Day 2 into the New Year and it's a sad day for me upon hearing the news of an old friend's death in a drunk driving accident this NYE weekend. This in mind, I am distracting myself on here by thinking about movement. Often, when people very close to these kinds of difficult situations hear this kind of news their body takes over, becomes a being of it's own that we have no control over. It becomes immobile, or perhaps wildly mobile, and out of control.
Dance is joy. Someone special told me this about a year ago after I taught a dance class in Uganda, Africa. Dance is joy...well, that is what we want dance to be. People choreograph dances of pain, of stories, of sexual freedom, of characters. At the end of the day, dance in its most vulnerable state is movement of the body witnessed by another. Choreographed or not - that's a whole other story that we will get into another day.
The truth is that dance is what we call the movement we want to, we choose to show off. We forget that these movements come from real, raw experiences of emotions that humans experience everday. The hunched over cry coming from one's gut upon hearing sad news becomes a theatrical contraction in a modern piece and translates this emotion of pain to the audience member...
To quote the fabulously screwed-up movie, Black Swan, movement before turned into dance has this innocent quality - it is "imprecise but effortless."
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