Why do you dance?

"I became an artist because the arts—dance especially—offered so many of the things I wanted in my life. Creativity, cooperation, optimism, humility, grace. Dance is and allows us to be vulnerable, equal, experiential, curious, beautiful beings always-in-process. You never stop learning. Dance also encourages dialogue, and discipline, strength, and resilience! It teaches patience, and the thing that really brought it all home for me is that it teaches empathy. Dance moves us to want to know the Other.

Dance is also connected to the individual. It makes learning very personal. We are embodied creatures. We do not live as tenants in a skull which is irrelevant to our existence. We live in a body, and our body is essential to our consciousness, to our perception of the world and about ourselves. The brain is not just up in your skull it’s distributed to our entire body and nervous system. And the condition of our body, the ways in which the hormones and chemicals and vitality of our body flows is essential to the world around us and the view of ourselves. We are not incidentally embodied; we are fundamentally embodied. Our consciousness is intimately connected to our physicality. If you engage people in physical activity you change their consciousness as well. Dance releases the vitality of our body in relationship to our consciousness.