Dance, the Erotic, and Intuitive Eating
What do dance, the erotic, and intuitive eating have in common? Let’s talk about it.
In Audre Lorde’s timeless essay, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, she offers an objective definition of the “erotic,” a word that is otherwise associated with danger, suspicion, and negativity.
Erotic: a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feeling.
I first came upon this definition in 2014 and felt it whisper into my mind last June when I attended AfroDance Seattle’s first ever PNW Dance Camp. Simply put, it was a weekend of workshops focused on modern street dance movements from Africa featuring teachers from all over the world. The theme of the weekend was “Dance to express, not impress.” That right there was an invitation for each of us to connect with our authentic self and vulnerably share what we found with one another* through dance and the energy we brought to the space.
*Please note: invitations to freely express ourselves in a way that feels safe often require establishing community agreements that prioritize body-autonomy and consent, something AfroDance Seattle does consistently.
One teacher, Jay Musodi, connected this concept to following our intuition. During one of his workshops, he invited us to decolonize our dance practice by noticing the structure of the room and the implications therein. He also invited us to notice the structure we hold within ourselves about dance; what is “supposed to” and what is not. Once noticed, he finally invited us to break down the internal and external structures that said how to move. “Move from your intuition… Let it be messy. Get just outside your sense of comfort. Have fun with it.”
When I heard him say that, Lorde’s definition of the erotic entered my mind and I internally translated it to:
Let your movement take you somewhere between the beginning of your sense of self and the chaos of your strongest feeling… Let your movement be erotic.
Cue my sexual empowerment training.
I’ve done a lot of work around my relationship with desire and letting go of “Gate-Keeping Desire in Others;” a role introduced to me through Carol Vance in her chapter, Pleasure and Danger. In a colonial, patriarchal culture where women’s bodies are seen as something to be conquered, controlled, and desired by men; gate-keeping men’s desire (of my body) was a survival technique. When I refused to no longer participate in that culture and reclaimed my body-autonomy, my experience with pleasure and desire changed; my experience with the erotic changed. Rather than tracking the erotic in others out of necesity, I became free to notice when I experienced the erotic in myself; when I was somewhere between the beginning of my sense of self and the chaos of my strongest feelings.
That’s when everything changed.
While I’ve spent the past decade recalibrating my relationship to desire and teaching people about intuitive eating, Jay’s workshop was the first time I heard something that reminded me of erotic in the same sentence as intuition. Now that I think about it, of course intuition and erotic are connected. Both are rooted in the body. Both are free from systems of oppression and therefore; a danger to those systems. Both require us to notice our authentic yes and our authentic no.
As I was invited to move intuitively, I considered the experience of my clients whom I invite to eat the same way. To move and eat according to the whims of our bodies outside the structure of “this is how you do it” feels a little shaky and even scary at first. We have to be willing to:
let go of our reliance on rules
begin trusting an ever-changing something; our bodies
have patience as we develop confidence over time
be messy, be imperfect
release guarantees of a specific outcome and surrender to the moment
That last one can be particularly challenging: surrender to the moment that feels shaky, messy, and might not lead to the outcome I want? Why would we do that?!
When it came to dance camp (where body-autonomy and consent are a consciously named and shared value), the impact of taking those kinds of risk and our collective willingness to be in the moment with ourselves and each other, led to one of the most heart-filled, connective and joyful weekends I’ve experienced in a long, long time. There was an abundance of spontaneous joy, collaboration, and silliness. Every “mistake” was a moment of discovery and the concept of “doing it wrong” didn’t exist.
The answer to “Why would we do that?” in the context of eating is the more we practice eating according to our intuition, the more we understand the messages from our body, the more confidence we have in our response to those cues, and the more peace and acceptance we can experience with our bodies themselves. Eventually, we may even get to the point where we no longer regard our body as something to suspect or control and instead, honor it as our most loyal ally in this lifetime.
In a broader sense, the more we practice listening and trusting our intuition, the more we can connect with our values, our authenticity, and our truth. The more we connect with our truth, the more we can connect with the truth of those around us. The more we connect with those truths, the more we find more peace and freedom within ourselves. The more peace and freedom we experience, the greater our capacity for joy and the less tolerant we become of untruths and oppression. The greater our capacity and lower our tolerance, the greater our will to make necessary changes in our lives.
Or in the words of Audre Lorde:
When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.
If you are new to Audre Lorde’s essay, consider listening to a reading by the author herself.
