Over the past three weeks every time I spoke to any of my friends or family on the phone or wrote them emails about the dance intensive, I was met with the phrase “You sound so happy.” And I guess at the very core of it, that’s why we dance. I know that’s why I dance. Because even when I’m doing a dance full of sadness, I can’t help but feel good about getting to dance. At some point in these three weeks, one of the company members said, “Above all we are movers. We need to move. That’s why we dance.” And it’s true.
The Graham technique is about expressing emotions through movement and although I understood that before attending this intensive, I never really applied it to my dancing. I didn’t think of all the despair in the world when I contracted or all the happiness in my life when I released, but now I do. Maybe not exactly those thoughts, but I have a deeper understanding of why movement becomes more powerful when you put genuine emotions behind it.
The pure joy of moving, of being able to display your inner emotions through your body, is what we as dancers live for; there a very few things that feel better than learning a dance in 5 days, cleaning it in 4, some how creating this weird little ensemble and performing it in front of hundreds of people almost flawlessly while dancers you admire stand in the wings watching. There was a lot of adrenaline pumping through our veins that night. So much so that as we bowed, both the person to my left and to my right’s hands were shaking as well as mine. And it was great. And it all came from the fact that the 35 or so of us need to move in order to live.
