Defiance on the body can be signified by postures such as:
the arched back, the crossed arms, the wide stance, the hands on the hips, the chin up, the slight turning the back.

I can perform “defiance” but why am I having such a hard time writing it?

***

My sister had a baby this week. A daughter, with black hair and dark eyes. In labor for nearly 24 hours, little Reilly didn’t want to come out into the cold world.

My sister doesn’t know how to describe the feeling in words. The power of it…Life coming out of her body.   Defying everything that seems physically possible.  Nature’s act of defiance. Life’s most basic defiance.  This is on my mind as I think about this word.

***

Daily defiances:

Defying the hegemonic and oppressive school uniform, a boy smears ketchup and mustard on his white tee shirt, and wears skirts with cowboy boots and long blue socks to class.

Defying her new feelings of love, the woman chooses to feel irritated at them. She doesn’t miss him. She doesn’t!

Defying her own anger, the girl assertively crawls up on to the couch to cuddle with her sister.

Defying his panic attack about Christmas shopping, the man encourages the loving attack of the puppy licking his face.

**

Dance as defiance:

I’m reading a book of short stories, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore.

In one story, she writes, “I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it’s the body’s reaching, bringing the air to itself.  I tell them it’s the heart’s triumph, the victory speech of the feet… It’s life giving death the bird.”

I’ve danced on and off since the age of four, when I would stare longingly through the door at the YWCA in New York watching children a few years older than myself doing plies and grand plies and turning joyfully in front of mirrors. Eventually the lovely women in the black leotard befriended my mother and me, and one day asked if I would like to take the class. I became the youngest ballet student at the Y and I was hooked.

I think the feeling of flying might have done it. Strength enough coming from my own body and feet to create a flight-like leap followed by a jumping kick, as if I were able to take off like a bird. Defying what seemed possible. Certainly, defying what seemed acceptable for everyday movement behavior.

Dancing defies by nature. Momentum takes me up to the shoulder of my partner, flying around his back to hang upside down, and I am free.

Dance defies the mechanization of the body, the reduction of our physicalities to habitual, machine-like movements (although some of the loveliest dancing I’ve witnessed has been based on the most subtle of everyday gesture). Dance, as I’ve known it, expands and excesses those physicalities, lengthens them or freezes them, opening spaces between the habits and above the machine in which our bodies can operate absent of our awareness.

The moment we become aware of our bodies in motion – as I become aware of my own fingers typing as I write; those little, clipped yet stretching movements— we become dancers.