photo: pedrosimoes7/ BY

I have been dancing my whole life, and I absolutely love it. My favorite types of dance are hip-hop and bellydancing. I find that dancing helps me to express my feelings and escape my troubles. In my experiences taking various classes, I've learned that dance needn't be a solitary activity. In fact, it is most powerful when it is used to communicate with others.

When I first started taking belly dancing classes, I was surprised to see that I was the only teenager attending the class: most of the class was comprised of older women. Soon, it began to dawn on me why the women in the class were interested in this specific type of dance. When the class would begin, the women would seem very excited and happy to start. You could tell by their faces that they enjoyed the sexy movements and the way the coins would shimmy and make a soft noise. Strikingly, most of the women were not in the best shape, but somehow belly dancing helped them feel secure about themselves and how they looked. It gave them confidence. And in the process, these women learned how to express themselves using their bodies.

I think it's interesting that dance allows a person to communicate using bodily gestures rather than words. To see this process in action, I recently went to a show called "Touch" put on by the Rhetoracle Dance Company in Long Beach. They used jazz dance to weave together stories about how it feels to touch someone else physically, mentally, and emotionally. It was the first time I'd experienced a show such as this, since I'm more familiar with bellydancing and hip-hop. While sitting and watching the performance I thought that the dancers and choreographers did an amazing job. I felt like I was able to connect my feelings with some of the dances in the show. I was able to feel the sadness the dancers tried to communicate. At times I was confused about what was happening, especially since the program didn't give too many details about the plots of the stories. But, I think that was part of the point. The audience members had to leave the auditorium thinking about the show and what it meant.

To get some insight into the guiding concepts for the show, I talked to Nate Hodges, the Artistic Director for the RhetOracle Dance Company. I asked him about his process of choreographing the show and how it tied into his own interests in learning and teaching dance.

Q: Can you describe the process of choreographing the stories in "Touch"?

NATE: The process of choreographing dances is always a little different especially for every choreographer. Everyone comes in with different sort of ideas. For instance with "Life Support," the dance I did with pianist Yan Kirsten,  it was really about creating these characters of the victim of these families in the waiting room at this hospital, setting up who they were what their history was. That way every movement that they did was a reaction to each other, almost like a play without words. So for that dance, it was like creating the characters and what would they do in that situation: if someone said this how would they respond off of those feelings [...] Each process was very different, and I think that’s why each dance feels very different when you watch it in the show. There’s always a process you know--you can’t just dance.

[Clip from "Life Support"]

Q: What's the difference between teaching dance to adults vs. youth?

NATE: I think that sometimes with kids there’s so much going, especially in high school-- they're in AP classes, and they're dealing with family stuff and extracurricular activities. There’s so much on kids' plates these days. And when you’re an adult, because normally you’re working or you’re doing things you have to do to get by, things you do in you’re free time are very important to you. So when I teach an adult class, definitely all of the adults are there on their free time, paying their own money because they really, really want to. I will say, though, the one real benefit in teaching kids that you don’t get from adults is that kids have so much creativity when they really tap into it and a lot of drive and ambition. Well, even younger than that, you got the whole 6- to 10-year-old group that are talking a mile a minute. They’ve got everything to say; they're seeing everything and responding to everything. They have the most creative time ever. They have no insecurities, so they don’t hold back, so it's really awesome to work with kids and be like, “Hey, we're going to do this dance where you’re like evil fairies and butterflies, and they're like, "Yeah, totally, we're in it!" And when you’re in high school it’s a little harder [...] And sometimes you can’t get that with adults because they have too much adults things in their lives to really allow that to happen.

Q: How did you get into dance?

NATE: It's just kind of something that I just did my whole life. I was kind of hopping around I was always kind of performing when I was a kid. I always wanted to be center of attention, sort of, and what happened was when I was born pigeon-toed, my feet were turned in and nothing was working-- you know, the special info, the walking, exercises. Nothing was working, and the dance teacher at my mom's school--she teaches at an all girls high school--was like, "Oh, well, you should put him in ballet because it's all about turn out so that’s gotta help him somehow." So my mom put me in ballet, and I hated it, but it worked. And afterwards I stopped, and I was still running all over the house, and I was [doing] jazz, and I loved that, and I ended up staying in it my whole life. I was eight when that happened. So it was just something I feel like I connected to. With choreographing that was something when me and the kids on the streets would get together, and we would play, like making dances or making little productions, and we would perform for our parents and stuff, and it was something that I feel like I related to [at] a very young age. So in college when I started doing choreographing more seriously, it felt natural; it felt like this is technically something that I’ve always wanted to do.