The Amorpheus mess of Dance

Much like the oneness that Indigenous peoples feel with their land - the indivisibility of land from spirituality, law, family, kinship, survival - dance is the same glorious, amorphous mess for me. It is not an activity... much the way that breathing is not an activity. I cannot tell you what I am developing, because what occurs is a development of me. My consciousness. It develops at a pace and magnitude beyond me. And I cannot know what will happen before it happens. My current collaborator Krystal Trickey wrote this: "the body of a dancer is always dancing, and that 'practice' is contained within an acute embodied awareness of everyday movement - the quality of the body moving through space in the mundane spheres - as much as it is within the time ordinarily considered the dancer's 'practice'. As dancers, our body is with us always, it IS us...yet it is also our tool for making art. With a tool for art-making as such, it is intertwined with everything we do, at any and every moment. Inspiration is everywhere." For people who don't love and dream of dance, this idea appears lofty. Childish even. Am I an overgrown fairy for feeling I can take flight when I drift from bed in the morning, just a few footprints from the threshold of my dreaming? Am I a fool for imagining dance through books, through words, through the thoughts of strangers staring blankly on trains? Even when I am chained by the schedules of life, and not even thinking about dance, dance is happening in me. Waiting for that moment, when I stand in a space, breathe, and let it unfoil... with all the richness and sumptuous flavour that unspent, mulled dance conjures in a dancer. For even when I dance no more, when I am but traces of song carried over oceans, I will be there dancing.