Every once in awhile, I’ll meet someone at a class or a show, or in some other dance context, and we’ll exchange our “dance stories” — that is, our personal histories with dance. These tales tell like love stories, usually stretching back into childhood, perhaps including some tumult or conflict, a break from one another eventually followed by a reunion. These stories are woven into the fabric of the rest of our lives, and often reveal a person in a particular sort of relief. I love hearing these stories. When I hear someone tell theirs, I imagine all the dancers I’ve ever known and all the dancers those dancers have ever known sitting around an enormous, fantastical campfire, enraptured by the teller, everyone seeing them anew through this aperture.
And I love telling mine. But I always do it in bits and pieces, a corner of truth but not the whole truth. Only what any particular moment can contain. This writing is my first attempt to really do it justice. I fear I’ll never be able to, in the way that one can never really convey the feeling of their greatest love, whether it’s for a person or an animal or, as in my case, something else entirely. But at the very least, I can give you a skeleton, and perhaps your own version of this tale will fill in the rest.
The perfunctory details are these: I’d hardly encountered dance at all until I was in my 30s. I was 32 to be exact, and on a wholly different adventure in the form of a new and unusual relationship. They were a married couple ten years my senior: a charismatic, self-assured genderqueer named Pavini; and their gentle, steady, soft-spoken trans husband, Ari. Pavini was the one who happened upon Sean Dorsey’s modern dance class for terrified trans beginners – Sean’s words – and the three of us decided it would make a great afternoon out. I joined rather trepidatiously, eager to show myself a match for Pavini’s curious and bold spirit, but as terrified a trans beginner as Sean might ever encounter.
Three tumultuous months later, the triad imploded as quickly and dramatically as it had begun. I was suddenly lonely and heartbroken, disappointed to once again find myself working a dull job during the day and smoking too much pot at night. I longed for something to fill the void. That class of Sean’s was actually pretty fun, I thought to myself one evening. I wonder if there’s another like it. So, I opened up Google, and a few days later, I walked into Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley for the first time, into a class taught by the person who would become my first dance teacher, Shaunna Vella.
After that class with Shaunna, it was almost instantaneous. I was in love with dance. I wanted nothing else. My life transformed overnight into that of a serious student of dance. I took every class I could – mostly modern and contemporary in all their varied forms, but also hip hop, West African, jazz, Haitian, ballet, improv, anything and everything that was on the schedule and accessible to a beginner like me. I took at least a class a day, two or three if I could manage it. I danced all the time. I danced on the BART platform while I waited for the train. I danced on my lunch break from my dull job. I danced while I smoked pot by Lake Merritt. I danced and danced and danced.
This may sound like the beginning of my dance story, and in a way it is. It’s the moment we met, and indeed, it is still one of the great demarcations in my life and always will be. There is a before dance and an after dance, B.D. and A.D., etched onto my timeline. But this story is supposed to be the whole story, and it actually began much earlier.
Most of my earliest memories revolve around a fierce and unrelenting hatred of my body. From the age of five or six, I remember a sort of ritual I performed: I’d go into the bathroom and shut the door and I would pull at my skin as hard as I could, in big, meaty handfuls. I’d attempt to wrest it from my muscles and bones, my little fingers digging into my flesh in search of some kind of respite. I could not explain it. In the midst of it, I had no words for the mysterious agony of having to inhabit this body. And I did not realize it was possible to feel any other way.
As I got older, this baffling distress at my own body festered and the ways I managed it evolved. I hated mirrors. I was almost totally unable to look at my own reflection. Some days, I’d find specific things to despise. My pouchy, chubby stomach was a chief offender, but there were also thighs that were too big, arm flesh that was too jiggly, genitalia that was dysmorphically wrong. But more often, the mirror would elicit something more overwhelming, a blanket of amorphous panic and inexplicable shame. It burned to see myself for more than a moment or two.
