Dance, dance, dance, dance, dancin' machine! Watch her breakdown...

Yes, I KNOW it's "get down", not "break down". But my dancing machine has broken down. And I'm quietly devastated about it.

I took up Middle Eastern Dance (raqs sharqi, bellydance, Oriental Dance, whatever you want to call it) in my University years. I figured it would be a fun stress reliever since I was having a SHITTY AWFUL TIME at the University of GODDAMNED ASSHATS (you know who you are. Ivory tower jerks.) Little did I know it would soon become a consuming passion, a job, and a stick for my own back.

It's hard to explain a relationship with the dance. It's.... overpowering. It's a passion that just can't be sated - you can't learn enough, you can't BUY enough, you can't go to enough events and collect enough STUFF and have enough experiences. You can't be good enough. You can't accomplish enough or be known enough or be respected enough. It becomes all-consuming, and certainly not always in a good way. It took a toll on my first relationship, because it became my job - and it's a job that doesn't pay anywhere near as much as it costs. Which of course means that you end up in fights with your partner over money, and getting a "real" job, which inflames your passions about your dance being DISRESPECTED and MISUNDERSTOOD and how HARD YOU WORK and blah blah blabbity artistic stropcakes.

You tend to have a lot of friends who are consumed by the same thing. Well, I should say that you START OUT with "a lot" of friends who are consumed by the same thing. And then you find out that those people you thought of as "friends" stabbed you in the back, undercut your pricing to steal your gig, talk about you behind your back, etc etc. If you're lucky, you end up with one or two close friends who ARE dancers and who won't stab you in the back - literally, ONE or two. And every now and again you get together with that friend to bemoan your situation as a misunderstood, backstabbed and belittled artiste because she's the only one who "gets" you and you're the only one who "gets" her. It's a lonely, lonely, life where you're constantly on your guard for where the next slight is going to come from.

Sound shit? Why would you bother with something like that? Because of the giddying highs. The times when your dance and the music meld together in a glorious moment of tarab, when everything clicks into place and you have an experience of whatever divine you believe in. And once you've had that, the dance becomes like breathing. You live for it. Your soul yearns for it. You feel trapped and depressed and broken without it, like a pale monochrome version of your former peacock self.

And that's where I am - I've moulted my peacock feathers and feel like a plucked, scrawny, ugly bird-butt for all to see. I haven't danced professionally, really, in years. I've had a few dancing experiences here in New Zealand but they were .... DEEPLY unsatisfactory. I was nowhere near my normal peak of physical fitness. My dancing left me flat and exhausted instead of elated. There was no floaty high period between the dance and the crushing comedown period - the comedown was instantaneous, and almost within the dance itself. Heart = broken.

There's a number of reasons for this, I think. Coming to New Zealand was pretty much dance career suicide. There's nowhere near the same kind of dance scene here - and particularly not HERE in the small city I'm now moved to, away from the bright lights (HA!) of Christchurch. And I suspected all of this before I left to come to NZ. Perhaps I was sabotaging myself.

I think a large part of it is due to my relationship breakup some years ago. My partner at the time was VERY involved in my dance career - he became a DJ of Arabic music, he accompanied me to all my gigs, he analysed my performances (and everyone else's), he co-hosted my dance events. We were a very conspicuous twosome on "the scene". When it went sour, there were tendrils of him reaching into all of the "safe" areas of my dancing - people asking about him, gigs we were supposed to do together that now I attended alone (and his libellous emails to the organisers DID NOT HELP. Grrrr.).

While it was difficult, I got through that time and got back on with my dance career. I shed a lot of weight, I looked better in my costumes, I was fitter, I experimented with a more athletic style, I was happy. And then I met my current partner and... the dance faded out of my life. It's not that I didn't "need" it anymore, because I miss it so, so much. But my previous partner had been with me before I started dancing, and learned along as I did. I suddenly found myself having to explain things to a new partner - to try to put into words the importance, the passion, the soul. And I just Did. Not. Want. I thought I could be selfish and keep the dance to myself, for me, to make sure my new partner didn't become intimately linked to my dancing again... you know, protecting myself against a break-up as we all so stupidly do after a bad one.

Instead, I became resentful of having to keep it to myself, of having no-one understand. It was the loneliest my dance life had ever been, whereas my personal life outside of dance was at it's happiest and most fulfilling. As such, I started to withdraw from dancing, it's loneliness and constant conflict, and to build my non-dance life into something more.

Don't get me wrong, I love my personal life. Well.... I DID, and it's taking a knock at the moment what with the NO JOB, OMG, but that's a temporary issue. I'm very happy with my partner, who is a completely different kettle of fish from my last douchebag coattail-rider. I'm very happy with my lovely home in my new city, and I'm sure once I settle into work things will be great.

But without my dancing, it's like I've lost a language to communicate with. I've taped up my own mouth, I've cut out a piece of my own heart. And sadly, I just don't think I'll ever be able to get it back.