June Bellebono
Lands
UK, Myanmar
“When my feet can’t stay still, when my hips can’t help but sway, when my lips can’t stop themselves from arching upwards - that’s when I feel safest - and when my body and my mind and my spirit and my surroundings feel like they’re healing.”
June Bellebono is a London-based writer, cultural producer and facilitator. They are the founder of oestrogeneration, a magazine platform highlighting transfeminine voices in the UK, and of Queer Good Grief, a peer support group by and for bereaved LGBTQ+ people.
They have written for gal-dem, HUCK and Novara Media, and have organised events for Queer Circle, Museum of the Home and Autograph ABP.
One time a therapist asked me to identify a space where I’ve felt safe.
I found myself completely stumped in answering this supposedly simple question which was meant to have a supposedly simple answer.
I found it hard to locate a space where I hadn’t experienced censorship, implicitly or explicitly, by others or by myself.
I often find myself questioning how my body would move if it wasn’t brought up within the confines of the {ciswhiteheteropatriarchal} system. I wonder how I’d walk, how I’d gesticulate, how I’d move, how I’d eat, how I’d {etc}
Eventually, in my efforts to identify that space, my mind kept going back to one place: the dance floor.
I was resistant in claiming this as a safe space as it’s a place that hasn’t always been safe - for myself and many others. It’s also a space that’s been sometimes tied to substance (ab)use - for myself and many others.
But, regardless, that’s where my mind went, and I let her.
On the dance floor, the {x} system still inhabits my body, but there’s pockets of unadulterated freedom where my body feels at one with my mind and with my spirit and with my surroundings.
When my feet can’t stay still, when my hips can’t help but sway, when my lips can’t stop themselves from arching upwards - that’s when I feel safest - and when my body and my mind and my spirit and my surroundings feel like they’re healing.
Healing has looked like letting go of gendered expectations, also always racialised, associated with my body - and dancing was the first step towards that. Recognising the shame I’d been carrying from when I stopped myself from dancing at 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, {etc} years old because dancing, especially in the way my body felt like dancing, was not something my body was meant to do.
That feeling, which I was initially only able to channel in a club, started oozing out in other parts of my life and I kept started finding the dance floor in the wild.
I found it when, at a fair in the piazza of a minuscule village in the Italian mountains, my mum and I started Burmese dancing to the rhythm of Italian folk music - our every step followed by the judgemental eyes of worried locals.
I found it when, walking on Southbank surrounded by my closest friends, unconcerned by onlookers, we sang, and danced, and laughed, and hugged.
I found it when, dancing on my own in my room at the peak of the pandemic, a smile emerged on my face, as a tear streamed down my cheek.
To heal means to pursue joy - and for myself, and many others - that pursuit exists in dancing.