I should have been a dancer.
I didn't have
the discipline to keep up my ballet as a child and now I don't have the
body, but I really should have been a dancer. There's just something
incomparable about the experience of watching and, better yet, doing
dance. This semester has provided many opportunities to remind me of
how much I love dance and need to dance. Either from listing the most
influential performances I've seen (yup, mostly all dance) or
experiencing Fela!, an Afro-beat memorial to the great Fela Kuti. Nadine George-Graves' Urban Bush Women
reminds me once again how important I find dance. George-Graves
describes the process choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar undergoes
through to work out a dance, how she lets the mood, the spirit of the
music overtake her and direct her. She makes mistakes, edits herself,
but really she is working out an impulse, channeling something greater
than herself, a story. Immediately, this passage reminds me of a group I
was lucky enough to be involved with called InterPlay. This
California-based method seeks to unlock the wisdom of the body by
utilizing "forms" of movement, story, silence, song, ease and
amusement. It
is an experiment in movement-based play that frees you from seriousness
so that you can be more in tune with your body and experience the world
from a freer place. It seeks to reconnect the mind, body, heart and
spirit in a world that has become too fragmented and regimented. Apart
from my own selfish pleasure in this experience, I have continually used
exercises from my time there in classrooms, helping to reconnect
students with themselves. For this reason, the passage, "Spirituality means different things to different people, and
in many respects it defies definition, which is, of course, part of its
power. Too, spirituality has long
been considered a path to healing and liberation" (138) resonated with
me and my relationship to dance and movement in general. To me, dance
is a spiritual experience. InterPlay taps into that connection for me.
The passage also brings to mind one of my most moving experiences as an
audience to a piece of dance: Alvin Ailey's Revelations. I included a
link to a YouTube clip of the piece in case you don't have any
experience with it. The work sets dance to traditional spirituals and
gospel songs, and experiences the songs on stage in a way I have never
connected with music. The joy, thought and essence incorporated into
the work took me to a place that I have not experienced on my own, it
brought me into Alvin's world. In this way, George-Graves' book
attempts to take the reader into the world of Zollar and to experience
it through her relationship with dance. The chapter The Body: Divided
and Conquered examines how Zollar addresses stereotypes and assumptions
of the body by focusing on that part and dancing with it. What I will take from this reading and all these experiences is that dance has such a powerful ability to impact its participants, those who engage with and those who observe dance. This reading also reminds me of the power that dance has in narrative. It has lit a flame in me to incorporate dance into the theatre I create and to work dance more into the classes that I teach. Just as we learn with multiple intelligences, why can't we art with multiple mediums?
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