Thursday, December 7, 2023

transient moments into a whole

 

Winter Dance Concert, '23


it can be wondrous to experience

what vision, work, and cultivated skill can pull off,

I use words to sculpt an abstract reality,

at its best, that world is more real than the transient moment,

yet dance uses those transient moments to make a whole,


the dance I witness this week easily plunges deep into the soul,

where its eloquence shouts

with fluidity, clarity, beauty, joy and sorrow,

and we are riveted by the synthesis

of movement, music, quiet, 

the light erupting from the dark,

the dark swallowing the light,

words on the screen introduce each dance,

the costumes of the dancers well help elucidate the story to be told,

the creation choreographed by extraordinary people

who found a story that needed to be told,

and only dance could be the medium for its telling,

the way did open for that telling,


anything on stage, for an audience, is like the first time

life appeared, bringing organization onto chaos,

it always get me how ephemeral the show is,

after the last performance of a play I've helped with

I usually was the last to leave the theater,

I would savor standing on the now quiet stage

and find both joy and sorrow in what 

lived so fully for a brief time,

and which then passed on,


I frantically snap pictures of the dance

 and print them out

so that we can at least hold fragments

and ache to hold the whole,

to remember a transient glory,


the CFS Upper School Winter Dance Concert

always transcends and helps us all reach to parallel how well

it found the stories within, and told them with flair and competence.


by Henry H. Walker

December 6, ‘23

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