Why do I dance?
A short prose for my former ballet teacher Catherine… with love.
A few years… decades… (epochs?) ago I was sneaking away from my studies in grad school to enjoy some dance classes, and one of the teachers asked me to write a small essay on “Why we dance?”. As much as the folk may not understand the necessity of building on those words, When I stumbled across the somewhat cat-shredded hard copy, I thought it might be one of the most apropos items to write upon, so… cheers.
Ascending the liminal connection from the community, the dancer leaves the world and transcends the sub-lunar space to connect with what may only be referred to as the empyrean realm.
When I dance, I have no stage fright, I have no thought, I am something else; and I feel a pipeline from the macroprosperos to the microprosperos, embodying the idea that has been said as early as the Sumerian dynasties of Ur, An se Pa Zu Ki Se Gir Zu, now made popular as the neo-pagan idiom “As above, so below”.
The dance, to really dance, the self self must dissipate to another space and you must fade before that thing which encapsulates all of humanity and which makes all humans apart. My communication with community and with my body is simply an outflow of what dance transmutes to the self in times of ecstasy.
We live in a juncture of many gods. When you dance, despite your race creed or culture, you are in communion with whatever gods have chosen you. It is one true moment of existence with the reality beyond the veil.
Dance arose from a desire to connect with the gods and the divine. The Corybante, Kuretes, Kaberoi and innumerable other mystery religions were that provided and urbanized version of what the !Kung tribal peoples would call “Boiling Energy”. It is the rising up of the soul to encounter gods and goddesses, and it is a fundamental sense of expression that is quite possibly the origin of the three major divisions of the performative arts; theatre, dance and song.
So when people ask why I dance, I say that I simply do not have a choice not to dance. TO take the first step along the path of dance is to make your entrance one way. There is no option to turn back once the path has begun, for the regrets and loss are too great that they would tear a soul apart and leave one as a lifeless broken thing.
Often we encounter a person who takes our aerial dance classes because they had been a dancer at one time and had given up due to the professional stresses placed upon them.It is in short order that I can see a change in their weltanschauung as they return to the liminal state that we enjoy. Watchign them is always a further validation that I am not simply mad, but am encountering a base essence of being human and more importantly… connecting with an abstract liminality of existence that I, and everyone else, should have ever present in their lives.
Dance is simply a necessity that cannot and should not be resisted or ignored.
Thank you Ms. Cabeen, unrelenting and never ending love to you always.
How can we not?
