Greetings, Masters,
Greetings, Mistresses,
Greetings, girls,

Welcome to the December issue of the Gorean Voice and this months dance column. This month michele has chosen to ask a dear friend of hers to write her thoughts on dance. As you will be able to tell shirasaya is a professional dancer offline and expresses her views from a very experienced standpoint. This one hopes you enjoy the thoughts and feelings of dance from a girl who is a dancer. Til next month she wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

A girl wishes all well,
michele

Dancing - Offline, On line, and Gorean dance

Property of Wandrlust,
shirasaya{W}

shirasaya is a professional dancer who has studied dance since she was 4,performed with modern dance companies, ballet companies, community theaters and middle eastern dance troupes. She has been part of the online Gorean community for 5 years, and has danced and taught dance online.

I'm a dancer. I dance both professionally and non-professionally, which means, basically, that sometimes I get paid for it, and sometimes I don't. Doesn't really matter either way to me, because I'm not dancing for the money. The majority of professional dancers (i.e. those who get paid for their dancing) aren't in it for the money, with a few exceptions, because dancers generally don't make enough to live on. Most professional dancers dance not because they love it, but because they have to do it. Sure, they like what they do, sure, they're passionate about it, but for someone who does it professionally, it goes beyond that. They have to dance because dancing is a necessary part of living for them. It's a way of expressing the strongest emotions - deep desire, soul wrenching joy, shattering grief, overwhelming love, those things that make us human. It's also a way to do something you love for money and in front of an audience, whether that audience is 3 people or 30,000 people. In part, that's why it's not very important to me whether or not I'm getting paid at the end of the evening. I get something out of it that money can't match, and I'm betting most other professional dancers would say something similar.

Every professional dancer I've ever known is, on some level, a bit of an exhibitionist. They put themselves through grueling training, put up with an unbelievable amount of pain from things as minor as pulled muscles, blisters, toenails falling off, bruises, and sheer exhaustion to things that can stop a career in its tracks like tendonitis and torn ligaments. And most of them do it so that they can achieve a technical level that allows them to perform for an audience, because going through that much to just dance for your mirror is overkill. There are lots of people who take dance because they like it and they want to be able to do it better, but that's not the same thing as dancing because you have to dance.

Dance demands a dancer's soul, and will accept nothing less. A dancer is someone who translates the spiritual into the physical, and that kind of alchemy takes a lot out of a person. Sure, you can offer less than your soul, and still dance. Anyone can dance, but not everyone who dances is a dancer. The distinction between "someone who dances" and "dancer" has nothing to do with whether or not the person gets paid, because not everyone who gets paid for their dancing is a dancer. And there are plenty of dancers who won't ever get a dime for their dancing.

The difference is in how much of your soul dance owns. Music was my very first master, and to this day, remains my master. It owns me as nothing and no one else ever will because it has fostered a need in me I cannot deny, and wouldn't want to deny if I could. It's not a matter of "right" or "wrong", "good" or "bad". It simply is. When I hear music, something in the depths of my spirit responds. I could no more repress that response than I could stop breathing. I go to dance performances all the time, and have always felt ambiguous about it. I love to watch dance because that kind of incandescent beauty transforms me, even if I'm no more than a spectator. Watching is important for me as a dancer, because that's one of the ways I learn and grow in my art. Dance tends to be a cutthroat and very competitive field, but since it's not my only career, I have the luxury of being able to enjoy other dancers. I love watching a dancer who can do something I haven't learned how to do, or who performs a certain style better than I can. But I'll be honest - I always feel a tinge of pain watching dance, because more than anything, I want to be doing the dancing, rather than watching it.

When I dance, I change music into movement and offer a transcendent beauty to those who watch. I speak directly to the gods, and speak directly from the very core of myself. I have never performed naked, and yet when I perform, I am stripped bare of all pretense, all masks, all that veils me and keeps me separate and private from those around me. Much as a slave must be before her Master, so is the dancer before those who see her dance. Stripped down to her very essence, artifice and pretense pared from her, without anything to hide behind. What I do when I dance is serve. What I serve is sacredness. I take a specific space - that space in which my physical form moves - and I change it from something mundane, whether that be the Persian carpet in the restaurant or the stage at the theater or the section of street at the fair, into a sacred space. What I do is something holy. In dancing, I create a sacred space, and then invite those who watch to become a part of something holy. And if in so doing I can convey even a fifth of what I feel to those who watch, then I have indeed danced well.

