Dancing Barefoot

How many, many feet you meet

Small feet
Big feet
Up in the air feet
Over a chair feet*

Feet are personal. Feet hold us up. Feet take us places.

Most of my dance life was with bare feet.

Flesh, skin fully on floors.

Heels, arches, toes, ankles, tops of feet, bottoms of feet – turned out, turned in. Blistered and calloused. Sometimes the tough skin splits. There’s tape, bandages, or maybe socks. But for me socks are a temporary tool. The sensation of skin with gravity is just too important. That touch of the big toe is like the alpha and omega of the code for dancing.

Subtle, but constant. Trained, but subconscious. Vital to weight transfer, to activating the whole body in space: the pad of the big toe gliding on the floor.

With weight not yet committed – the big toe feels its way forward or side or back.... like a throw line getting ready to haul the full weight of my body across an abyss through an undercurve or falling shift of weight. Everything in my feet sends ripples of signals up my legs, to my sciatica, through the spinal cord, brain, and all the limbs.

I also danced in ballet slippers and toe or pointe shoes. There were jazz shoes and sneakers. Rubber boots, espadrilles, and high heels. Mostly these shoes were about style or costume, character or location. Still the feet inside those shoes were on high alert.

But dancing barefoot feels like coming home.

Feet are not monolithic. They are full of curves, surfaces, movements in all directions. Feet have twenty-six bones. They are a feat of engineering. (see what I did there?)

It’s easy to think feet are just a slab that touches the floor, flaps around, and sticks out in front of the leg. Stick figure drawings show legs coming down straight and then like an L shape, the feet jut out.

But, there’s a hindfoot, a midfoot, and toes. There’s an outside or heel foot, and an inside or ankle foot. Feet have deep intrinsic muscles as well as the more obvious external or superficial muscles.

I spread my toes wide. Literally pull toes apart with my fingers. Massage down in the spaces between the metatarsal bones. I spread and lift the arches – the inside arch that is most obvious, but also the support and lift along and under the pinkie toe side. I practice doming the metatarsal arch up and down off the floor. The muscles under the metatarsals provide powerful propulsion forward and up.

I like making footprints in the sand.

I trace pathways with my big toe.

I see how the heel lands first when I take a walk, and then the big toe is last, ready for the big push for the next step. From outside heel across to the big toe – a criss-cross of action, a waterfall from hind foot, through the mid foot to the toes, a cascade from outside foot designed for stability and weight taking to inside foot designed for mobility and thrust.

Babies’ feet. How they are loved. Fleshy, sweet, and ready for adventure. Some of the first objects a baby reaches for. Then there’s the miracle of a baby pushing, rocking, and shifting from hands, knees, butts, and hips to feet. To standing. Cruising. Running to a hug.

The foot is not a slab. It is more like a soft, rounded Rubik’s cube of a thing. My stick figure drawing would show the leg coming down in the middle of a plushy disc – the heel behind the leg, the toes splayed out, the rounded sides like stabilizers on a massive ship.

Feet take us on parades. Feet hold us up in protests. Feet dance. In thousands of different ways in thousands of different kinds of dance. The expressive stomping and slapping in Bharatanatyam. The strength of the point in classical ballet. The inversions and splayed toes in Indonesian dance forms. The rapid hitting and tapping and heel dropping in rhythmic dance forms.

I am in awe of feet.

The very idea of support and mobility all in one.

When I was teaching movement that was down on the floor and then rose up to being on the feet, and back down again…I talked about all the different body parts that in essence became feet. Body parts that supported and mobilized.

So we have shin foot, butt foot, hand foot, shoulder foot, and of course, foot foot.

How many, many feet you meet.*

---

*With thanks to Dr. Seuss

Failed to render LaTeX expression — no expression found