or, Don’t Stand On Your Head If You’re Menstruating.
So I was all set to write a nice long loving piece about how wonderful it is to be a somewhat more mature person in a performance dance class, because it is. I have jazz dance twice a week this semester. Like my African dance class, it is reminding me how much I love to dance for its own sake, without the complicating factor of having to negotiate the meaning of dancing with a member of the opposite sex who may or may not be trying to cruise me.
Jazz dance class is providing additional insight, however, in that it is something I tried a few times before as a much younger person. We had it in a mandatory PE section on and off through elementary and junior high school, and then, because I loved the school’s resident dance teacher so much, I took a few voluntary courses in high school which parlayed into a slightly better understanding of what she expected us to do in the school musicals.
I enjoyed working with Cynthia Crass (ahem: Cynthia Crass! IMDB doesn’t list that she was in the British touring company of the Rocky Horror Show, but her cachet went up just that much when she told me that) and with Claire O’Berry, and certainly never had any negative experiences with them, but I enjoy jazz dance so much more now that I have a little more perspective on the world. When I was a kid I never thought of myself as a dancer. For reasons of the peculiarities of late-70s feminism which I won’t go into now, I identified as a tomboy; the girls who liked to dance wore frilly pink things and were very very girly, and I didn’t like them very much. For another, there was an insanely competitive ballet scene in my hometown (not due, apparently, to the teachers, but rather to the bourgeois matrons living vicariously through their little swans and butterflies). I went back and wrote about it this last January for the hometown paper (dammit, that link are broken!), and had stage mothers actually push their children into my path as I went around interviewing the kids.
There are certain things I missed by not dancing when I was younger; I have less flexibility right now than I would like, I spot badly enough to make my pirouettes look drunk, and my balance even when I’m standing still is pretty poor (well, at least when I’m asked to stand on one toe). I feel like I’m making up for lost time when I stand up straight, an experience I am now coming to enjoy simply for the feel of my back and muscles coming together to make it happen. But I think if I had danced when I was younger, I would never have enjoyed these things. Probably I would have taken them for granted.
Plus, they would most likely have been lost in the ambient social pressure to compete which seems to pervade the ranks of young dancers who want to go pro and which we all felt at my school. I probably would have felt anxious for not picking things up right away and slack for not practicing outside of class, and the anxiety probably would have made me hate dancing and identify as a poor dancer. It’s nice to be in a place where most of us are struggling. Most of us seem to have a little experience in dance, but not enough for any one person to stand out. None of us is expected to do anything more than push our stretches a little further. That and the all-female makeup of the class makes it feel quite acceptable to fuck up and fall down giggling. I’d like to maybe look a little more graceful in the routines our teacher (who also teaches at Alvin Ailey) puts together, but I’m not sweating it.
So yeah, I was going to write all that, and then I had yoga class today and came away fuming. Something about the yoga teacher has always rubbed me the wrong way (could it be the stupid little shorts he always wears which have elastic around the legs and look for all the world like bloomers? or his Mr. Rogers-like supercalm voice? or just that I hate having male teachers for physical exercise?)… and then today in the second to last pose in the class, he tells everyone to grab two blankets and take their mat to the wall, adding almost under his breath that anyone having their period should get a bolster and a block instead. He said it so quickly that I almost thought I’d heard him wrong.
Think of the awkwardness of this moment: If you’re menstruating, you have two options. The first is to grab the different equipment and signal to the not-all-female class that you’re uncontrollably hemorrhaging in your shorts, something that years and years of blue-water-on-slim-maxi-with-wings-for-thongs, they’ll-never-know-you’re-going-through-this-TERRIBLY-EMBARASSING-STIGMA-WE-CAN’T-NAME advertisements have said you ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT SIGNAL or risk social ostracism. (If I was any more comfortable with being a woman, I might not be inclined to liken this to a gentle request to pin a bright yellow Star of David to the crotch of my yoga pants.) Or, you disobey the teacher and do what everyone else is doing, risking consequences which you guess might actually have a medical basis.
It turned out the pose in question more or less involved standing on your head, something I am very eager to do with my newfound abdominal strength. It looked like a great stretch. Those of us on the rag were told to do a much less strenuous horizontal stretch in which we basically lay prone on a big pillow.
OK, Mr. Bloomers, so what the hell was that all about? No time to ask right away, Mr. Bloomers is busy saying “There there, isn’t that better?” as he replaces the big pillow, now under my head during the last pose, with a few thinner blankets so I could do the pose right. (I shit you not. He said “There there, isn’t that better?” Verbatim.)
So naturally I cornered him after class. “What’s the reason,” I asked — “is it something medical, or something having to do with the physics of menstrual blood?” He delicately told me that there were a few reasons behind it. First, he said, something about blood clots. OK, I said; a medical reason.
But then he tempered that claim with something about “the natural downward flow” which shouldn’t be stopped, and then went on to begin some platitude about how we like to think of that time of month as a “time to take it easy.” At that point the next class’s teacher, who is a woman, stopped by, and he weaseled out of finishing his statement. She told me that Mr. Iyengar, who founded this particular flavor of yoga, decided on these strictures with the help of his daughter, who also practices yoga. And, the teacher guessed, it probably went back to the scriptures yoga is based on.
And here I was just telling my doubtful Pentecostal friend just the other day that she need not mind her church’s dictums against yoga, because plenty of practitioners do it without the spiritual baggage attached. So much for that.
People, in case you haven’t gotten it yet (no, you’ll never live that tampon comment down, Evan), I’m rather posessive about what I do with my menstrual blood. It’s best not to give me advice on how to manage it. And so, Mr. Bloomers, keep your hokey borrowed spirituality off of my headstand, and I won’t make the political statement of bleeding on your whiteboy ashram.
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