Dance!

 Winter Dance Concert 1/25

there is a cleanness to dance, 

a simplicity of form and function

that, like music, speaks to the elemental,

I live in a world of words,

where I love the ambiguities and complexities,

as I work to hold idea and feeling

with the infinite variety of tools of words

I can use to sketch,

I reach for the wholeness that glimmers at me,

and dares me to see it within a net of sounds

that ache to hold what cannot be held,

the dancer has the tool of the body:

in movement, in stasis, 

in relationship to the other, to the others,

a dance is conceived, choreographed, 

taught to those dancing it,

then it can be shared with an audience,

though dance is communication, as Martha Graham argued,

many of us in the audience cannot capture

what we have seen with our words,

we can with our hearts,

as we appreciate virtuosity, simplicity, 

beauty, joy, whimsy, profundity,

dance eloquently speaks a language

that is its own world,

it is wondrous when we dare to enter that world

and let it transform us in ways

we cannot know with our conscious mind,

but which can profoundly reshape us.

by Henry H. Walker

January  16, ‘25