I remember what dance was like in the beginning...
It requested I reach for the cookie jar on my tip-toes, then hide quickly in my mermaid shell of folded legs. Those same legs transformed into butterfly wings when they flapped.
It appeared when I was alone in my basement, at the age of 5. I had mastered my dad’s surround-sound stereo system. I would imagine I was in front of a large crowd, dancing for millions to my favorite song. Other times my improvised undulations were meant for one or two people, an intimate engagement, black-box style.
It revealed itself when my family was celebrating -and we celebrated together a lot. My auntie rode my uncle like a donkey once. The Soca song playing was titled "Whoa Donkey," wildly appropriate for my auntie's dance interpretation. What were we celebrating? Each other, I think.
In the beginning,
dance existed with my family, through my body, and in my imagination.
In the beginning,
it never existed in studios,
or on stages with lights and speakers.
I was never trained to dance.
Instead, it was an experience that surrounded me. My encircling relatives shared with me how to move my hips to the rhythm. I was enraptured, determined to somehow absorb the movements, repeating them constantly, feeling my body understand a special way of moving.
As a shy child,
it was something I was never shy about.
I was that kid at the wedding reception
never shy on the dance floor.
Flash forward a few years later, and I find myself in NYC pursuing a career as a professional dancer. I made the commitment three years ago that I would create a life with dance -create a life with art.
How’s it going?
Too early to tell...
I’ve found myself in a place where dance is met with ambition and aspirations.
Dance has become my life’s work.
Dance has become work.
Insert^
exhilarating (and sweaty) dance party*
*A therapeutic and physically-embodied source of rejuvenating enthusiasm TO dance, thus connecting me with the energy and rhythms of other bodies, allowing dance to become a rhythmically improvised and communal experience, as I knew it to be earlier in life.
Encircling bodies moving to rhythms...it takes me back to the beginning...before dance became work.
In this city, I have found sources for great dance parties where I can move freely for myself. The professional layer drops away and what's left underneath is an abandonment in tandem with the rhythm.
There are many professional dancers in this one place. New York City is the Mecca of the artistic world, and with so many aspiring and established dancers pursuing their artistic career, I wonder if there a place that exists for these dancers where dance is not work?
If so, where?
If not, why?
When does dance stop being professional and become recreational? When does recreational dance become professional? How are both dance and the dancer constructed within those two words: "professional" and "recreational?"
~~~~By asking this question to different types of dancers in my life, I can compile varied thoughts and experiences as primary sources of the present professional dancer's relationship to her or his work, in the hope of deconstructing and exploring the meaning and the relationship between what it means to be a professional dancer and what it is to dance.
