What is Dance?
Updated onTwo fish swim past each other. One says, Mornin' there! How's the water? The other says, What's water?
It's hard to see an object from inside the object. In dance, it's easy to get lost in the weeds of footwork, frame, and connection. These things matter, but they amount to nothing if you lose sight of the big picture. You can't play with a form if you don't know it exists. So we need to find the form.
To find the form, we have to cut to the core of the thing and find the fundamental structure or process underlying it. The goal is to understand the thing intuitively; to get a feel for it. Oppenheimer said it best: The important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it?
In this case, the analogy is so apt it's not even an analogy. "Hearing the music" in dance really means hearing the music. There's a reason we don't dance to silence. Dancing is singing with the body. Without the music, there is no song to sing.
You don't sing to music. You sing a song. Likewise with dance. You don't dance to music. You dance music. You embody it. You become it. Aliens should come down and not immediately understand that the music isn't coming from you.
Take the music inside you, and let it lead the way.