How I Met the Dance World From My Living Room

My anorexia was molded by fashion magazine subscriptions, early 2000s SoCal dance studios, WeightWatchers, Lean Cuisine, the runways I desperately wanted to walk. The ludicrously normalized idea of chewing food and spitting it out just to “get a taste.” 

By the time my age was in the double digits, I’d been energetically flattened by this cultural and common rhetoric. I let society convince me that my ultimate goal was to be thin. I fell for it for years. insert clown emoji. 

But then it all crashed down in 2017—and thank God for that. Recovery gave me something I hadn't expected: a chance to rebuild my relationship with dance from the ground up.

The world beyond the dancefloor

I moved to New York City in 2018. I was a baby in anorexia recovery, and I wanted to start over in the city that had always called to my heart. Focused on rebuilding and refeeding my hungry body, I was careful when it came to approaching exercise again. I had spent years forcing myself to do hours of cardio in the gym, and my dance memories were largely tainted by body dysmorphia, comparison, and insecurity. 

One day, a Caribbean coworker of mine invited me to a dance class. I instinctively said “yes.” I had no idea what to expect, but I wanted to test the waters and see how I might reconnect with movement. 

Arriving at 520 Eighth Avenue, we took the elevator up to the 17th floor and walked into Kiara Paige’s soca class. When the class started, I was completely blown away. The joy in the room, the unabashed confidence, the support oozing out of all the beautiful Caribbean women. It was genuine love. 

The dance spaces I’d grown up in were the complete opposite: quiet and sterile, with undertones of judgment and, in some extreme cases, cruelty. I was used to everyone holding their breaths, avoiding eye contact, desperate to “become the best.” But in that joyful soca room, we weren’t becoming anything. We already were. We were all the best, and we made sure each other knew that. 

That day, I fell in love. 

I continued learning, attending every class I could throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. Eventually, COVID hit the City, and I had no choice but to continue my new, rejuvenated dance journey from home. 

I turned to online resources, which is where I discovered Lucille Aires for the first time. She seemed larger than life to me. She was living what felt like an impossible dream. I watched and followed along silently at home, wondering why I felt so unfulfilled in the stuffy corporate life I thought I had wanted. 

Looking back, though, what I remember most from those years isn't the choreography or even just the dancing. It's the people.

By then, dance had become my doorway into cultures I hadn't grown up around. I lived in Brooklyn. My friends and neighbors were Jamaican, Trinidadian, Nigerian, Ghanaian, South African. Unlike the SoCal landscape, my NYC dance classmates came from all over the world. Beyond the movement, I found myself learning about music, food, history, language, and ways of understanding community that felt very different from the hyper-individualistic culture I'd been raised in.

At first, I didn't think much about it. I was just showing up to class.

Years later, I’ve joined international online dance communities, developed friendships with dancers across multiple continents, and begun teaching these styles to the very SoCal community I felt so ostracized in.

Again and again, I’ve met people who described dance not simply as an art form or a hobby, but as a bridge. Introducing them to countries they'd never visited, cultures they'd never encountered, and friendships that often grew far beyond the dance floor itself.

A subculture of a subculture

One of those people is Inca Vallès, a language consultant from Barcelona who now lives in Lisbon. Vallès met friends from Gambia and Senegal through dance, and it was through dance where she discovered much more about them and their cultures.

“I learned a lot of things about both their Muslim religion and their delicious foods,” Vallès said. “I also learned how much their languages (Mandinka in Gambia and Wolof in Senegal) reflect their cultures. For example: if you ask how their family is and they say ‘okay,’ it means they are okay, too, because they see their family as part of them.”

Vallès experienced a similar learning when she went to Cabo Verde for vacation and learned more about the land’s history through their massive Carnival events. 

“I started seeing the dancing, and from there, I started talking to people. They were explaining to me about their 500-year tradition of Carnival, where it comes from, how it makes them who they are today and why it remains so important and relevant in their culture,” Vallès said.

“They’ve had very harsh conditions due to colonization and their long fight for independence, but the Carnival is the big festivity they prepare for throughout the whole year. The entire society is involved, and it’s a very political thing. So, you’ll see nurses, doctors, teachers and families demonstrating for better conditions. All of the kids come dressed up, dancing and spending months preparing their costumes. It truly is the Carnival of the people, for the people. It keeps them happy despite harsh living conditions and a difficult economy, and they take huge efforts to make that happen.”

Vallès also lived in São Paulo, Brazil, for a while, where she discovered Baroque dance for the first time.

