Shake It So Notes

Today is the actual holiday: Menstrual Hygiene Day. But we decided to celebrate the day before and the day after.

Yesterday we had our dance party on Zoom, with many of you, with people from the MoonCatcher Project, and with 80 or so students at the Sankhula Secondary School in Malawi. There were a few technical glitches, but mostly everything went smoothly and people seemed to have a great time.

When we were first getting set up, Sickiey let me know that the kids had some song requests. I should have known. They always do. But it wasn't exactly compatible with the plan, which was 42 minutes of carefully curated, licensed music from Malawian artists.

The kids had already planned specific dance moves for the songs they'd requested, so we couldn't refuse. We cheated a bit. Becky pulled up their requests on Spotify a few minutes before the official start time. You can see their moves in this video:

Looking back, I think that was the right call for more reasons than one. We had a plan, and the plan was good, but the kids had their own ideas, their own songs, their own moves. Meeting them where they were, playing what they wanted to dance to, mattered more than running the schedule I'd built. That turns out to be the whole idea.

Today I'm wearing a special T-shirt. It has a quote on it: "Joy is an act of resistance." The line is the poet Toi Derricotte's.

Joy as an act, an action. That's really interesting to me. As someone who has struggled at times with depression, I'm not sure about the idea that you can just choose to be happy. But I think you can choose to engage, with authenticity, hope, love, and respect. To me, that's what engaging joyfully means.

This is one thing I love about dance. When you dance to a song, you're meeting that song on its own terms, with your whole body. It almost forces you to engage in a meaningful way. And when you dance to music from artists half a world away, whose lives are different from your own, that's powerful. It's the kind of engagement we need to move beyond a charity model, to acknowledge that the kinds of problems we're trying to solve require partnership, respect, even hope and joy.

And I think that's where resistance comes in, too. It can be hard to have hope when patterns of disenfranchisement are rooted in centuries of history and oppression. But to celebrate life while acknowledging the real pain inside ourselves and outside ourselves takes strength and determination. And it's necessary for actually creating change.

Tomorrow is the big event. Because it's a Friday night, and because we'll be meeting people where they are, I hope some of you will come to Berlin to dance with Becky and Johanna. I'll be in Albany, dancing with the MoonCatcher folks.

This event is a chance for me to demonstrate, to myself, to the MoonCatcher Project, and maybe to future partners, that this model can really work. That it can raise money and build awareness, yes. But also that it can lead to the kind of engagement we need to overcome these hard problems. To really be, as Billy Preston sang, soldiers in the war on poverty.