No 6: CONTORT

PHOTO BY FAYE RAAD

KATIE KERN

I think a lot about dance. Music quietly flows through my mind when I am about to sleep and I choreograph when my creativity is at its best before everything shuts down. I choreograph the placements of my legs, or how my hips would move next to my torso. If I would be alone or would be moving with someone else. 

I think of how when I dance I use the strength in my legs to ground myself in plie and in my torso, using the power in my body to exude energy out from my extremities. How I use contorted movement where I test the creativity of my body and mind, warping my arms swiftly around myself letting my legs follow. Creating odd shapes, a triangle between my elbow and hand, or a circle with my arms. My hips shift with my lower body, rolling on top of my legs. I like releasing through that direct, sporadic movements, emancipating anything I had to let go that day. I analyze the relationship of my back to the rest of the body as I like to contract and bring my shoulders in. The flexibility in my back allows me to release and stretch my back in new ways that others can't. I resort away from form and lines, and find freedom in releasing. I find rhythm and song in my movement, creating my own sound.

When I listen to a song or a beat, my feet immediately hit the floor to the rhythm, thinking about how my shoulders would be moving if I was dancing. My head bops along with my toes. I am that annoying person in class who makes music with the floor when you're trying to finish a test or essay. I follow the music when I dance, creating a friendship between the rhythm and my body. My shoulders react to the beat, my hips hear the sound changing, my head follows the rhythm. 

Whenever I improv, you see who I am. My weird facial expressions I make when I am sweaty and letting all the energy and the power in my body pour out onto the floor. My mind tells me what to do, creating a dialogue between my body and self. Emotions and worries sweat out from my glands, liberating me. 

I think about that first stretch you take in your bed in the morning. Those stretches that you need to do when you can’t wake up. How you let your shoulders go out and stretch out your arms as far away from yourself as they can go. Straightening your back and letting your head rest behind your shoulders. 

That is how I feel when I dance, that rush of comfort flows through my feet to my head. Movement allows freedom.

I started when I was young. I took those cheesy ballet classes as a 3 year old, but it really all started when I used to show off my moves on the kitchen floor, quickly moving my feet around the floor as fast as I could, looking like a character from happy feet, and although I looked absolutely ridiculous, in those moments, I thought I was 7 year old dancer there has ever been. But in the studio, things felt a little different. My body was bigger than the girls in ballet. My stomach puffed out and squeezed tightly into those ballet tights and leotards. My legs didn’t stretch as far out like the other girls. When my ballet teacher told me to suck in, my belly button could never go closer to my spine, it always stayed where it was. I stopped for a while. I stopped dancing because as a chubby 8 year old who loved ballet, that wasn’t enough, because those moments at the bar left me so alone questioning why my arms couldn’t fit into that costume, or why my split wasn’t as good as the girl who was 30 pounds lighter than I was. 

I went back a few years later. I lost weight, matured. I fell in love with it again, but not the tendus and pirouettes, I fell in love with my own movement and sound. It started to feel the same as when I did quick footwork as a 7 year old. It's been that way ever since.

Movement allows us to connect with yourself. There are no instruments or attachments, just our bodies. That's it. Intimidating but empowering. I love watching the joy in peoples faces when they dance in the street to that musician standing on the curb with a trumpet. How their ridiculousness is confident and cool. I love dancing with other people. You can hear them, you create a language between your bodies, talking to each other by how you connect your arms. Or how when two people already connected, dance together, a head lying on the person’s chest, shyly smiling so loudly. Dance can tell stories, work for justice, and teach people about themselves and others. It’s my home, my body, and my passion.