Dance is communication. Pure and simple. There is no communication without a body. Even if we tried we could not speak without our bodies, we need our vocals chords, the movements of our breath, the articulation of our hands and facial expressions in order to communicate. Dance is the ultimate form of intuitive, direct and vital communication. It is our body language that conveys to another what’s really going on. You can listen to somebody speak for quite some time and possibly understand their language, but what will stay with you the most is the communciation that was conveyed through their body language.
We live in a culture that has valued the spoken and written word over physical expression. I think one of the reasons why dance has been the lost daughter of the art world is because of its physicality, the judgements around sensuality and sexuality and the devaluation of the feminine. Bodies are hard to put in a box, are hard to classify, categorize and catalogue. Although cognitive science, medicine and religion have tried their best to do just that, the body personifies the unknown, the uncontrollable, the untamable.
As people practicing dance we have an insight into the subjective magic of our bodies that science simply cannot prove. As dancers we move to sense the inside of our bodies, we access somatic information through which we relate to early developmental stages, cellular awareness and unconscious dream material.
Dance is a language of intimacy, intuition and introspection. Dance is a language of expertly knowing and then unknowing oneself, unravelling the bits and pieces of the unknown before us. There are deeper processes to be formulated than a single word, that can be easily taken out of context. We dance because we mean it and we dance because it has meaning. Bear with me here, because it is metaphysical and yet so concrete, can you feel it?
Movements that are done with the intention of connecting to a deeper self, often need more time, a clear container and safe transition time to come back up into „daily consciousness“. They are often, but not always done with eyes closed, have internal referencing, which can be anatomical, somatic or image-based, they have often, but not always, diffuse spacial patterns and often no concrete shape or form. These movements often, but not always, have emotional content, can bring forth archetypal images in the mover or the witness or memoiries, sometimes also painful and traumatic, sometimes with astonishing resources and insights.
„As the brain receives an ongoing but diminishing flow of sensory input, it may begin to create its own internal experience through increasingly vivid imagery and at times, body image distortion. Such navigation through the non rational world of the unconscious can facilitate profoundly important insights and new levels of integration for people who have already developed a strong ego position.“
(Joan Chodorow, Somatic Psychology, Linda Hartley, Whurr Publishers Ltd, pg 57/ 58)
If we allow ourselves to be, to rest, to breathe, to move softly and slowly, to dive deeper into the different layers of our bodies, if we learn to love and acknowledge that we are way more than the 10% of our brain that is currently at work, we recognize that dance, movement and touch can be doorways into this underworld of information. A deeper version of ourselves, interconnected not only with the nervous system of other people, but with the vibration of the earth, with other animals, with plants, the elements, stars, and yes the cosmos. It’s scary of course, because so much to fit into our tiny little brain, but how about if we think of it as our body brain?
Dance allows me to feel into the many different layers of myself, connecting or better re-connecting to my Self (Self with a big S). It allows me to align myself with the gravitational field of the Earth and be nourished by it. Through this groundedness I can invite an informational flow from the heavens (if you prefer intellect, cosmos, God, spirit or stars fill in the right word for you), guiding me through experimentations of movement, expressions and choices.
From here on, I can continue to investigate my own musings, but I can also use this alignment to communicate with another person, let’s say another dancer, who is equally aligned with gravity and spirit. We have exchanges of informed content, ebbing and flowing movements between the two of us, interchanging the input and output of our messages. One plus one equals more than two, so something new emerges, a new interconnected being, a creation. This of course can extend to more dancers.
If we take it another step further, we expand our communication to our environment, may this be an audience in a theater or a witness during an authentic movement session, or a group of people at a parking lot who carry their groceries to their car and get to see us dancing or a bird in a forest, where we dance and communicate with the woodpecker and the grasshopper, the beetle and the bark of the oak tree all at the same time. The level of communication through dance is so intricate, so down to the core of our being, it leaves us speechless, because words are not needed anymore. This way life actually becomes very simple. Pure and simple.
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