Today, I woke up wondering…when we dance…what happens to our cells? I saw a video clip once that showed cells dancing to the music. The narrater suggested that when we introduce “sound waves” into the body, that our cells literally start “dancing”. Once video had me laughing…it looked liked the cells were doing a country line dance! I found this by a choregrapher on the web today…thought it might interest others who are truly wanting to know what is happening to their cellular structure down into the DNA, when they are receiving a VIBRATIONAL ATTUNEMENT MASSAGE (VAM).—Karyn
“But, I get a strong feeling, we are ripe for another look into intent. This is good, and fun! I like trying to figure out what dance is brilliant at or, more, what it is essentially for. And my recent thoughts are that dance enacts: it manifests an idea, an intention, and then does it — just as a muscle takes an idea, an intention from the nervous system however conscious or unconscious, and does it — and perhaps by doing changes it into something else.
Now, I may be extreme in suggesting that there are some things that dance enacts better than others, but I am both vastly encompassing and specific in my list: dance enacts beginnings and birth, endings and death, and everything in between that has to do with those two. To borrow a phrase from the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, dance aims truest when it is “about procreation and perish.” I would add a third “p” in there, “pleasure.” Dance resonates, plucks our very flesh-and-spirit lifestrings, when it is related to these three things, which are everything. And we know it when we see it; with a very short scent-trail back to these markers, it gets to us.
Oh yes, and it is about love. But love is bound up warp and weft in all of this and also beyond it all: it is unnameable.
Dance is very good at enacting pleasure for doer and onlooker, and also enacting the flipside, “p” for pain. We now know from science (as if we didn’t know already) that the onlooker actually does the movement she is watching, in her frontal lobe mirror cells. She just doesn’t necessarily move her body. (See NYT, Science Section 1/10/2006 “Cells That Read Minds.”) How’s that for audience participation? We’ve called this “kinesthesia” for a long time. Dance and music articulates, vibrates, activates the senses in both doer and watcher. And the senses are the key to everything, they are all we’ve got for knowing the world.
So I am on fire right now about dances that are consciously doings — and I understand that I am changing myself, those I dance with, my audience, my world through this action. It is for real. It’s not a symbol of something, it doesn’t tell or show.
I could use the word “sacramentality” for all this, and “ritual,” which dance itself created and then found itself excised from in Western culture. “
[ed. note: Modern-dance choreographer Clare Byrne is based in New York.]
After reading this excerpt, I thought, “Yes, when my body is in movement, when my body is flowing, when my body is filled with inertia…then my cells must be vibrating to the music! And that…is a dance in and of itself!”
