Every Thing Is Dance

What is an artist that does nothing but make art?

It's easy to feel like I'm not a dancer because I don't go to technique class or perform or participate in a company. And to an extent, that's true - how can I be a dancer if I never, ever dance? But what seems to be more important is that if I do that - go to technique class and perform and join a company - and I don't just take time to be a human than my feet might be strong and my plies might get deeper but my art won't matter.

I don't just want to make good dance. I want to make dance that matters. And the reason I dance is because I am a human. If I don't have the time to be human, then I don't have the time to be dancer.

When I take a week off of doing any movement whatsoever because I'm sick with a stomach flu, I'm not taking a break from being a dancer. Being a dancer has been woven in my DNA since I could walk. It's not something I can just take off when I'm not feeling particularly good in my body, or when I'm not inhabiting my body in the ways I do on the marley. Being a dancer happens in every second of every day. When I'm laying on the couch for a week, that's just a new experience for my body to live through. When I take off an entire month to go travel to a new country, I'm not taking a month off of being a dancer, I'm just taking my dancer body to a new place so that it can experience new pieces of information.

Eventually, everything I experience will wind up in my dance practice. The week I spent on the couch being sick will end up affecting the way I stretch my hamstrings and bend my sore knees. The month I spent traveling will affect my attack on a jump or my pliability during floorwork. Everything that happens to my body, everything that I bring my body to and through, will affect my dance, and therefore it is a practice of dance.

It is my very humanity that allows me to dance, and it is that same humanity that requires dance to thrive.

There's a boundary to everything healthy, so I must set boundaries around this frame of mind so that it does not become an excuse to avoid difficult things like rigorous training. But that means I also am doing myself a disservice if I do not set boundaries around the frame of mind that technique training is the sole definition of being a dancer - it isn't, and if I let myself believe that then I will either become an overworked, yet underdeveloped, dancer or I will become someone who rejects the identity of dancer under false pretenses. It's dangerous to think that way. I refuse that definition of being a dancer, and now I begin to tease out what my definition of that identity means to me, in my own dancer body.