We're All in the Dance of Life..

"Life's a dance we all have to do," says the lovely and insightful Feist through her ethereal vocals.  There is almost a childlike truth to her lyrics...  It is common and shared knowledge that Life has 'ups and downs,' 'bumps along the road,' etc...  Even as children this mantra was instilled in us through movies such as The Sword and the Stone in which the ever-so wise Merlin sings:

For every up there is a down
For every square there is a round
For every high there is a low
For every to there is a fro
To and fro
Stop and go
That's what makes the world go round 

(That's What Makes the World go Round
From "The Sword in the Stone"
Composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman)

However, for those of us who are dancers, afficionados of Dance, musicians, or lovers of music...I think you can appreciate the depth in the analogy of Life as a dance.  

When you dance, you have to dive in fully into each step, each moment and often leave a piece of you onstage.  If you fall onstage or forget the choreography, you keep going as if you meant to fall or as if improvising was part of the performance.  This philosophy also applies to social dancing or even dancing in your shower or living room- If you don't let yourself become immersed in the movement, you won't enjoy it!  No one 'half-asses' their underwear dance in front of the mirror? Why would they? That's not enjoyable! Instead you dance around in your underwear to your favorite song because it fulfills you and makes you happy because in that moment you are carefree of outside judgments and void of inner judgments- at that moment you are living fully.  

When dancing with a partner, you rely on trust; if you are performing with a partner you are literally placing your well being in their hands.  You are taking a risk with every lift, every acrobatic endeavor...  When on the dance floor in a social setting, you are quite often trusting a complete stranger with your Ego--trusting that they won't laugh at you if you step on them, or slip, and if you do trusting them to make light of an awkward situation... In the performance world, as if trust wasn't difficult enough to build...you must also share a deep, meaningful connection both physically as well as emotionally with your partner.  In this capacity, dancing strongly resembles romantic relationships.  Much like in Love, when dancing with partner you take the proverbial "Leap of Faith" not once, but several times...  Also, much like in Love you often have to make an active choice to keep dancing with your partner, to persevere through the drops and try the lift again, to work with them and learn with them, and to sweat out every awkward, clashing moment until your bodies move as one.  I think Bell Hooks would much appreciate viewing Love as a section of choreography in Life's dance as she very firmly believes love to be an action, a verb. In her book Bell Hooks on Love, Hooks describes the process of love as “climbing a set of stairs (the action), on each floor you stop, look out the window (the introspection), and decide to continue or not to continue climbing (the choice)”. (Hooks, 162)  and follows this description with the novel idea that “we would all love better if we used it (love) as a verb.” (Hooks, 4)  

However, sometimes you choose not to Love, or even if you choose to Love you still find yourself without a dance partner for whatever the reason may be...  Sometimes, alike in Life, you find yourself dancing solo.  It's as Feist sings, "We walk around and round, partners are lost and found-"  

Perhaps sometimes we forget the steps or where the dance is headed and how it will end... Sometimes we loose our connection to the music, the rhythm, and the beat...Sometimes we loose our partners and find others, sometimes we even loose ourselves...But through it all we keep dancing, through it all we keep living; we have no choice, "we're all in the Dance."


Let's keep dancing...-Nahyr