Portrait of a Dance

Professor Gail Abrams has taught in the Scripps College Dance Department for 23 years. She is cur­rently team-teaching a CORE II class called “The Embodied Self: Feminist Theories of Body, Yoga, and Dance” with Professor Leigh Gilmore. The class explores expression through body movement in yoga and dance, as well as the role of gender in embodi­ment. She also teaches Modern Dance, CORE III, Laban Movement Analysis, and a course called Dynamics of Hu­man Movement, which explores effi­ciency (or lack thereof) in the ways we use our bodies and movement. Abrams is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst who studies the qualitative and quanti­tative characteristics which contribute to expressive communication and ef­ficacy of all forms of human movement (including sports, dance, management, teamwork, and other motion-related tasks).

“Everybody has body im­age issues,” says Abrams when asked about her self-image. While this might be a generalization, she explains that it would be hard to find a woman who has never had an issue with her ap­pearance.

Like most people, Abrams has had insecurities. While growing up, people teased her for her small stature and “big Jewish nose,” and she was self-conscious about being flat-chested as a teenager.

Such insecurities affected her throughout high school, but her experience in college was differ­ent. In her sophomore year, a friend dragged her to a modern dance class and she was instantly hooked. She was attracted to the “less codified move­ment” of modern dance, and the fact that it celebrates individuality, not just prescribing a specific body type for all dancers. Modern dance, she says, is “concerned with expressive content and movement as communication.”

For Abrams, connecting with modern dance was the first step towards sensing her own self-worth. Exploring the connection between mind and body relieved her of many insecurities, including body image struggles.

A sense of self-worth, in Abrams’ opinion, is vital for accepting love from others. Each woman needs to feel good about herself before she can really believe it when someone tells her she is beautiful, or intelligent, or worthy.

As a mother of two, Abrams appreciates the relationship between good parenting and a child’s posi­tive self-image. Her parents loved their children unconditionally and emphasized the importance of loving oneself. By the same token, Abrams was careful not to be self-critical in front of her own children. In today’s culture, dieting and plastic surgery have become increasingly common. While she does not believe that caring about appearances is bad, Abrams does question the negative messages mothers send their children when fol­lowing such cultural trends.

Abrams believes that men have body image issues too, but feels that “women struggle with them more than men do.” This is partly a result of mixed messages coming from the media. When magazines and televi­sion criticize female celebrities for both gaining a few pounds and be­ing too thin, women are caught in a double bind where they “can’t win either way.” By contrast, weight gain and loss in male celebrities is usually attributed to movie or television roles, and is not “a reflection of an inadequa­cy in the person himself.”

Through her experience, Abrams has learned the value of individuality in contemporary society. “Where we make a mistake is in al­lowing ourselves to be dictated to by some external arbiter of how we are supposed to look.”