I always sat front row center. Eight years of shows, hundreds of performances across countless venues, and I never sat anywhere else. The dancers knew where to find me. When they hit their mark downstage, there I’d be, camera raised, eye pressed to the viewfinder, capturing the moments that would otherwise exist only in memory. I was the guy who never missed a shimmy, the one who somehow always found the shot when the light caught a hip scarf just right.
Tonight I was in my usual seat, but something fundamental had shifted. I had my camera, of course. I’d also hired a videographer, because some part of me understood that I couldn’t simply watch anymore. I’d spent too many years behind the lens to suddenly become just an audience member. But this wasn’t a gig I was covering. The room full of dancers wasn’t here for a show. They were here for me.
Fifty-four years old. My eighth birthday party in this world I’d stumbled into nearly a decade earlier, and everyone in the room knew it would be my last. We weren’t saying it out loud, because that would have made it too real, too final. But the knowledge hung in the air like the last note of a song that nobody wanted to end.
Michelle Hilario had scheduled all the dancers, coordinating the lineup with the same care she brought to everything she touched. I’d handled the rest myself, the way I always did. Found the studio, rented the space, sorted through the logistics that turn an idea into an evening.
Eight birthday parties over eight years had taught me how to create these gatherings. Some years I’d done two nights, twenty or thirty dancers each night, the studio transformed into something between a concert and a family reunion. This final celebration was smaller, more intimate. The people in this room weren’t just performers who’d heard about an event and decided to show up.
Michelle danced too, because that’s how this community works. Nobody just organizes. Everybody gives something of themselves.
Dianna and Jennelah opened with tribal fusion, all precise isolations and fierce attitude. Then Circata took the floor, five dancers moving like a single organism, their tribal choreography a conversation without words. Mandala Dance Works had attended almost all eight of my birthday parties over the years. They performed their signature blend of tribal and modern dance, and watching them, I felt the weight of all those previous celebrations stacking up behind this one like photographs in an album I was about to close.
My friend Donavan spoke. He used to own Studio Iqaat, one of the spaces where this community had gathered and grown, and he talked for a while about the years we’d shared. It was good to see him again. We’d been through a lot of the same rooms, witnessed the same transformations, watched dancers evolve from nervous newcomers to confident artists. Olu danced and was wonderful. Mardhavi performed bellydance. Jannah and Indra took their turns on the floor.
Then a break dancer appeared, a Black guy I’d never met. He’d simply heard something was happening and showed up, the way people do in scenes like this one. Word travels through channels that have nothing to do with social media or formal invitations. Doors stay open for those who know to look for them. He delivered a performance that had everyone cheering as if he’d been part of the plan all along, because in a way, he had been. The plan had always been to welcome whoever found their way in.
Jannah had created a piece specifically for me. Personal. A goodbye wrapped in music and movement, a gift that could only be given once. I don’t remember the specific choreography anymore, because memory has a way of preserving feeling while letting details fade. But I remember how it landed. I remember understanding that she had put something of herself into those minutes that she wouldn’t get back.
Then Donavan picked up his drum.
This wasn’t scheduled. Nothing about it was planned. He simply started playing, and one by one the dancers rose from their seats, not to perform, just to move. An ad-hoc rhythm calling forth an ad-hoc dance floor. The formal structure of the evening dissolved into something looser and truer, the way a river eventually finds its natural course. People I’d photographed for years, people who had somehow become friends and family, all moving together in this rented studio while Donavan’s hands found patterns none of us could have predicted.
I shot it. I couldn’t not. The camera had become an extension of my eye, my way of holding onto moments that insisted on passing.
A couple of dancers I didn’t recognize joined the improvised celebration. That’s the thing about communities built on art and movement. There’s always space for one more. Always someone new finding their way in, drawn by music or curiosity or the simple human need to belong to something larger than themselves. I’d found my own way in eight years earlier, broken and grieving, carrying a camera like a shield against a world that had suddenly become incomprehensible.
The party wound down the way all parties eventually do. Hugs that lasted longer than usual. Promises to visit that we all wanted to believe. Everyone in that room knew I wasn’t coming back to California. The state had grown too strange for me, too expensive and chaotic, and I was building a new life in Florida. This was the end of something that couldn’t be replaced or recreated. The community would continue without me, the way communities do, but my place in it was becoming memory.
I said the goodbyes. I meant every one of them.
Somewhere over Texas, the cabin lights dimmed and most of the passengers surrendered to sleep. I had the window seat, though there was nothing to see. Just darkness pressing against the glass and the faint reflection of my own face, older than it should have been, staring back at me.
Fifty-four years old. Eight years immersed in a world I hadn’t known existed until grief cracked me open and I stumbled into it, camera in hand, looking for something I couldn’t name. Nearly a million photographs. Dancers, renaissance festivals, mermaid shows, professional wrestlers, masquerade balls, and reenactments. A whole life that had grown from the wreckage of the one that ended on January 31, 2005, at 9:57 in the morning, in a Los Angeles hospital called Queen of Angels.
I closed my eyes, and the memories began surfacing. Not in chronological order, because that’s not how memory works. They came the way dreams come, following their own associative logic, one image triggering another across years and venues and states.
The first time I saw a belly dancer perform and had no framework for understanding what I was witnessing.
The national parks in those early months, all that geological silence and ancient landscape, trying to outrun something that had taken up residence inside my chest.
Marjhani, who opened a door I hadn’t known was there.
The moment I realized I wasn’t just documenting anymore. I had become part of something, woven into a community that had welcomed me without asking what I was running from.
The plane hummed its mechanical lullaby. California was behind me now, shrinking into distance and memory. Everything I’d built back there, all those friendships, all those nights in the front row center seat, all those images captured and shared and treasured, was becoming the past tense.
But not yet. Not while I could still remember. Not while the faces and the music and the movement still lived somewhere behind my eyes, waiting to be summoned.
The memories kept coming, and I let them.
[LINK: Full Bellydance PHOTO gallery on SmugMug]
[LINK: Full Bellydance VIDEO gallery on SmugMug]