Yesterday I did my first ever burlesque class.
Despite the fact that I have wanted to try this for years, I have to admit I was taken by surprise. You just don’t realize how disconnected you are from your body until you’re staring at a 360 reflection of yourself.
It was strange. As we practiced our shimmy, and my instructor begged me to shake harder and faster, it occurred to me just how much of my life I had spent trying to keep my tits from doing exactly this. I found myself feeling self conscious - I was the only one who had arrived in a sports bra with no t shirt overtop. Who did I think I was?
We moved on to a walk - just a few minutes to practice moving with confidence. One girl threw on a pair of heels. The instructor told us to think about our character. I thought “maybe my character is shy. Maybe that’s part of her charm”.
It wasn’t.
I felt ridiculous. The instructor called out instructions and my body disobeyed at every turn. I couldn’t twist the right way, my hands were always floating up. If I concentrated hard enough, I could do the right moves, but I could never do them with the flair required to make them look good. If I let myself think about style, and consider my face and my hands and my toes and everything else, I found myself lost, looking around to find I was three moves behind.
At the end of class, she made us stand in the mirror and say how beautiful and talented we are - frankly, the hardest part of the whole thing. As I avoided my own gaze in the mirror I considered the day. I had honestly expected myself to be naturally amazing at this. I’ve watched a million burlesque acts. God knows I’m good at taking my clothes off. But coming face to face with something new, something I wanted to do well and couldn’t (yet), I had to make a choice:
Do I go back, and work until I AM good? Or do I pretend the whole thing never happened and give up my show girl dreams?
Look out world - there’s a new burlesque baby in town.
