Rakkasah Festival 1997

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,
but by the moments that take our breath away."
-- George Carlin

Since the summer of 1997, I have been facing challenges in my dance life. In that fateful year, I released “The Dancers' Toolkit, Volume I”, and I had further plans to make a series of videos for dance instruction.

When my video was received with acclaim and awards, I had additional hopes of making a real contribution to the art of Middle Eastern dance. However, within six months, my life had taken a number of unforeseen turns -- for the worst!

Home Lost
First, I fought (but lost) an eviction proceeding at my San Francisco apartment, just at the moment that the city's rental rates were going off the charts, thanks to the dot-com invasion. With an eviction on my record, finding another apartment in the area seemed impossible and unaffordable.

I tried to re-establish myself in Sonoma County, hoping to find a niche again, but I felt so depressed that it was difficult to get out of bed, much less promote a new dance alternative in an already-saturated market --even though I thought that what I had to offer was unique in its approach and discipline. Interest was focusing primarily on "American Tribal", which I found extremely boring and unchallenging. Tribal oriented students were not ready for the kind of work I expected of them. For several months, I felt utterly paralyzed, and then a former San Francisco student offered me a small house on her property south of San Francisco--for "whatever I could afford" which was pretty little, given that I had not been able to find a job and had used up what little savings I had had simply surviving. I accepted her offer, and moved all my belongings from a storage unit to my new abode.

Performing with Hahbi Ru in 1995

Robbed
When I got to my storage place, I discovered the lock on my unit had been changed; when I inquired at the office, they claimed that they knew nothing about it. It turned out that someone had cut off the lock and replaced it with one of their own, allowing them to go into my unit and take what they liked.I had been robbed of almost all my records and books. I had stored approximately 40 boxes, and only three were left. Of my hundreds of LPs, only 30 or so, survived. This was another tremendous blow! My mother had read some of those books to me; in turn, I had read them to my son, and was planning to pass them to him for his children someday. Recordings I had bought during 35 years of dance and irreplaceable one-of-a-kind items all had been lost to me. All of the hundreds of books I had loved enough to keep, out of the thousands I'd read, were gone. Perhaps 200 books on dance, dance history, body awareness, and movement, were all missing. It felt like losing a host of friends who had supported me through difficult times, with whom I laughed and from whom I learned. I was devastated in a particularly violated way, when something cherished and from which I drew joy and strength, had been taken with no regard for its intellectual, artistic, or spiritual value.

Despite the loss, I had hopes of rekindling my teaching after moving back to the area. Without a good-sized studio, I had begun teaching private classes, as well as intensive subject oriented courses on costuming and developing a personal style, using the converted 1-car garage between a student's and my home. I eventually found a job in San Francisco and tried to start teaching there again, when my student/landlord decided to move out of the area and sold the property. Again, I was without a place to live, in a rental market where people were thrilled if they could find a studio apartment for $1500. -- at the time, almost my entire take-home pay!

Miss America of the Belly Dance 1993-94, Magana Baptiste poses with Baraka

Click of Death
It would have been a good plan, but when I opened the database on my hard drive, it was corrupted. “Good thing I had a backup on a zip disk!” I thought. However, it was a very bad thing that my zip drive chose the moment I put that database into it to develop the dread "click of death", thereby destroying the only remaining copy of my records. That lost me some 3500 names and addresses, and I had no money to pay for data retrieval.

By now, having lost my home, my studio, my library, my recordings, and my database, you would think I would start to get the hint that it might be time to move away from dance. Having been a dancer literally all of my life, I simply couldn't give it up!

I'd been out of the scene for the better part of two years, barely keeping my head above water financially and emotionally.

performing at the Marrakech Restaurant

I took the job at Stanford, and found that there was a Health Improvement Program for Employees; so I proposed a dance class. They hired me to start teaching a class in the summer of 2000. I taught the first two classes, and then, in early July, left to go on tour with our Jazz Orchestra and drummer Louie Bellson (who played for years with his late wife, Pearl Bailey). Little did I know that that trip would end my dancing forever.

Benicia street fair, circa 1976

As we stood in line waiting to board, I was talking with one of the students. The next thing I knew, I was overwhelmingly dizzy and nauseous, surrounded by people who were telling me to lie down. "Why? What happened?" I managed to mumble from behind a blur as the world spun around me. "You were hit by a bus."

