Goddess Dance

My beautiful wife took a day-long performance seminar Saturday in Philadelphia with Ansuya, one of the undisputed superstars of modern American belly-dance. She reports Ansuya "worked our butts off," but was completely involved, down-to-earth, open to every question. At the end of it all, wife said, "I think she's my new hero."

After the seminar we went to dinner at a great Irish place that had Belgian beer on tap (go figure), then returned for a performance concert. About a dozen belly-dancers got up and did their thing, one by one. Some were entertaining, some had skills. All of them were moving to music. Sometimes they wrapped themselves up in the performance so tightly it felt like voyeurism to be watching them. Other times they were chasing the music around the room.

Then, at the end, Ansuya came out. She cued the tape, and the music swelled and she just lit up, improvising every move. I have seen nothing so stunning and powerful in decades. She wasn't a dancer, and it wasn't music. She was an elemental force that pulled music into her body and merged both into something more than human. And she radiated into the room, even when her eyes were closed, and she drew the room's energy into herself, too, so that for the first time in the evening I found my foot stomping, my hands clapping.

Her face was full serene. She didn't even break a sweat. Yet every moment of her performance she was working two or three different isolation movements together -- hip rotations and shoulder shimmies and arm motions, all at once, any one of which would have taxed the abilities of most dancers -- and in each moment she was not only full on moving the music, she was in transition to the next set of movements.

She put the zills to work, and for the first time in a live performance, I understood zills. She wasn't just clacking along to the music but she layered something over top of it all, like a soprano saxophone jazz riff dancing on top of a pounding melody, like butterflies drawn to the unfolding rose of the dance.

Layer upon layer of ability spun up like non-stop sensual lightning from the supple body of one woman. When I was a sportswriter, I got to see athletes at the peak of their game. Gretzky, for instance. They didn't just perform well, they made things happen. They controlled a space and everyone in it, with a perfect flow of mental-into-physical energy. They owned their muscle and bone and their skill, and they took that ownership and projected it into everyone around them. So did Ansuya.

You don't forget those moments, when you see them. They're times you lie awake and what you saw plays over in your head and you think, is that really a mortal quality? Is there any way to produce that out of the same stuff that I'm made from?