Dancing Online

Dancing is often considered the pinnacle of an experienced kajira's skills. You can serve Bazi tea? Fantastic. You can do a tandem serve? Wonderful. You've taught 89 Gorean kajirae the positions, food, drink, history, geography, and philosophy of Gor? Kudos. But can you dance?

If you say no, most people will consider that you haven't mastered the one thing that really divides the beginners from the experts - the novices from the skilled slaves, or, as some channels have designated it, the white silks from the red silks.

So what's the big deal with dancing online? Well, first off, you have to know how the heck your chat program works. That means understanding technical basics behind pop ups and aliases and how to use them properly.Everyone knows that the majority of dances are written well in advance and posted piece by piece to the channel for the admiration of the audience, just as the majority of real dances are choreographed and rehearsed and then performed movement by movement for the audience. Still, there's a stigma attached to aliases and pop ups - probably from the misuse of them during serves - that has never quite faded. There's very little worse than forgetting the darn forward slash to pull up an alias, and seeing "whipdance8" come up in channel instead of the searingly sensual conglomerate of phrases you labored over to get just right, or even worse, clicking on the wrong pop up by accident and interrupting your own pole dance with a paragraph from your veil dance. It's a pretty big let down to see your hard work cut short by an unexpected buffer length as well.

Second, you have to find a setting that you can dance in. Sure, there are contests, but they tend to be political and the judging highly subjective - what one channel's judges find provocative another's group will find crass and bordering on insulting.

Third, you have to be halfway proficient writer - or maybe I should say a halfway proficient writer of really awful prose, because let's face it - the dances that are the best Gorean dances would give any editor, publisher, or writing teacher fits. Gorean dances are a lot like eating a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream, nuts, cherries, butterscotch sauce, honey sauce, raspberry jam and caramel three meals a day. Every day. Overkill is the name of the game. But still, you do have to be skilled in overkill. You also have to figure out just how you want to present yourself - how important an accurate representation of yourself is to you, and how important the fantasy aspect of online Gor and online dancing is to you. Online dance runs the gamut from no holds barred complete fantasy featuring poses that simply can't be done, and dance movements that are physically impossible performed in a channel where every kajira is 19, nubile, has knee length red hair and green eyes and a 38-22-38 figure to more realistic portrayals. The rule of thumb is to know your audience. The Barbie doll kajira doing triple back flips and landing perfectly balanced on one toe with the other leg extended over her head without a lock of hair out of place is going to look ludicrous in a channel that insists on realistic portrayals, just as the average looking 40 something kajira with frizzy brown hair and bifocals who dances a more subtle, realistic dance is going to look badly out of place in a channel full of Barbie doll kajirae. I won't get into any kind of debate here over which is 'right' or which is 'better' - that depends entirely on what you and your owner want out of your time on Gor. You just need to be certain that you and your owner have the same views on which is the right way, and that you find a channel that espouses those views as well.

Getting training in online dance is somewhat controversial within the online community - the longer you explore online Gor, the more you'll find that pretty much every facet of online Gor has some kind of controversy revolving around it. There are a lot of channels set up to help kajirae gain knowledge and skill about various parts of Gor, and there are quite a few kajirae who will help train other kajirae, either in a class or in a one on one setting. If you prefer to have help in training, take some time and talk to people in several different channels, including the ops, the trainers, and the students, so that you get a clear picture of the expectations and the focus of the channel. Interview prospective trainers the same way. It's a buyers market for training, and taking training at one place or with one person shouldn't preclude training elsewhere as well unless you make the mistake of training in a place or with a person who's of the opinion that knowledge is a bad thing, which is a peculiar mind set for any teacher to have. An informed decision is the best kind to make, and the more you know, the more informed your decisions will be. A perfectly valid and often overlooked way to learn is to do your own research, wander around and watch as many different kajirae as you can, and develop your own style from there. If you already have an owner, be certain that he or she approves of the things you're practicing, preferably before you engage in them.

