dance LIGHTNESS

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements

will never do any harm to the world.”

_Voltaire

Dance can bring both lightness and joy to our lives. In short, it is a harmless activity that can bring happiness and fulfilment. So why is it so difficult for many people?

It would seem that some of these reasons are also exactly some of the benefits and powers of dance. Firstly, people may feel self-conscious about their dancing abilities or even what they may look like when dancing. They may also feel uncomfortable about their bodies or how they move. Yet, once we let go into the dance and release our inner creative and expressive self, not only do we gain self-confidence, but also a positive self-image, and self-esteem.

Secondly, there is sheer fear! Sometimes people are fearful of expressing themselves. To let go into the dance can be a space of vulnerability. In a society that is quick to assess, judge, and sometimes dismiss our efforts, this is a very real experience. It takes great courage to step out of this fear and through the doorway that leads to dance. But once we do that what awaits us is pure magic.

Each one of us is unique so that which keeps us from dancing and fully expressing ourselves may be different. However, once we move past these barriers and enter the dance we find that whatever it was that we were carrying slowly melts away. Maybe not all at once, but certainly each time we dance, we let go a little more. Until one day we feel in our body an incredible lightness. We dance without effort. We dance without fear. We dance with joy as our authentic being is given this incredible opportunity to express itself fully in the world.

_Christos Daskalakos

which is MY dance?

 “Dance is an ephemeral, a fleeting art. To describe this momentum,

every movement on state, in words, is virtually impossible.”

_Michael Barishnikov

This marvelous body of ours is like a cosmic antenna. Through the exquisite composition of our external and internal senses, we receive the information that allows us to construct our reality. We do this nanosecond to nanosecond, and so it appears to us that the world is a solid, permanent, and something of an object with which we can engage. And yet in truth, it is ephemeral. The time span along which changes take place may be a bit longer than we can easily perceive. The changing seasons are not detectable in a minute or hour, but we wake up one day and the trees are more orange than green, and we feel the passing of the summer.

In contrast, the ephemeral nature of dance is experienced in real-time. There are no freeze frames in the dance. We cannot linger to savour, stop to contemplate, or indulge in an emotional freeze. We keep dancing even if we do return to revisit and experience that which has given us joy or pleasure. Ultimately the dance flows and even if it seems like we are repeating or cycling back, in reality, we are creating new and layered experiences of the things that are familiar to us. Words cannot capture the nanosecond, to nanosecond experience of the dance, and by extension, life.

Like the dance, life is lived, not explained. Sadly when people are caught up in the explanation, they repeat and hold onto stories that are really relics from our past. What is happening NOW? Which is my dance in this nanosecond of eternity? Our mind can only draw a blank with these questions. The answer lies enveloped in music and dance. The answer is really that there is no separate dance that is our particular dance. There is only one dance, one life, and to suck out every drop of the mystery of this cosmic experience, we need to keep moving. To dance life here, now, fully.

_Christos Daskalakos

dancing outside THE BOX

“Dance is an art in space and time.

The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.”

_Merc Cunningham

What are the limits of your personal space?

What are the limits of your dancing space?

Are they the same?

The Kinesphere is a spatial dimension within which we dance. The term was coined by the Hungarian choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf von Laban, and is an imaginary dynamic sphere that surrounds a moving dancer and changes its shape and size as the body moves. Although Laban’s Kinesphere has twenty points, that is it is an icosahedron, many people limit their dance to a two-dimensional flat plane. The Kinesphere not only describes an imaginary dimension in space, it can also be used as a metaphor for life and describe the self-imposed limitation and boundaries we create around ourselves and each other.

This life Kinesphere is shaped by many factors. These are cultural, those imposed by society, and those we create through our own life experiences. This imaginary space represents our limits both physically and metaphorically. It becomes the manner in which we engage with the world in movements, gestures, and interactions determined by unconscious habits. Our movement and body, however, do reflect our endogenous moods, and state of mind. This is most obvious in the dance. To what extent do we engage, extend, contract, express, hide, leap, or contain?

Creative dance gives us the space to extend the range of our personal Kinesphere. The emotional component of music can support the exploration of new movements and dimensions. Mind and body are connected, and when we begin to dance outside of our personal kinespheric box, we open up a different and richer experience to life. The dance becomes a laboratory of life. We can experiment, explore, and experience within the safety of a contained environment. And when we have embodied the new we can venture out into the world and call truly call ourselves “dancers of life.”

_Christos Daskalakos