"To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak."

"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls."
-Merce Cunningham

I miss dance. Today in Jazz my professor, during a turn exercise, tried to explain that moment when a dancer nails it- A quad pirouette, a switch leap, a arabesque en pointe. That moment after practice after practice after practice when the stars align and you execute perfection. "And it's always effortless," the last word as a sigh: EF-fort-leSS. In that last word she nailed it. I know that moment. Now I won't lie to myself, I've never danced better than mediocre; EF-fort-leSS for me was landing a double or grande jete. But I know the feeling. It's literally an AWEsome moment.

That's something I loved about dance. Those moments were rare and so made dancing a risk. You don't know if you're going to nail it. Even after practicing a hundred times, each new time is a new risk.

Risk and defiance. Defiance of gravity, defiance of momentum, defiance of limitations, defiance of the body... but with grace, so naturally performed.

Once a dance instructor told me, "a dancer rages with ferocity within, but with such control so as outwardly she is the queen of serenity." I love that. I miss that. The control and the awareness. Knowing your muscles, the blood flow, the pressure of breath within your lungs.

In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength. ~Martha Graham

And I miss the rawness. Though I admit to bias, I truly believe dance is the purest art form; there exists no medium between you and your art. You are your art.

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. ~Ted Shawn