Encountering the Stillness in Contemporary Dance

I turn left and my knees bend towards each other, I look at my right and drag a metaphorical mask away from my face. I transform into a swan. And I experience.

Oh, yes. I know. The particles and bigger pieces of the cosmic theory are moving. Brand new information is moving faster than water down the sink. In fact, things appear to be moving faster than my imaginative brain. Me, a master of worry and intensity, has been surpassed. I know. I don’t have time to catch the morning air before I am bombarded by the news. Before praying. Before peeing. There it is. And different kinds of news hit me. Moving, proceeding. Not in dance, more like a slide down to hell.

I can say it. Things don’t seem to be going so great. You can say it, too. The cat is out of the bag.

In my last piece, I wrote about dance. Dancing was in the back of my mind for the last few months. I missed it. Not the idea of it. I missed knowing it. When something is not perfect and you’re not perfect in it, it results in something great. Dance has a balance for me. I never had to be great or excel at it. All I had to do was participate for a few hours per week and move my body with the choreography. It was lovely. Lovely for my spirit and fucking great for my body. Even if you move your legs like a monkey up and down, you’re still gonna enjoy it. Dancing is fun and universal.

I didn’t have to be good at it — of course and I loved it.

The decision to come back to it was completely impulsive. Usually, those blow up to my face. Especially when I end up deleting things or throwing them out of the house. So, quite impulsively I overpassed all the fear and self-doubt. I bought what had caught my eye. The Steezy dance app found its way into my month. I am not promoting them; I own a small blog with another green spark of excitement in the world among many others. But, seriously, if you want to, try the app out. It’s the most user-friendly I’ve found.

And thus, here I was. I started… exercising. Thank god I didn’t go in it with full expectations of being a beautiful, graceful dancer in an hour because that would mess me up and make me want to drop off one hour later feeling terrible about myself. Phew, no. I choose the beginner level. That I didn’t know shit. And it was AMAZING!

I began with some exercising and I finally moved my body. I left the bed that had become a pool of stress and I danced. I air-kicked left and right. It was a struggle to keep up with the teacher’s speed (I chose the fast one). Sweat and negativity were actively leaving me.

But, here is another beautiful part.

I chose contemporary dance. Then, learned my first dance. And within all the steps and the effort I put into learning this specific type of dance, I found stillness.

Here is how Google describes it: Around the 1980s, the world “contemporary dance” referred to the movement of new dancers who did not want to follow strict classical ballet and lyrical dance forms, but instead wanted to explore the area of revolutionary unconventional movements that were gathered from all dance styles of the world.

Here is how I describe it: You choose something slow and sweet because that’s the energy you want in yourself. And then contemporary dance swipes you in and makes you jump higher than any other dance would. Because the source of the movements is about acceptance. When you switch to a jump from back to front to fall back on your knees again, you are a bird in the clouds for that second. Before you fall again. Because that’s how it is.

As the teacher was explaining the feelings behind the movements, I felt her words. It was like… I didn’t know why I chose contemporary before hearing her. Contemporary is about showing your emotions. You show them in every move. The singer sang about feeling and we fell with our fists revealing our faces. We swirled and fell to the ground for a half-moon rotation. We were stars in the singer’s night sky.

In contemporary, you move from slow to fast, and then it’s over.

It was an incredible lesson for me. I use the word incredible because I didn’t expect it. How it matched my need for stillness. The movements have a sequence and when you follow it, you go left like a wave and then you end up right like a tsunami. You move and move constantly because emotions are inter-changing and the dance does not stop. But in knowing them and moving fluently in them, there was stillness.

It’s better than my words can make it sound.

There is noise in my head and thoughts play around. From desperation to depression to god-awful self-deprecating thoughts. But they go up and down. Dancing contemporary takes the human in me out for a ride. And nobody speaks. Isn’t dance fucking beautiful? No words, no language. Just moments. It’s universal. While the viewer holds his breath, the dancer experiences stillness.

It is incredible.

I turn left and my knees bend towards each other, I look at my right and drag a metaphorical mask away from my face. I transform into a swan. And I experience stillness all around me.