Article - Steps’ Mother - Dr. Anita Ratnam

There is no getting away from it. It is not something you can push under the carpet or hide behind your ghungroos. If you are a woman and a dancer, then dance is your eldest child, you are married to your body and you are a mother to movement. That alchemical bond between the spirit, body and the navel of memory is sacrosanct. Married or unmarried, divorced, separated or in a social relationship you can term ‘complicated’, there is nothing complex about a woman and her body that absorbs, morphs and shape-shifts as it grows and the dance grows alongside it. You are a parent who nurtures and forms the growing bubble of kinetic clay that takes shape through your limbs and torso. What is it like being a mother? What is it like to be a mother and a dancer whose body is singularly stubborn and independent? I always believed that life would deliver me as a dancer first and all else next. I knew I was good and that I would always be in the spotlight. But a mother? I had never planned on being a mother to anything but dance. I did dream of a handsome man sweeping me off my feet. But children? I knew that being a mother was not going to be easy and that I did not have the stamina to stay the course of motherhood.

Read the article in the site