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Why do you dance?
Hi Crystal, I love this question! And I think it is an essential one as well. I'm not sure if you're asking the question of me in particular or dancers in general, but one thing any dancer will tell you is: to dance professionally, you gotta have fallen in love first. I fell in love with dance the moment I stepped in a modern dance class eighteen years ago. I just got a high off it that I had never gotten before, and I knew I wanted it to be a part of my life. You hear dancers use the phrase "fell in love" all the time when they talk about dance -- so much so that it sounds figurative, like a metaphor. But we don't mean it abstractly. It really does feel very akin to the emotions you might feel when you meet that person you want to spend your life with, or when you have a child. (Although from my new-mom perspective, I gotta say: if you're talking emotional intensity, hands down, there's nothing that comes even close to that!) That first year it took a while of 'just dancing' before I started to try to figure out why this one activity was having such a deep impact upon me. In the past I had enthusiastically enjoyed various athletic pursuits, and I had always been involved in artistic ones (I was a runner in high school, and I loved to paint). But while I had enjoyed those activities profoundly at times, it was nothing like dance, where after every class I would leave the dusty old wooden dance studios on our campus just floating, ebullient. As I mused one thing that became clear was that, although this alone did not explain why dance had such an elemental impact upon me, it was true that dance was an extraordinary fit for me because it fulfilled so much of what I needed in life at once: The physical: A good dance class is the most complete work-out you can ever imagine. Period. The mental: To do well in the studio or on the stage, you must have a level of concentration that surpasses anything I'd ever used in my sports experiences. After all, you must pay attention to minute details in every area of your body, frequently while you are being asked to remember dance phrases at an astounding rate. Think you got the arms right? What about the footwork? Got both the arms and the legs? Too bad you're off count with the music. Oh and by the way, while you're doing all that, how's your spacing -- are you about to careen into the dancer next to you? One thing I love so much about dance is that when you're in class you absolutely cannot be thinking of your next appointment, when you're going to wash the car and what to have for dinner. The concentration demanded is so complete, every class feels to me like some sort of Zen experience. The creative: Dance is inherently creative. You can make a dance about anything (or nothing), just like you can paint a picture or make up a song or do a play or movie about anything. Dance is perpetually the forgotten art: in school most of us got music and art and sometimes even drama, but dance usually is left out of the equation entirely. The unfortunate result is that most of us never consider dance as a creative outlet -- when both movement and creativity are common to all of us. The social: Most dance doesn't happen alone. It is by nature a group activity, and a wonderful way to connect with other human beings. Again, through all the divisions of age, nationality, ethnic background, class, sexuality, gender, disability, etc, what we all have in common is that we move. To be alive is to move. That's why every culture through the ages has had a form of dance as part of its communal base. The spiritual: Restorative, therapeutic, transcendent, call it what you will, but I've always said that it's almost impossible to leave a class in a bad mood. Dance is just something that is very very good for the soul. The political: On my initial list of "musts" for what I might do professionally was that my career should somehow have an impact upon the imbalances and injustices I see in the culture around me. I have never believed that dance is an activity that should be exclusive to the privileged few, and I don't agree that art is a luxury -- i.e., that should be doled out only to those who can afford to pay for it. Art and art-making are essential to the human experience. A lot of my work has centered around trying to make this art form more available, in one way or another, to those who are usually denied access to dance. Indeed, dance was such a "complete picture" to me that at my most naïve and smitten it seemed to me that if I could manage a way to dance for a living, I would never need to go to a gym after work, or take an evening art class to assuage my frustrated creative urges, or go on a meditative retreat to replenish my soul, for instance. Of course I might choose to do any of these activities and more, to supplement my diet if you will, but in terms of my 'daily bread,' I was set. True or not, that was then and still is amazing to me. That same year I started dancing I also came upon this quote. It must have struck a chord of truth in me somewhere, because it has stuck with me all these years: "You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls." -- Merce Cunningham So maybe when it comes right down to it, I just love that fleeting moment when I feel alive. Thanks for your very thoughtful question, Nicole
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