Those words rocked the earth under my feet. I was confused and bleeding. I hurt everywhere, and I couldn't focus my eyes. I collapsed to the pavement. The next forty-eight hours are a blur of paramedics, ambulance, emergency room, x-rays, stitches, and voices. "We're going to have to cut her hair." "What year is it?", "Who is the president?" Mostly, I heard the French language. My command of French, at that time, was adequate but rusty. It had been over 30 years since I'd been fluent in French, but I could shop, get around, and manage simple conversations. However, after putting a six-inch hole in the windshield of an Italian tour bus with my head (fortunately, it was the windshield and not the steel body, or I would not be writing this!) I found I could not think of simple words and phrases even in English.

It seemed to take forever to get an idea from my brain to my tongue, and just attempting to speak drained me completely. What French I could comprehend, I couldn't process. I realized that something was wrong with my brain!

After some interminable time in the emergency ward of the Hôtel Dieu, located just across the street from the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, it was determined that I would be kept at least overnight for observation. Alone in a hospital room in a foreign country, concussed, bruised, cut, and battered, I came close to panic. If I had not been thinking so slowly, I sure I would have worked myself into quite a state, but I simply fell into an exhausted sleep, hoping that the morning would bring me back to normal.

Performing at the Casbah in 1977

That hope was not to be realized. By mid-morning, my fellow tour manager, Laura, had returned to the hospital with Estelle, the head of the Stanford in Paris program and our only contact in the city. A native Parisiénne, Estelle was able to explain to the doctors that I was not nauseated, but queasy from the dizziness. Estelle was able to go to the local police and arrange all the required paperwork to be filed about the accident. Angel that she is, she even let me use her cell phone to call my son back in San Francisco and let him know I had been injured. It took most of the day to get to the point of being released from the hospital so that I could fly home with the rest of the group the following day.

I'd been as insistent as I could be from flat on my back, that I would feel better getting home than staying on in Paris to try to recover. It might not have been the wisest decision, but by this time all I really wanted to let my hair down, stop being brave, and get home to my own bed and my cat, so I could just cry, rest, and try to sort everything out. At least I would be in familiar surroundings.

Powell Street Station in 1979

I was worried that I couldn't think clearly but believed that it was probably due to shock and disorientation, and that things would be better when we got home and I could be comfortable. I won't bore you with the agonies of flying for 12 hours, untaped ribs and all, on medication, and then getting through customs, and then waiting over an hour for my son to find me. My hopes were dashed again. As soon as I could get home, I went to the doctor and got a diagnosis in English. I had 2 broken ribs, a serious concussion, cuts to my head and face, pain pretty much everywhere, and an overwhelming dizziness that made even turning over in bed a process to be done in slow degrees. To simply turn my head gave me grief; walking was only possible if I had a hand on a wall. If I could stay awake for four hours, it was an accomplishment. It was a month before I had enough strength and balance to walk half a block to the store, and I needed a nap after managing that much. I couldn't return to work, because I couldn't hold a thought long enough to get it into words. The prognosis was between six months and two years to recover.

The Long Recovery
I filed a Workers' Compensation claim. Please let me tell you, this is a complex process even when you're in complete command of your mental faculties! Trying to make sense of it all with your brain wrapped in layers of wet felt was nigh onto impossible. WC referred me to Dr. Ralph Kiernan, a neuro-psychologist whose specialty is working with victims of head injuries. He slowly helped me to understand the process of recovery, to find ways of being able to manage my job in small doses, and to try to be patient with my recovery. I gradually returned to work, first for 3 hours a day by telecommuting. After four months, I returned to the office first for a few hours a day and gradually increased my stay. It was very much a trial and error process. After 8 months, I found that I was going to have to move and thus pay much higher rent. This meant I would need to work full time, but I tried for a month and had to cut back to 3/4 time because I simply couldn’t manage the hours without exhausting myself.

The first troupe (name long forgotten) in 1976

For the first 18 months, I suffered from continual dizziness and spatial disorientation. Any rapid movement made me nauseous. Driving was dangerous for me, since quickly turning my head to react to another car could set off the spells. I was sent for a neurological exam, which confirmed that the dizziness was caused by my inner ears, rather than a brain injury as I had feared. All the small and delicately balanced bones in the inner ear regulate balance, and mine had been jarred every which way by the impact of a double-decker bus going about 15 mph.

Mark Bell drumming, Tahiya and Baraka with Hahbi Ru

Relief!
I have always been a proponent of massage therapy, especially for dancers, but now I was going to find out exactly how far it could take me in my recovery. Conventional medicine would have treated me with drugs to mask the effects, but this was not a solution, just a panacea. I hated taking drugs for that reason. I went to my masseur, Frank Aviles, and we began an intensive program of therapy, which was, thankfully, paid for by Workers' Comp.

