Natasha Bedingfield and Cassie and Maroon 5 and Lloyd and The Fray and Chingy and Ciara and some of them are still making music but nothing as good as “Goodies” or “You” or “Songs About Jane.”
We wore pennies over our shirts that we picked from a bag at random to unlearn all the small and large shames grown out of picking teams. We had a referee with red and yellow cards but she never pulled one because no one really knew if there were rules or what they were or if we were follow- ing them. We went back to my house for Zachary’s Deep Dish pizza and I played the playlist I had prepared titled “PUBERTY!!!” that started with “Me & U” by Cassie (my 7th grade ring- tone 3 ) and was full of the East Bay rap- pers from when everyone still thought of Oakland as “the hood” - Too $hort, The Pack, E-40. I guess what I’m trying to say is that
the Bay Area– and even more specif- ically, Oakland – has transformed so drastically since my childhood that when I think about home, I think about adolescence. A time when this place really FELT like home. The sense of belonging I felt. I think about the Bay Area I knew when my friends and I spent every free hour together 4 . We didn’t talk about belonging then as much as we do now on our group chat. We didn’t yet realize there was anything to say about our life experi- ence. We didn’t yet need to define the comfort we felt in community. It felt inevitable then. 4 When we mostly saw the inside of each other’s parents’ homes but also hours and hours of walking neighborhood streets and trying to take public transportation all the way to Stinson beach for Y’s 15th birthday and hanging out in parking lots. So many hours in parking lots. I think about J’s blue minivan speeding through the dark streets of the Oakland Hills blasting Frank Ocean and Erykah Badu and Sade.
(west) to the right (east) side of the screen. It was a (not-so-discreet) meta- phor for my journey from California to Washington DC and my confused feeling of displacement in trying to transition my sense of home from my upbringing placed entirely in Oakland, CA to a DC dorm room with a nice midwestern roommate who wanted me to coordinate with her nau- tical design preferences. To spoil the ending of this distraught dance from left to right of the studio, I ended up freeing myself from the ballet barre 1 Shock like jumping into a freezing cold lake and the air getting sucked from your lungs. Shock like your brain is not going to come back on- line for a second because it’s too busy trying to figure out where it is and what the new rules of this new game are. Shock as in everything you learned about how to relate to people as a child has now stopped working and people laugh at you rather than with you now so maybe that’s who you are and are you actually okay with this new reality, you worked so hard to get here but you never actually imagined what here would feel like and you did not know it would be so different why didn’t anyone tell you.
feeling more than it is a place. Home is what community feels like. Home is what familiar tastes, sights, smells, and sounds feel like. Home, like all sensa- tions, really does exist in the body. If we understand home as a place, I am still technically “home.” I am in the same place I lived when I was born. I still live in the East Bay. I am renting my
3 “Yooouu’ve been waiting so long, I’m here to Answer. Your. Call.”
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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