I can’t remember the first time I took a knife to my skin, or why I thought to do it in the first place. It was almost instinctual, a backroom deal struck with a dark corner of my humanity that knew a secret: physical pain soothes psychic pain. I did it in the quiet solace of my bedroom in the middle of the night. My older brother had helped me pick out the knife from a catalog of paraphernalia for outdoorsmen. I liked its sleek, smooth grip, the little nub you rotated with your thumb to draw out the blade. I liked the way it felt pressing into my arm or my thigh, the relief and comfort of its intervention, the immediacy of the sensation. When I bought the knife with several weeks’ allowance, this is not what I pictured doing with it. It’s just what happened.
As I approached the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence, I settled into an identity that had been solidifying for years, and on its surface seemed to provide an explanation for my inner distress: I was fat. My parents were rather one-dimensional in their thinking about bodies. People were either fat or thin, and this also equated with bad or good, pitiable or acceptable. It had been a known fact in my family since I was small that I, unfortunately, was fat. My dad advised me to do what he did: obsessively count both calories and grams of fiber, run every, single, day, and weigh myself every, single, day. He seemed relieved that I was finally taking an interest in resolving the situation of my fatness, so in search of both his approval and some existential peace, I began following his advice fanatically.
My father’s approach was extreme and rigid, but in some ways, it did help. I loved running. I’d pound the pavement for miles and hours at a time, daily, in all weather conditions – even the notorious Minnesota winter. Running satiated a multitude of needs: first, I’d always harbored an intense wanderlust, and even exploring the sidestreets of the suburbs of Minneapolis satisfied me at 12; second, running made me feel alive, connected to something earthy and mammalian and powerful; and finally, it was like the knife, in that running was a trial upon my body for the sake of the soul that lived inside it.
Between the running and obsessive dieting, I gained a newfound sense of control. I treated my body the way a tyrant would a disobedient subject, pummeling it into submission. We were at war with each other, and I was determined to win. It was neither pleasant nor peaceful, but some order was finally being imposed on the chaos.
When I was in the 7th grade, I got to know a boy who had been studying at a local Tae Kwon Do school from practically the time he could walk. I found him intensely compelling, handsome and rugged, embodying a manhood beyond his years. He’d already earned his black belt and sometimes even taught the children’s classes after school. It was because of him that I found myself donning a loose-fitting uniform and a neatly tied white belt, lined up at the very back of the class.
If there was any indicator in my early life that dance would be my eventual destination, it was the fervor with which I studied Tae Kwon Do. Soon, I was in the little studio in Richfield, Minnesota every evening. The exactitude of it appealed to me, the way that each movement had a clear and purposeful definition. Bodies were broken down into points of contact, the technique of it a kind of instruction manual for bringing one point – a heel or a ball of the foot or knuckles – most efficiently in contact with another – a nose or a solar plexus or a kidney. It was objective, sterile, functional. Inside of Tae Kwon Do, my body could lead a full and interesting life without necessarily needing to be integrated with my soul or spirit. Martial arts allowed me to respect my body’s capabilities and power, while remaining a safe distance from it, as if it was a big, fierce cat secured behind glass.
The mirrors were a problem, and it’s a testament to the intensity of my desire to participate in martial arts class that I found a way to manage their presence. One entire wall of the large, carpeted room in which we took class was occupied by a mirror. At first I could barely stand it, and had to consciously focus my eyes on the instructor and other students in order to get through class. But humans adapt when they need to, and so I did. The boxy, masculinizing uniforms helped greatly, masking many of the aspects of my body that I hated the most. I built a container in my mind for the version of me reflected by those mirrors and learned to tolerate it, if not enjoy it.
What happened next is hard to explain, but it all comes back to a question that echoed with increasing urgency the older I got: why was I burdened with this extreme pain of disconnection to my body in the first place? To what were its roots bound? Every effort I’d made in service of my body to that point had done nothing to soothe this suffering, only to mask it and pack it deep with a thick layer of soil.
Even with three decades’ retrospect, the answer to this question is not totally clear to me. The roots are many and they are deeply intertwined, and some of them may always be too tender to expose to the world. But certainly one root that winds all the way back to the base is that of my gender and my need to transition.
