| By Carollyn Lee Peerman |
“Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance,” said Dave Barry. What better way to shake the blues away than to get up and dance! Let the joy of dance be unconfined. When you dance you come out of yourself. You become more larger, more beautiful, and more powerful. “Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery. Dancing is the hidden language of the soul. Dance is a song of the body. Either joy or pain. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather,” said Martha Graham.
Would you like to stay on the young side of life? Never fear that you will stop dancing when you grow old; you grow old when you stop dancing. Stay excited about life. Don’t let your enthusiasm diminish. There is a bit of mad insanity in dancing that does you a world of good. Move your feet to the music.
“Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart,” said Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. I treasure my ballerina slippers. I did an arabesque, a ballet position in which I stood on one leg with the other extended back and both arms stretched out, one forward, the other backward.
“Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself,” wrote Havelock Ellis. To dance is to move rhythmically and in time to music. Like a happy child you leap up or skip especially in an emotional manner. You chase the glowing hours with flying feet. Dancing is gleeful. Sometimes you jump up and down or skip. You leap through the air. You wheel pirouettes or take stork legged steps. To dance is like creating a poem with your feet where each movement becomes a word. You are the stuff of which the art of dance is made. “Dancing is like bank robbery. It takes split-second timing,” said Twyla Tharp.
Dancing is truthful. Dance is expressing truth in gesture and movement. “You can’t lie when you dance. It’s so direct. You do what is in you. You can’t dance out of the side of your mouth,” wrote Shirley MacLaine. Agnes de Mille put it this way: “The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music.” When involved with the music, even the ears must dance.
Dancers are committed and disciplined. It is a dual role. “Dancers are both athletes and artists,” said Margot Fonteyn. The choreography of a dance fuses the eye, ear, and mind. It is exhausting work and demands much energy.
Carollyn Lee Peerman is an independent photojournalist.
