Mrs. Brenda Hotard: Finding Paths Back to Dance

An Incredible Story of a Life Devoted to Dance and So Much More

  

FINDING PATHS BACK TO DANCE

An illustration of classic, traditional country dancing

At the Burlington Grammar School, organized dancing was offered on rainy days when we couldn’t exercise outdoors. Bad weather happened often enough in England that we would frequently end up in the assembly hall doing English country dancing instead. It was a style and vocabulary that required skill in managing space, accurate footwork, relationship to others, and learning choreography. It wasn’t ballet, but it was still satisfying organized dancing and wonderful music.

Some of my friends from the ballet school were in the same grammar school, and they would occasionally invite me to get together and make up a ballet dance, with which we would go onstage. I had been away from training but had not lost the skill. It sharpened my abiding yearning to be back at it, though there was no way to return.

Later, while being academically pressured to think about a future career, I longed to say all the time, “Excuse me, this isn’t what I want to do. I really want to dance. Can you help me find a way to do that?” It would have been an absurd thing to say to any teacher! “I don’t want to do English poetry of the 19^th century. I want to dance!” (Laughs…)

Fifties dancing

Anyway, I didn’t—couldn’t do it, so I got through my high school. I was eighteen years old—twice the age I was when I stopped dancing, and I still danced at every opportunity. I had a boyfriend at that time. We went to clubs—nothing sophisticated, but there was always dancing going on. It was the fifties, and we were doing swing—wonderful dances! We were showing off because we learned all the stunts (through the legs and over the top). Oh! I wish I could’ve seen it! It was just fantastic.

Every kind of dance that I could find, I did. There were always free opportunities. The youth groups would offer free programs for working class kids in London. My dad always kind of had his ear to the ground on that, and he would say, “Oh, you can go and do gymnastics at such and such gym.” I tried gymnastics and found that I could succeed at it because of the flexibility and coordination that I had acquired so thoroughly in dance. What I preferred that was going on in the gymnastics room was Scottish highland dancing over in the corner where a Scottish highland dance teacher was working with a few kids.

A famous Scottish Highland Dance instructor, Jean Reynolds

My dad was always the one to take me to these places. Looking back, I realize that he was constantly hoping for a way to reconnect me with dance. So he took me “over there,” and to the Scottish instructor—a woman who taught me how to do Scottish highland dancing. It was in many ways very close to ballet dance and equally demanding. To my delight, I discovered that I could do it and loved it.

In many ways, Scottish dancing very much resembles aspects of ballet. This group was doing little competitions in the area, and somehow this competitive opportunity opened up for me. I was eager to do it. I recall feeling wonderful in the performance and the audience was so affirmative.

But all of these little opportunities were brief because I was always moving on to something else. Finishing school and going on to the university, there was no opportunity to dance. However, I became a thespian performing in several plays—wonderful, serious, substantial plays with meaty lead roles. That took care of my love of performance temporarily, but it didn’t lead me to dance.

 

(To be continued in following sections…)