Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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B l i R Nvi HI ■ ; s i To dance: to move in rhythm. There are no standard definitions which produce immediate understanding. A dancer moves in rhythm — to what? To music sometimes, to other bodies, to personal body — happenings: heartbeat, breath. Dance is reaching the awareness of growing numbers of people. And, as with any other valuable phenomenon in the public eye, its foundations are questioned, changed, remolded. There are those who argue that traditional European dance is the ultimate in achievement, while others claim that we are only now cracking the surface to discover the limits (if they exist) of the dance experience. But, for all the abstraction, dance is always a personal experience — it ' s personal for the viewer as well as for the dancer. There ' s something that often happens in situations which require some amount of concentration and it ' s particularly noticeable when the person concerned is trying hard not to concentrate: the monologue. It invariably seems to present itself in choreography. There are decisions to be made and the

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monologue appears: try this — it looks better with the leg higher, but feels safers with the leg lower — try these two phrases together — now smooth out the transition, and on and on. The monologue sometimes follows movement and sometimes leads and sometimes acts as a running commentary on the work in progress. It is meditative and always present. Its presence says something about the relationships between mind and body that are a necessary part of choreography. The most obvious dancer ' s pitfall is attachment to the corporeal: if a body is an instrument, as it is in dance, the easiest thing to do is to get caught up in a body trip (my extension is getting better, alignment looks pretty good). But dance has to be a mind experience too. The question of which takes over during specific points of a dance has a lot to do with how the dance looks to other people and with how it feels to the dancer. There is something very liberating about dancing without thinking — uncontrolled movement. There is a different experience involved in dance-with-thought. It is no less liberating and, at least in my own experience, just as cathartic. Dancers dance for many reasons, but one of the most important is that it feels good, it ' s a rush. We ' re told by Paul Reps and our own experience that if the things we try to do aren ' t fun, they probably aren ' t worth doing. So we think and we move and we spend hours working on a piece that never quite works out and it ' s excruciating sometimes to go through a dance class immediately after alarm clock and breakfast, but there is a pleasure in it too. It can ' t be pinned down to specific happenings. But in its totality, in the relationship between mind and body that dance requires, the da nce process encourages exploration of consciousness. And that ' s the most liberating experience of all. LKD