What are you doing with your hands?

T-rex-ing or lengthening

Watching back a recent video of myself belly dancing, I could see in my hands the moment I started thinking. One minute, my fingers were long, with a very gentle curve to them. The next minute, I had curled up my fingers unintentionally, displaying my knuckles. It’s the position my fingers are in as I type this; my brain has, perhaps, linked thinking with typing. Or it’s my default hand position because I spend a lot of time on the keyboard for work and for art. Concentrating is embodied, unconsciously, in my hands curling over imaginary keys.

This was not the aesthetic I was going for. Nor was the breaking down of my lengthened arm position, a version of a la seconde modern arms fused with belly dance, into full on T-rex mode as I tried complicated layering.

And, then, in the video, I saw myself realize what I’d done and correct my arm position. It cost me a little speed in the shimmies layered on top of hips moving in a circle. But I pulled the arms out of the cretaceous period and eventually into snake arms and sidewinders; I made my body into other reptiles.

I have heard, over the years, in many dance classes, teachers ask: What are you doing with your arms? So, I know it isn’t only me whose arms wander to a default position that isn’t the aesthetic the dancer is aiming for.

I wonder how long it will take before my fingers are less curved by default. I find myself correcting the curve during other activities. Telling my fingers to extend down into the earth. Release their bend. You’re not typing now. I know, it’s hard to believe, I tell my hands. You type so much. Let the positions you developed playing Typing of the Dead go.

Dancing and writing both explore feelings and thoughts. The mind-body connection has to extend all the way to the ends of the arms, away from the heart space, for full-bodied dancing. In the past, I’ve worked on hand movements, like figure eights, after decorating my hands with shining temporary tattoos, rings, and bracelets to highlight them in videos. Each fingertip, with painted fingernail, had to be articulated in a specific way. Like in this video:

Now, I need to move my fingers in a larger variety of ways to balance out the huge amount of time I spend in those memorized places, fingers over letters I don’t have to look at, but merely feel. My laptop’s keyboard has become so worn that some keys don’t have letters on them anymore. (The a, s, d, and n are gone but I never have trouble finding them.)

To dance with my hands is to stretch and strengthen them; to physically support the life of the mind that pours out of them on the computer. It is also to make my hands look more human, less Mesozoic, when I am thinking in front of other people. I want to train my fingers to assume a variety of idle character animations.