At the time I was growing up, in the 80s and 90s, trans people were not talked about. It’s hard to imagine today if you didn’t live it yourself, but trans people were so far outside of the cultural consciousness that I didn’t even have a concept of a trans man until I met one in a lesbian club in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2007. His name was Tyler. I was 22.
It’s never been clear to me why it seemed at all logical that the medical interventions related to transition should be a salve to this mysterious ailment. I could not pinpoint why, after meeting Tyler, I was suddenly obsessed with the idea of taking testosterone – one of the primary interventions for trans men like myself. But I spent hours scouring the internet for all the stories I could find of assigned-female people who had transitioned to men by injecting synthetic “T”, as it’s called. Their muscles bulked. Their hair grew in places, fell out in others. They changed, before my eyes, into people who were legible to the world as men. The fantasy of what my own version of this transformation might look like was so intense and constant as to be intrusive, even compulsive.
I could not ignore this yearning for long. Less than a year after I met Tyler, I’d embarked down the road of transition myself. I was very much on my own, a fresh transplant to San Diego from the Midwest, navigating life in a new city and the first year of a math PhD program in parallel with the hurdles of medical and social transition. I had no idea how to go about this gargantuan task of changing my sex, but the men I met in support groups on campus and at the LGBT center in the city became my teachers, confidants, and even, in some cases, my mentors.
Before long, I made an appointment with an endocrinologist. I got my first prescription for testosterone and learned how to inject it into my thigh. I repeated this ritual weekly until it became mundane. My muscles bulked. Hair grew in places, perhaps less than I might have liked, but also thankfully did not fall out in others. I watched myself change in the mirror, which became less of a tormentor with each passing day. But most profound was what happened inside of me. Something just felt better. I was calmer, more settled and grounded. Testosterone was the medicine I needed to finally start feeling right in my body.
Along with testosterone, I pursued surgeries – eleven of them, to be exact, on my chest and genitals, and peripherally, on the inside of my mouth, my thigh, and my forearm. Surgery takes a toll on the body, and mine were not exceptions. Bottom surgery especially was a huge physical and emotional undertaking that spanned several years of my late twenties. I was very glad to recover from what I hope will remain my last gender-related surgery in August of 2015.
The logistics of a gender transition can be all consuming. For the first years of mine, my body’s primary focus was healing from surgeries and absorbing the physical changes it was undergoing. I certainly enjoyed my transitioning body as much as I could between surgeries, tropeishly stripping off my shirt at every opportunity and letting the San Diego sun shine on my scars. I swam in the ocean and ran long distances. I became a regular at a men’s nude yoga class. I had lots of sex. The pieces were falling into place. But surgeries were a constant presence, sometimes two or three times a year, followed by weeks or months of healing, a jarring interruption in the midst of glimpses into what lay beyond.
As the most intensive parts of my medical transition passed, they left in their wake a newly constructed body, so much more male than it had been, but one that I still had trouble feeling as my own. My body felt so much more correct than it had, so much less dissonant, but I still inhabited my skin with a certain awkwardness, as if my body and my soul were roommates, simply sharing a space out of necessity, observing a polite truce, but knowing nothing like real intimacy. My body was not yet a home. I’d been so busy building the structure that I’d yet to have a chance to really live in it.
But when I found dance, it was as if my body, my gender, and my soul learned to speak a shared language. And once they did, they were a very chatty bunch. Perhaps that’s why I simply could not stop dancing in those first couple years. Every part of me had so much to say, and each had been waiting a lifetime to say it.
Sean Dorsey’s class for terrified trans beginners was held at Lines Ballet in the heart of San Francisco. The three of us took the BART to Civic Center and found our way to the dance studio, housed on a few floors of a very old office building. The elevator is so old that it requires manual operation, so the building employs an elevator attendant. As I’d learn later, the operators get to know almost anyone who dances regularly at Lines by face at least, sometimes by name. There are three or four guys employed in this regard, all a bit tough on the outside but friendly and kind just underneath, welcoming to all sorts. These days, when we exchange our evening pleasantries, I sometimes wonder what they think of us dancers, and how they found themselves pulling a lever in an old lift so that we can all get to our modern and our ballet and our Horton.