Weekly massage sessions became what I lived for, as it was the only time that the pain would be relieved.

Over the past two years, Frank has relieved virtually every physical problem from the accident. At first, he just worked very superficially, trying to work out the overt tensions from the accident. When I had been hit, my right temple took the first impact, which torqued my entire body to the right. According to witnesses, I spun around, went down to my knees, and got back up. The result was that my skull had been knocked out of alignment with my spine, and was putting pressure on a nerve. All my vertebrae were misaligned, my hips were uneven, my left leg was twisted and numb. No wonder walking was a chore!

Frank is a genius of massage and works primarily on dancers and with people recovering from injuries or surgery. He is empathic and supremely sensitive to the body's needs, and has done more to restore my physical health than any other treatment I was able to find. It took months before we could begin to address the deeper effects of the accident. Now, nearly three years later, he has managed to realign my skeleton. He is working on healing not only the accident-related injuries but has also been able to correct problems I had for over 40 years, including a weakened knee joint and a broken foot, which I had exacerbated by dancing during the healing process. Even so, I have found that the problems reappear if I miss more than a couple of treatments, so I expect to continue receiving treatment for these problems on a continuing basis. I am slowly learning to balance again, and dizziness is less of a problem even though it recurs if I move too quickly or try to do too much.

Performing at the Grapeleaf in 1983

Acceptance
I've had to accept that I will never again be able to dance professionally, even though the movements are now so ingrained that no matter what music I hear, I still move like a Middle Eastern dancer. Even with classical or modern composers, I feel and imagine interpreting the music with the same vocabulary of movement. However, this improvement doesn't give me the renewed desire to dance again. That Italian tour bus was the final message in a long string of them, and I've accepted that outcome.

There are certainly things I miss: I miss being active and healthy and having the stamina of someone many years younger (though I'm slowly improving on that score).I miss the sheer joy of expressing every nuance of music. And I miss the pride of seeing a student excel. However, teaching requires mental abilities I have yet to recover; such as being able to talk, observe, give feedback, assess students, keep a lesson plan flowing, challenge or rein in where needed, and to do this all at once. I might be able, on a very good day, to keep two different things going occasionally, but for now, mono-tasking is my method.

When I was dancing and teaching, I wanted to make a contribution. I wanted to raise the bar and challenge dancers to improve and represent the art of Oriental dance in the best way possible. I tried to expose more people to good dance skills and technical excellence, as well as interpretation and individuality. I wanted to see dances that were technically strong and musically coherent. I wanted to weave strands of tradition with innovation and personal expression. I wanted to reach for perfection and inspire others to do the same.

I could never be happy dancing badly, nor giving less to my students than every student deserves--the best advice, guidance, and knowledge I could. I am painfully conscious every day of the slowness of my thoughts, the difficulty I have tracking conversations or being in groups of people,

In Tunisian costume at Northern Renaissance Faire 1995

and the way I have to search long and hard for the word or phrase I'm seeking. I've had to learn ways to compensate for the gaps in my memory and to re-learn how to do my job all over again.

There have been compensations, though they may be different from what I would have expected of myself. After my accident, small things became much less critical and even "large" things that might have been real crises before the accident became less problematic. For instance, about a year ago, I parked my old Ford Escort (with the nifty bumper sticker "Isis! Isis! Ra Ra Ra!") in front of my building at work. Moments later, one of the professors dashed into the office saying, "There's a car on fire by the box office!" Of course, we all went out to see the excitement and, to my surprise, it was my little Kudra there-- self-immolating. Everyone else was panicking, but I was essentially unfazed.

I'd finally internalized the fact that, if the situation can't be changed, you can always change your attitude toward it instead. So, getting hit in the head by a bus has, in the long run, had some good effects, but I certainly don't recommend it as a regular spiritual practice. Ironically, I used to joke that I would arrive somewhere "If I don't get hit by a bus!" Believe me, that's no longer part of my vocabulary.

Now, I'm sorting through costumes and tapes and fabrics and a large pile of back issues of various magazines in hopes of selling them. I'll be having a mega-yard sale the last weekend in July to make all my treasures available to loving dancing homes, to which readers are cordially invited. Without dancing, my income's noticeably smaller, so if you remember something you've seen on me and would like to find out if it's available for sale, do get in touch!

If you would like to get in touch with my masseur, Frank Aviles, he can be reached by telephone at 415/831-1554. I’m sorry, but he's so 20th Century that he doesn't have email!

Contacting Baraka
info on yardsale

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