Dance and Why We Love It

Dance grew out of our ancient roots of story telling, expression, and even healing. Today we have the joy of sitting and experiencing visually and viscerally the beauty of the human body and the ability to communicate through movement. There are infinite forms of the stories that can be communicated through movement and infinite forms of movements that relay those stories. Interpretation of those stories lays in the hands and vision of the choreograher who then works in collusion with the dancer to mold the body into a language of it's own. When one is sitting in an audience and sharing that story with both loved ones and strangers alike, it enfolds that audience into a community sharing an experience that will only happen once, in that moment. Emotions explode that the dancer(s) move through the space, often times with musical accompianment, but sometimes not... It'll merely be the dancer occupying that particular space in that particular moment. It becomes a moment of social awakening, participation, and visually beauty. Dance is a universal experience for human beings. Dance, in many forms, is found in every culture around the world.

This holiday season I had the pleasure of spending some time with my mother in snowy Boston. Every day I went down to swim laps in the Olympic sized pool they have at the retirement community she is in. And every day I had the absolute joy of witnessing an elder woman who walked in with her walker.. her feet swollen with arthritis. As she slowly lowered herself into the water, the pool attendant would change the Christmas music over to love songs from decades ago... and away she would go... dancing through the water moving with agility, wrapping her arms around a lover I could not see, gently singing to him (or her) and taking up the entire pool as her dance floor, lost in a graceful dance and experiencing her body in a way that all the entire population in that pool shared with her. My heart still soars thinking of her...