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