There is a pop song from 2008 with which I think many of you will be familiar. It is called ‘Human’, and it possesses one of the most striking lines for we humans who dance. The question is posed, “Are we human? Or are we dancer?”. Interestingly, 2008 is the year my life changed with the birth of my first child, and I was deep in the weeds of contemplating whether I could continue to be a dancer or whether I would hand in my resignation, and succumb to a life more ordinary, in the realm of humans.
I like to imagine that, as we dance, we bridge the gap between animal and angel, between human and ghost, between this physical dimension and the realm of the unseen, between the land of five senses and that of a multiplicity of others, between the quotidian universe of footsteps in the sand and the fantasy world of wingbeats in the wind and fingers caressing clouds. There are many reasons why people dance and one of them is just simply because that is what humans do. We respond to breath, heartbeat, pulse and flow of blood, with movement; we surrender to sunlight, wind, wave and cascade of water with the contraction and relaxation of muscle. Our skeletons are conscious puppets, with dreams and memories, who acquiesce to being cloaked in soft tissue, in order to stand tall, crouch low, twist and jump and fall and dance their secret longing to feel the air, water, earth and fire.
Dance is a transcendent act. It wakes the sleeping snake coiled at the base of the spine. It honors the ancestors and the beckons to the unborn. It moves us beyond the boundaries of our skin and into the space which has embraced us from the moment of our birth, and which holds us unconditionally for all of our lives. It is a vehicle for the embodiment and expression of emotion, for the manifestation of vision, for the telling of silent stories, for the inspiration of fearlessly freeing our life force onto and into the world. We dance because we are human, and through dance we discover the treasure of our true nature of being other than human.
Dance is my love and has become my metaphysical muse. Dance is like my soul – an inescapable , essential, life-giving piece of me. I have tried to run away from it numerous times. To turn my senses off so as not to see, smell, taste, hear or feel it. Yet the rhythms of waking and sleeping are music to my ears and images of bodies carving through space lurk in the deepest recesses of my mind. Every relationship is choreography. My eyes sense movement and my body opens to translate it. I cannot get away from the truth; from my reason for being here. Dance lives inside of me and I live inside of it. When I attempt to amputate myself from the Dance, it is as if I am engaged in some futile action, in the midst of a lucid dream, and I awaken to the knowing that the Dance and I are One. And so I surrender to Life and to the Dance. I embrace my life-force and the joy and the bliss of perpetual motion. And I do believe that I am here to share the Dance with you.
