Tatyana Ali did not go on Dancing with the Stars expecting to learn anything about her own body, and then she did.
Ali, an actress and a maternal health advocate, is competing with the professional dancer Jan Ravnik. Speaking before their Mariah Carey Night performance, she said the rehearsals had brought things up she had not expected, and that she had stopped thinking of movement as exercise.
Then she turned it outward, which is the part worth carrying. “What’s important is, mamas, women, we have to move. We have to dance,” she said. Not trained dancing, and not a programme. “In any way that you can move, that you’re able to move, is important, and don’t deny yourself of that,” she said.
That is a different instruction from almost everything aimed at Black women about their bodies. It asks for nothing to get smaller. It asks for twenty seconds in a kitchen.
She was also clear that this has been good, not hard. “If you are seeing joy coming out of me, just know that this is a really cool experience,” she said. “I got a lot to be joyful about.”
And to anyone on a couch on a Tuesday night with the music up: “Dance with me. I love you guys.”
