Life As The Dance
a dance performance,
rather performance after performance,
in company with projected words and pictures,
with overarching audio of opinion & song & direction,
a whole with every part a whole in itself,
the vision of each student choreographer suffuses dancer and stage,
within the larger gentle vision of the teacher director,
we in the audience are touched in ways we recognize
and in ways we know but do not know how we know,
in the dance space itself is alive with movement and stasis,
the physical expresses design with body & shape--
shifts to the call of will and entrances each viewer
with how well limitations of shape and gravity
can be the frame within which art can lead us deep, high, & far,
I am daunted when I think of the years
that have been bent to this moment,
the hour upon hour of conditioning, experimentation,
implementation of will upon soul & body,
all the rehearsals so that the spirit and the physical in dance
embody truths that can speak to the heart
in a language more primal, evocative, ascendant
than the languages most of use so readily,
all with precision to detail and presentation
so that nothing distracts us from the fullness of belief,
every moment we have on this Earth is a gift
and we can easily forget how fleeting the moments we are given,
past and future always meet in the present
and with dance we can feel the triumph
of making even the fleeting moments transcendent,
or maybe even particularly so,
in the finale of the dance tonight
the musicians move toward center stage,
pull the dancers and are pulled themselves
into deeper and deeper connection,
and as the movement of the dancers crescendoes
their singing brings us even further along,
in only a few days this manifestation of the dance
will have its last performance,
how expressive these moments are
of how we should live our lives,
how we should create and soar
with every moment we are given.
by Henry H. Walker
December 7, ’09
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