Dance Memories

 

Today in the mail a whole box of my next book, Off Pointe arrived. It was a little box because this is a little book, for a slightly younger reader. Off Pointe is part of Orca’s performing arts series, a line of books for 11-14 years olds who are interested in art, music, dance and drama. My book is about a dancer named Meg, a fourteen year old girl who loves ballet. She dances all the time, and when she isn’t dancing she’s thinking and dreaming about ballet. Meg is devastated when her summer ballet program is cancelled and her ballet teacher suggests she attend dance camp to work on her lack of stage presence and to connect more with her audience. 

While I never attended dance camp, I did go to a Jewish camp in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia for many summers, and I did do a lot of dancing there. I used the beautiful setting of Lake Kalamalka for Meg’s camp and it was fun for me to think back to those sun-drenched hills and the lake, both of which are so different from the city of Vancouver where I grew up, and from Kingston, ON where I now live now. Writing the book also made me think about the many years I spent dancing as a child, both at my local community centre, and then as a teenager with a group called Body Electric. (I don’t currently have any plans to write another dance book, but if I did, it would have to be called Body Electric.)

Lake Kalamalka

Recently my mother was given an old photograph of the Body Electric Dancers. I was surprised I could remember so many of the girls I danced with. This was partly because many our names were very similar (Leanne, Dianne, Reanne, Rachel, Rachelle, Michelle etc). Sometimes I have a reoccurring nightmare that I’m with the Body Electric dancers and we are in the wings of the stage about to go. I’m wearing the right costume, but I haven’t attended the rehearsals and I don’t know the dance at all. I don’t remember having those anxieties as a dancer. I only remember the thrill of performing and the many happy hours spent rehearsing.

  
For many years I danced with another girl I knew, Debra Karby. She was in my childhood classes and then we danced together in high school. We weren’t really friends by the time we were teenagers, still we took the bus together in grade eight and nine because we were going to the same place, and our parents took turns picking us up. We used to eat french fries at Church’s Chicken before class which was disgusting, but we didn’t know better. I also went to camp with Debra and our parents were friends. We were part of the same community. When we were older I would sometimes run into her when I visited Vancouver and I was always happy to see her, to hear what she was doing. When my first son was a toddler she had a toddler too, and once we had a playdate my mother organized.

Debra passed away two years ago from liver cancer, shortly before her thirty-eighth birthday. Off Pointe is dedicated in Debra’s memory because when I think of dancing, I think of her.

Debra Karby