“It’s very special: a dance from the Black community in Brazil. People learn it in their houses with their families and neighbors. Today, it’s taught in schools, but it remains a very exclusive thing for São Paulo,” Vallès said. 

According to Vallès, Baroque isn’t danced anywhere else in Brazil—or the world. She was fortunate enough to begin learning it with her husband while they lived in the area. Eventually, they began attending parties, which were 98 percent Black Brazilian. 

“Thanks to the dance, we were able to connect with this culture we wouldn’t have accessed otherwise, because it’s a subculture of a subculture!” Vallès laughed. 

Vallès also got to host Aires (our dance teacher in common) at her home in Spain while Aires was preparing to move to Barcelona. They’d met once briefly at a workshop on Barcelona, but when Vallès learned Aires was in need, she reached out without hesitation.

“It was an immediate connection: the way we could talk about everything in life as if we’d already met. It was so nice,” Vallès said. “I also got to connect her with another one of my teachers, and I knew they’d hit it off. Dance needs to remain a big part of culture, because it makes everything so much more authentic and real—especially in the age of social media.”

Dance across borders doesn’t always mean easy

If Vallès' story is one of discovery, Foxxi Lorenzelli's is a reminder that cultural exchange is not always so seamless.

An Italian sculptor living in Berlin, Lorenzelli initially returned to dance classes for the same reason many people do: she wanted to meet people who shared her passion. Instead, she found herself confronting cultural differences she hadn't anticipated.

"I was excited to meet new people and connect, but I was quickly brought down to earth when I realized how different my culture is from the German one,” Lorenzelli said.

Even as an introvert, Lorenzelli found herself struggling with what she perceived as a more reserved social environment compared to what she’d grown up with in Italy. Building friendships took far longer than she expected. Finding community within her dance school required patience, persistence, and eventually a bit of luck when another Italian dancer joined her classes.

"We connected immediately and became friends, and because she was such an extrovert, she helped me finally get a little closer to other people, too,” Lorenzelli said.

Her experience serves as a useful reminder that globalization doesn't magically erase cultural differences. In many ways, dance made those differences more visible. But rather than pushing her away, it gave her a framework through which to understand them.

At the same time, dance also expanded her world far beyond Germany.

Through the international Dancehall scene, Lorenzelli began attending camps and workshops across Europe, where familiar faces would appear again and again. Over time, those repeated encounters evolved into something that felt less like a network and more like a family.

"Thanks to dance, I've connected with people who share my passion from all over," Lorenzelli said. "We meet at different camps, and it feels like a little Dancehall family around the world."

In one particularly unexpected twist, she even reconnected with friends from her old punk scene after years apart, only to discover that they had independently found their way into Dancehall as well.

Perhaps the most striking example of the trust these communities create is her upcoming trip to Jamaica. Later this year, Lorenzelli will travel with Hannah Jensen, a fellow dancer she first met through Aires’s online dance community, Luniverse.

Outside of dance circles, telling someone you're flying across the world with a woman you met online might raise a few eyebrows. But inside this community, it barely registers as unusual.

The internet often gets blamed for making the world feel smaller and less personal. Yet, stories like Lorenzelli's suggest something more complicated. Technology may have introduced these dancers to one another, but it was a shared passion that transformed digital connections into real-world relationships.

The network builders

If dancers like Vallès and Lorenzelli represent the participants in these communities, Aires represents something else entirely: the beloved connective tissue.

Over the past several years, Aires has taught, organized events, and built communities across multiple countries, including Ireland, Turkey, and now Spain. Through those experiences, she has watched friendships form between people who otherwise might never have crossed paths.

One of the things that surprised her most wasn't necessarily learning about different cultures, but simply becoming aware of how much of the world she hadn't encountered before.

"When I was teaching in Dublin and Istanbul, I had people from more than fifteen countries in my classes," Aires said. “It didn't change my view of those countries because I didn't really have views about them in the first place. But it made me realize they existed. Countries like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. I just didn't know much about them.”

Indeed, knowledge and familiarity are not the same thing. We can locate a country on a map and still know almost nothing about the people who live there, but Aires watched that distance shrink every time students from different backgrounds found themselves sharing the same dance floor.

Over the years, those connections have multiplied in ways she never anticipated.

“I’ve been traveling for dance for the last five years. When I hosted my first Afro dance camp, I invited my first Afro dance teacher to teach,” Aires said. “Two of my students have become teachers, and their first international workshops took place at my Turkish events. When I go on tours, I stay with students who’ve become friends. The connections are endless.”

Listening to Aires describe these relationships, it becomes clear that the dance community operates through a kind of informal reciprocity. People teach one another, host one another, recommend opportunities, share resources, and create pathways for others to follow. What begins as a student-teacher relationship often evolves into friendship, collaboration, and mutual support.

