Dance and Life
I’m preparing a new course (Ritmovida, Thurdsays at 18:45 and 20:15 in Mainz) about dance, feeling and expression. It’s a culmination of me putting my current ideas together and being able to present them as a coherent concept. It’s exciting as I am forcing myself to be clear about all aspects of what I am trying to teach. To be able to explain an idea or concept and to teach it to others, I need to know and understand it truly myself.
There are a few things that are becoming clearer and clearer to me. They are more philosophical than practical. They give me a concept, the details of which, such as exercises and goals, fill in themselves. The ideas are not really new, but their importance and connection to each other is growing in my mind. They originate from to my desire to investigate the reasons as to why people dance. I keep coming back to the belief that we live and dance to experience life. So here is my list:
We live to experience life
Movement is key to life
Physical Awareness helps us sense what we live
Authenticity and connection is key to self
The emotions that we create make us feel alive and connected to our self
Creating and learning are our expressions of growth
We learn through experience (experiential learning)
The amazing thing about the above list is that dance has all of this. Dance in itself, is an extension of movement, with self-expression and (biology 101) movement being the basis of life.
I’m pretty convinced that most things that we do and desire in life are for the experience. Sure, we often do things to move away from fear or harm. Yet for fulfilment, it all lies in the experience. Whether it is seeing a movie, spending time with friends/family, travel, working on a project, dancing… our motivation can be broad, but the experience of doing these things is key. It is how it affects us physically through our emotions.
The importance of movement to life can never be understated. I could go so far as to say that movement is life (for without it nothing would change). The physical body moves and dance is an extension of this movement. To distinguish dance from movement, dance is about quality of movement, how we move. Of course, how we move is also a sign of our state of being and health. Our quality of life is directly influenced by our freedom of movement, expressed through our physical body.
Awareness of our physical body is key here. How the body feels right now in this moment. It is a picture of exactly where we stand and therefore what we are also capable of. Taking the time to really feel where we are can be scary, but also satisfying. There is no other me! Through feeling and listening to the body we can get in touch with ourselves creating and deepening our connection with who we are.
Having a deep connection with oneself allows for authenticity. Knowing how I move, how my body feels, being aware of me, my thoughts and feelings, I am then able (through trust and allowing vulnerability) to express myself. I express feelings and emotions that come from inside my body. To be able do this also requires a level self-acceptance. The more I express my authentic self, the more I feel alive, seen and true to me, deepening and enriching my experience of life.
Awareness also facilitates our ability to change, influence and direct our physical experience. In doing so we create and learn. Awareness helps us to express ourselves more clearly.
Dance is so lucky to be an experiential learning subject. The only way to learn dance is through experience. Being there in the moment and physically going through movement, allowing the body with all it’s receptors to sense and learn creates physical stimulation that is much greater and more powerful than any thought (see post on body mind ideas from November 2019). There is little that you can understand from theory alone and the body itself learns through movement.
And in relating that back to performance and dance as subject, it is a tool not only for the art form, but also for physical well being and self expression, alive, here and full of life!