The Kun Yang Lin Dancers have been visiting Grand Valley State University this week. I missed their performance on Monday night, and I hope I get to see them perform somewhere in the near future because the lessons they’ve shared with the classes I accompany throughout the week have touched me and spoken truth to me.
Whatever our vocation, and I speak best from the perspective of the performing arts, we tend to work at it very hard, thinking that will bring us happiness and fulfillment and the essence of the art. But we are wrong. While there is unending practice involved, work is a concept that is not helpful but detrimental. These dancers (Jessica and Grace) invited the students to play at dancing and to experiment with movement, within the context of ballet class. And most importantly, they challenged the young dancers to breathe, not just as many teachers have encouraged students not to hold their breath, but to actually make audible breath part of the dance steps. On one combination, I was instructed to give the introduction and then stop playing. The dancers felt the movement and the breaths together, and it was moving and magical! This made manifest for me the idea of us breathing together as human beings, of feeling each other’s presence at all times, and thus of experiencing one another as parts of the same pervasive, respiring and inspiring whole. I truly wish we all could have been there together to feel this happening. It’s something I won’t soon forget; and I hope the dancers in the class had as powerful an experience of this as I did. I hope they carry it with them and find ways to repeat it and draw more people into it. I hope Jessica and Grace and their fellow company dancers convey this message, this experience, and this feeling far and wide because it is about humanity and Godness. It is about all of us, together.
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AuthorThinker, lover, curator of Sacred Space. Archives
June 2016
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