Author: Everyday Dancers

It took me a while to feel comfortable with the floor in dance. I used to enjoy watching B-Boys get down and move effortlessly. At first it was their combination of power and flow that I enjoyed and over time it became realising that there was more to breaking than power. Footwork, freezes, combinations, go downs and learning to dance on the floor had a completely different feel and it was challenging and rewarding to gradually get more comfortable with different positions and movements.

Later finding contemporary dance and the way they approached the floor was so different. It was all about ease, gravity, making a movement effortless, not just looking effortless. And there was so much thought and intention about where the movement would initiate and how one part of the body would affect the other part.

There was a lot of similarities between attention to different parts of the body and intention and movement, and ways of moving but the approach was different. 

Again learning floor work in house dance and lofting (well what I learned from my teachers) and the approach it took was again different and maybe somewhere in between contemporary and breaking. It was smooth, graceful and circular and in someways still dynamic.

It’s weird that at one point in my life I decided to refer to my dance as movement. I guess because people, well dancers would always ask each other what dance was, or what they felt dance was, and then would judge it, try and find the right answer, intellectualise it, and I felt it just got further and further away from what dance actually meant to me. And I guess that’s the thing I’ve realised that dance is usually something different to each person. Just like the word “God” conjures up something up different for each person, each religion and each aetheist.

I guess I just thought that movement was a lot broader of a term for Dance, that it meant people could identify more broadly with movement than with dance even though they’re so similar and in some ways the same thing. That there wasn’t so much debate about what movement was, it just was and it just is…movement. People accept it.

In my eyes Dance isn’t a specific narrowly defined thing, its a much larger thing than I first thought and I feel movement captures this more for me than dance. I feel that if the word movement can bring more people together than that’s a good thing. I guess going to back to that other analogy, I guess more people would associate or identify with spirituality than religion or God, even though some might think they’re the same thing or synonyms, but to me, spirituality fits better and I guess so does Movement…for me. 

Putting on music and dancing is a simple thing I can do to be present. It’s a simple thing I can do to get out of my head and into my body. I think way too much and in general think we as a society do too. That’s what I love about dance. It connects me to my soul, to the universe and to others. It’s free, it’s experiential and it’s a form of play where I find humility, balance and peace.

I love dancing and always have since I was a kid. I think most kids enjoy dancing. It seems very primitive and ancient. One of my dance teachers, Charemaine Seet, said it’s the first art form.

As I got older I loved parties for the love of dancing. It’s a place where you can meet people from all walks of life and cut through the barriers and get right to the point. You get to touch a person’s soul and they yours as you get to communicate and talk with your bodies, expressing yourself so deeply and intuitively it’s faster and almost instantaneous. I think that’s why I love dancing for hours and it seems that lots of other people too, because dance energises. It gives and multiplies and creates. It’s abundant, like a candle. With one candle you can light another 1000 candles and the flame of the first candle doesn’t go out.

The universe is abundant, and dance acts in the same way. It gives to all of us when we move together or even by ourselves as we connect with the spirit of the universe and the deeper parts of ourselves if we allow it.