At the same time, Aires has watched something else happen: more people traveling to experience the cultures that gave birth to the dances they love.

"I feel like there is much more tourism now to places where these dances come from," Aires said. "Especially African countries and Jamaica. People travel because they want to dance."

Yet, she is quick to point out an important contradiction: while dance communities are building increasingly international networks, many of the artists responsible for those cultural exchanges still face enormous barriers to movement. African dancers, in particular, are frequently denied visas despite being invited to teach, perform, and participate in events abroad.

"It's funny, because governments don't really see it as a valuable opportunity," Aires said. "It just shows that we still have a long way to go."

On one hand, dance is bringing together people from countries that might otherwise never intersect. On the other, the institutions that govern international movement often fail to recognize the necessity of those exchanges.

For Aires, however, the evidence is impossible to ignore.

"I think people outside the dance community are shocked when they see ten different nationalities together in one room," Aires said. "But dance is really such a connecting thing, and artists are absolutely required.”

And perhaps that's what makes communities like Luniverse so remarkable: they continue to build connections whether institutions understand them or not. Long before governments decide cultural exchange is worthwhile, dancers are already making the decisions for themselves.

More than movement

As I spoke with dancers around the world, I kept hearing variations of the same idea: dance was introducing people to cultures they otherwise might never have encountered. It was creating friendships that stretched across continents. It was turning strangers into hosts, teachers into friends, and online communities into real-world support systems.

But it was my conversation with Irish dancer Sadhbh Lee that ultimately changed how I think about all of it.

Through dance, Lee developed close friendships with members of Watwero Dance Company in northern Uganda. The organization's name means "we can" in Acholi, and its mission extends far beyond performance.

One member of the company had been abducted as a child and forced to become a child soldier. After escaping, dance became part of his healing process. For Lee, hearing stories like these offered a level of understanding that would have been impossible to gain from a news article or documentary alone.

"It gave me more insight into the traumatic effects of something like that," Lee said. "And also how dance can be used as an outlet, a way of healing and connecting people who've been through similar experiences."

The company now uses dance not only as a creative outlet but as a tool for community development and education. Through her own work, Lee eventually helped facilitate a partnership between Watwero and a health-focused organization addressing teenage pregnancy.

On paper, the collaboration seems unlikely; one organization focuses on public health, while the other is a dance company. Yet in practice, it made perfect sense. The partnership challenged assumptions she had grown up with in Ireland, where dance is often viewed primarily as entertainment or artistic expression rather than a powerful source of healing.

"Here in Ireland, if people are using art to heal, it might be through talking groups or writing," Lee explained. "Dance wouldn't necessarily be the first thing people think of."

In Uganda, she encountered something different.

Many of the dancers she met came from difficult economic circumstances. Yet dance remained accessible because it required very little. At the community's youth center, young people gather every day to dance, socialize, and support one another.

"It's a real source of community, and an important outlet for people,” Lee said.

The more she learned, the more she began to understand dance not simply as an activity, but as a social force. A way of creating belonging, processing hardship, and imagining a future.

Her perspective on social media is similarly nuanced.

Like many of the dancers I spoke with, Lee credits online platforms with making these relationships possible. She has learned from teachers around the world, met friends while traveling internationally, and connected with communities she otherwise never would have encountered.

At the same time, she is careful not to confuse access with understanding.

"Social media makes it easier to connect with people and cultures, but you don't know them in the same way as you might in person,” Lee said.

That distinction stayed with me long after our conversation ended.

Throughout reporting this story, I kept returning to a simple question: what exactly are we building when we dance together? The answer, I think, is something much bigger than classes, choreography, or performance. 

We're building relationships.

We're learning how other people live, celebrate, grieve, heal, and understand the world. We're creating networks of trust that exist outside governments, outside media narratives, and often outside traditional tourism itself. We are finding ways to meet one another directly.

The internet may have introduced many of us, and dance may have brought us into the same room. But what happened after that was profoundly human.

A woman in Lisbon hosts a teacher from Brazil.

An Italian artist in Berlin prepares to travel to Jamaica with a Danish twerk instructor she met online.

An Irish student collaborates with dancers in Uganda on public health education.

A former child soldier helps build community through movement.

None of these stories are particularly viral or likely to dominate headlines. Yet together, they paint a picture of a world that feels increasingly rare: one built not on algorithms, politics, or fear, but on curiosity, generosity, and shared joy.

I started dancing because I was trying to heal my relationship with my body. What I didn't expect was that it would transform my relationship with the world.