One of the universal no-no's in writing a dance is to plagiarize someone else's dance, either by presenting segments of it and taking credit for it, or presenting it in its entirety as if it were your own. If you present an online dance, it needs to be your own work. If it isn't, you need to get the writer's permission to present her dance and say at the beginning of your presentation that you're dancing someone else's dance. I've heard some incredibly far fetched arguments for why it's okay to steal someone else's hard work and present it as your own, but none that hold water, let alone justify theft. It's not just in poor taste and unethical, it's illegal, both by Gorean and Earth standards. It will also earn a slave a very bad reputation in short order and get her banned in channels.

Dancing off line compared to dancing online

I may take a lot of flak for this, but for what it's worth, my opinion is that online dancing isn't really dancing. How would I know? I know because I do both, and there's a world of difference between them, and I'm not just talking about earth and Gor. I'm talking about the difference between physically going through the training necessary to hone your body to a point where it can do things a lot of people can't make their bodies do - things that hurt, that take an incredible amount of skill and control and a lot of effort to do - and make it all look easy while you do it, and sitting down at a keyboard, or with paper and pen, and writing out a description of a dance that will work on a chat program.

Is dancing online hard work? You bet it is, if you want to do it well. Finding "le mot juste" and a turn of phrase that will evoke an image - a provocative image - in the audiences' minds that hasn't already been used 50 billion times by everyone and their third cousin isn't easy. Finding the right words is only half the battle - you have to figure out what the channel you'll be performing in likes to see. Is it for a contest where the rules are specific? Nothing beyond 10 segments, and the entire dance taking no more channel time than 15 minutes? Is the dance supposed to be improvised or is it supposed to be written beforehand and carefully polished for a professional appearance? Is it for an audience that expects skilled slaves to have diarrhea of the keyboard, and judges all dances by word count alone? Does the channel permit sexual acts during provocative dances, or does it frown on masturbating with the whip handle? Is the channel full of strict Goreans who want only things that were mentioned in the books? Or does it cater to Goreans who want a kajira to develop her own style and her own set of dances that move beyond the few dances and vague phrases Mr. Norman used to describe dances? And let's not forget the slave's owner. After all, the only reason the slave is dancing is because her owner finds it pleasing that she do so, right? Well, maybe, and then again, maybe she's fulfilling some of her own needs in dancing - but that's a whole different issue. Bottom line is that her dance had better please her owner, or she'll end up wishing she'd never attempted to create a dance. If her owner likes long flowery phrases and dances that last 25 segments, she needs to write those kinds of dances. If her owner likes to keep it short and to the point, then she'd better be prepared to keep it simple and leave the purple prose to others.

But online dancing is not physical work. Very few online 'dancers' pull muscles or strain tendons training and performing their dances - unless you count carpal tunnel syndrome, that is. You don't have to break a sweat, you don't have to be in great shape or even decent shape, you can dance online even if you're flat on your back in bed. There are a slew of skilled online dancers could never perform dance in real life simply because they don't have the dance training needed to do it. Then again, there are a slew of skilled real life dancers could never write a decent online dance because they don't have the writing background needed to do it. Both take a lot of dedication and a lot of effort. If I do enough research, I can write a very realistic account of murdering someone. That doesn't mean I really have the wherewithal to kill another person, and it doesn't mean I actually committed murder. Given the time, I could also write a convincing account of brain surgery. That doesn't mean I'd have the skills to perform brain surgery in real life, just that I have enough skill with the written word to make my fictional account persuasive to a reader. A dancer who dances in real life rarely gets up, performs, and then says "I just wrote." But I've seen plenty of kajirae online post a flawlessly eloquent and moving dance and say "I just danced."

There's a stigma attached to the fantasy that online Gor represents, perhaps in part because IRC has a well-earned reputation for being the place to go when you want to deliberately misrepresent yourself. While 'role playing' is considered a filthy term in some Gorean circles, it's also an inevitable part of online Gor, because no matter how much a person models their real life on Gorean principles, the fact is that when someone is sitting at a keyboard typing about being in a tavern swilling paga, they're still sitting at a keyboard typing. How much of a part Gor plays in a person's real life is a choice each person has to make for themselves, and frankly, it's not my business who's decided which way to go or for what reasons. For me, online and real life dancing are two very different things. I enjoy both, they call on very different skill sets for me, and both take a lot of hard work. I enjoy the fantasy that online performance offers, as well as the reality of an offline performance.