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Portland, Oregon

When you travel you can’t stay huddled in your comfort zone, you are continuously tested and stretched and by stepping out of your comfortable routine you get to know yourself better. If you don’t throw yourself into life you miss out on experiences and for better or worse interesting is always better than boring. That’s how I found myself in a sea of strangers freestyle dancing for two hours. I am always nagging at Dylan to go dancing, so when our Airbnb host SaraHope invited me to Ecstatic Dance I couldn’t really refused although my mind was repelled like a magnet from jumping into the unknown without the safety net of my boyfriend’s company.

The Tiffany Centre was a grand old building, all ceiling frescoes of kings and saints, sweeping marble staircases and timber paneling. Not the small community hall I hd expected for a new agey “dance journey”, the room was huge. I cut my strings to SaraHope and waded into open space. There were people swaying and stretching to the relaxing rhythmic beats, I took shelter to stretch on the floor, time to observe. One woman with a swooshing robe and shaved head was beautiful watch, weaving like tendrils of seaweed through the waves of people. Another man in a trance like shuffle snailed past, a gorgeously graceful girl who must be a ballet dancer, impossibly flexible legs pointing north and south. Then there was a woman with an off duty service dog on the floor and amongst the crowds of dreaded up, descended yoga panted enlightened ones were neon top big earring ravers. Then a whole heaps of mums and kids dressed for the gym and a fairy party respectively.

We joined hands in a circle to encourage inclusion and embrace the theme of water, all donations would be going towards the Sea Shepherd. Then all there was left to do was enjoy the moment, it was hard to get out of my head at first, to dance like no one is watching is harder than it sounds. But after a while the rhythm throws your mind into quieter depths and the comfort in numbers releases hidden tensions. SaraHope had forewarned me that some dancers practie contact dancing where you dance with a person always having some physical contact. I saw a number of pairs doing what almost seemed like slowed down martial arts moves, sometimes rolling over each other backs, sometimes flipping on the floor. As the music shifted from Underwater Love to Shake Your Ass to Rolling in the Deep, I realised a white clad boy and I were moving in time, perhaps consciously on his part and on making eye contact, I thought why not and made contact. There is something pathologically awkward about trying to move in sync with another human being with no set steps or instruction, to those who can do this gracefully I am in complete awe, I can’t imagine it being very restful, always preempting another’s slight movements. It was nice to have a brief connection in the room though, as with anything new even in a crowd you can feel alone. Sweaty backs aside it was fun, I would have felt a coward had I not let myself accept the experience, but once the song was done I yearned for freedom and exited contact as suddenly as it had begun, no hard feelings.

We danced on, at the half way point it was almost tribal, jumping and stamping, everyone throwing themselves into the rhythms, a bell would ring, people would yell out. Then exhaustion began to set in, some people folded onto the side lines, I didn’t want to demure. To last to the end of this full body and mind workout I had to stop trying to match the fasted rhythm in the music, slow it down, people around me were doing the same. i imagined mysef pushing my hands through thick air, like the resistance of swimming. It was almost like Tai-Chi, perhaps the mostbenjoyable part of the dance, in our slow movements we became like a community of fishes or washing in the wind, we rippled together. Then it was done, a line at a time poem was read and we were released into a sunny Portland noon.

Dylan had a surprised for me when I returned home, tickets for the Seattle Orchestra Downtown, but we had to go now! We bundled up and jumped on bikes into town. In the gorgeous concert hall the audience hummed around us, then that wave of tuning that gets the heart pumping in anticipation. And the theme for the concert? Soundscapes and the sea, how the world plays in unison! Luther Adams: Become Ocean, painted vivid images of the barren planes of Alaska that is his home, soft and so sweet that it almost lulled us to sleep, which is a compliment. The Varèse was polar opposite, full of unexpected cracks and claps, a composer who in the 50s dreamed of electronic music that technology was not yet capable of producing. A small number of the elderly portion of audience, left the room in disgust to our mischievous delight! And of course the Debussy: La mer was very fine, bows of strings moving like the legs of a Japanese wind sculpture, we settled in to watch the interactions between the orchestra members, deference here, a look there, one particularly impassioned jerky viola player, another with an epic beard down to his waist. The music done, lights up we emerged into late afternoon shadow. we wandered a while before finding dinner, around a square while a homeless man in a bright yellow workman’s vest sang in a deep baritone about a “good loookin’ girl”.