But back then, as Pavini, Ari, and I were shuttled up to the 5th floor, I didn’t know any of that. I’d never been to a dance studio before, so I really had no idea what to expect. We were ushered down a narrow hallway to a folding table outside what I now know as Studio 3, and were welcomed by a friendly young trans person in a beanie and a flannel, holding a clipboard. “It’s free,” they said when I pulled out my wallet. “Just take your shoes off and head inside.”
The room was already nearly full. It had been quite some time since I’d been in a room with so many other trans people. It’s always a striking feeling, being exclusively amongst others who have shared some version of this path, in all its oddities, hardships and rewards. Most of them were younger than us, mid or early 20-somethings, trans masculine with edgy haircuts and awkwardly fitting clothes designed for bodies other than theirs. There were others, too; a few trans women, a few folks our age or older. The three of us filed in near the back, which I was grateful for. I wasn’t eager to draw attention to myself, nor to be too close to the enormous mirror covering the entire wall at the front of the room. I remembered these walls of mirrors from martial arts, but I feared that without the psychic callouses I’d built when I was a teenager, I would be overwhelmed by the invasiveness of my own reflection. I was afraid that the sense of comfort that had grown inside of me over these many years was as transitory as wind, fragile as paper, just waiting for an eddy strong enough to wash it away.
But when I finally risked a glance to the mirror, I was surprised to discover that I didn’t mind it at all. The person who looked back at me was not exactly who I’d pictured at 22, as I was just on the cusp of transition. No, in fact, he was even better. He was what had really happened, not a fantasy or a longing, but an in the flesh man whose body I loved as if it was my oldest friend. That body was mine, and that man was me. Somehow, gradually and painstakingly, we had found each other. What a delightfully pedestrian feeling it was to see it so clearly, to be so connected, to find myself resolutely free of the burden that as a child, I’d believed I would die with.
As the years have passed, I have found myself back in Studio 3 for dozens of classes. Often, as class begins, I will look into the mirror and remember that first time. Some days I marvel at the tiny and quiet revolution that has slowly unfolded inside of me. At other times, if I’m having a bad day or feeling insecure about this or that, I will search for that bottomless agony I’d known as a kid, daring it to come forward again. But it never does. Today it seems to exist only by another name: it is a harmless, distant memory.
Class began. Sean was joined by an assistant teacher, ArVejon Jones (AJ for short), who at the time performed with his company, Sean Dorsey Dance. The exercises were novel but approachable, and seemed to come pretty naturally to me. Shadows of martial arts flitted in and out as Sean taught us about plies and chaisses. With a visceral clarity, I recalled how much I loved imposing movement on my body. But there was one aspect of dance class which I found myself fully balking at: it was so performative. In martial arts, we never moved to rhythm or music, and in fact viewed those who did so with a certain amount of disdain. To move to music was to be so showy, I thought, so unabashedly vain.
Indeed, when Sean turned on the first song and told us to execute the movement he’d just demonstrated to the beat, I shrunk and tensed. Sure, I’d stand in the back and do the moves to the silly pop tune he’d chosen, but I would do so as anonymously as I could, hidden behind all the others.
My plan was foiled, however, when Sean announced that we would be going across the floor – that is, we’d dance three at a time from one side of the room to the other. I would have no choice but to be seen. And worst of all, the combination we’d be dancing ended in an effeminate, accentuated flick of the wrist. Oh my god, I thought in horror. But I glanced over to Pavini, who gave me a flirtatious smile as they lined up behind a wiry young trans person in a tank top that matched their purple hair. Fine, I told myself. I’ll do it. But with minimal flick.
On my first pass, I did a careful and robotic rendition of the phrase, imitating the technicalities as best as I could. I didn’t think it was too bad. But, right when I got to the part with the flick, I found myself within a couple feet of AJ. He looked me right in the eye and yelled “Flick!” as he exuberantly did so himself. I flicked back rather flaccidly, reflecting on how perfectly stupid he must think I was as he watched me prance around unskillfully in front of him.
I stood on the other side of the room, watching the others complete their own versions, some closer to Sean’s original rendition than others. AJ weaved adeptly in and out of the rows, cueing students when they forgot the sequence, cheering them on when they got the groove of it. My mind flashed back to a memory of AJ on stage, performing a duet in Sean’s recent show. It was at least the third time I’d seen him do it, and the dance had still left me reeling from its incredible beauty. AJ possessed the kind of stunning physical mastery that could only be the result of years of intense, focused training – that much, at least, I recognized clearly from my days in martial arts. He’d probably spent tens of thousands of hours in rooms just like this one, teaching, learning, rehearsing, perfecting his craft. Whatever was in AJ’s head as he pulled the dance out of this room full of absolute beginners, I was sure he didn’t think any of it was stupid. And if he didn’t think so, then why should I?
On my next try going across the floor, I approached it differently. I dove in head first, moved confidently and enthusiastically. I welcomed the music into my ears and admitted to myself that yes, I did love this silly pop song that Sean had chosen, and I indulged in its rhythm as fully as my limited skill would allow. As I was about to complete my pass, I saw Ari watching me from the other side, his eyes bright and happy behind thick glasses. I met his gaze and flicked my wrist flamboyantly, right on the beat. He laughed and clapped, catching me in a squeeze as I found my way to him. You look so cute doing that, he whispered in my ear, and I could tell he meant it. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to be seen after all.
It’s striking in retrospect to realize how much of my personal dance pedagogy formulated in that one moment. Do it big, even if you don’t think you know how – especially if you don’t think you know how. Stare into the face of insecurity and self-consciousness and tell it that you’re very sorry, but you’re just going to do it anyway. Know that shame and its younger cousin of embarrassment are tricksy ghosts that shrivel in the light.
If you’d told me as I left Lines that day that the modern dance world was about to become my community and the practice of this art my central passion in life, I’d have laughed at the absurdity. But it was true. In the not-too-distant future there would be dozens of teachers, each in possession of a unique corner of dance wisdom. There would be fellow dancers with generous spirits and complicated, intricate histories of their own. There would be lessons in technique and artistry, tricky rhythms in 5’s and 7’s and even 15’s, and loads upon loads of laundry. There would be rehearsals and shows, including one with a 30-foot ball of yarn and another with an old tricycle. There would even be heartbreak.
If only I’d known all of this back then. I prefer it how it was, though: a total and transformational surprise, a joy so pure it required no accompaniment of anticipation.
There is so much more to say, but that is the end of the beginning. AJ and Sean had planted a seed to be sure, but they both would recede into the background of my dance life, at least for awhile. The next story I’ll tell you is of the quirky beginner’s class taught by Shaunna Vella, where that seed could not help but sprout and flower under her impossibly bright light.
I can’t wait to tell you more. Until then, maybe I’ll catch you in class, and if I do, please come over and tell me the story of your own dance. I’d love to hear it.
Scott Duane (author) is a dancer, writer, filmmaker, and clown based out of San Pablo, CA. He has danced, clowned, and otherwise performed in works by Nol Simonse, Eric Kupers, Christina Lewis, and Garrett and Moulton Productions. His choreographic work was recently featured in the 2023 Queering Dance Festival. In 2019 he published his first book, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity, with Micah Rajunov, recognized as a Lambda Literary Finalist. He holds a PhD in math from the University of California, San Diego. Find out more about his dance and film experiments at www.agtricycle.me.
Shaunna Vella is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and activist creating work out of Oakland, CA. Her performance work and academic scholarship is an interdisciplinary praxis of playful movement explorations, queer performance, somatics and embodiment, performance studies, and building performance as community ritual with a social justice focus. Find out more from her website, www.shaunnavella.org.
ArVejon (AJ) Jones [to be inserted]
Sean Dorsey [to be inserted]
This is fabulous, Scott. Can’t wait to talk more! Hugs! Sima