Why Do You Dance?

The prompt for my Butoh-based dance class: This is a very simple question. So simple, that it may be difficult to answer. As highly-complex, socially-trained animals, we tend to try and assign or create meaning out of everything. This often results in very overburdened experiences in terms of the way we see and think about them. What happens when you dance? Answer this question as you like. You can give a straightforward, literally descriptive answer. Or you can give a poetic or creative answer that tries to get to the visceral, intuitive core of your experience

My answer: I dance because I don't know how to. I dance because if I don't, something bad will happen. The world will stop turning. The world could end, turn upside down, and disappear. But if I were to keep dancing, I would stay alive. Even if everything around me turned into darkness and disappeared into nothingness, I would still be there. Dancing. Being off rhythm. But the dance continues. Sweat drips, my legs grow weary and tired, ready to give out from under me like bent straws.

But truly, what can stop me if I continue dancing? I remain alive- this breathing vessel of raw flesh, of complex transportation of blood. The blood that keeps my limbs moving in indiscernible directions, stretching to ephemeral heavens or writhing on the concrete ground beneath it.

I dance because I can. Because each movement is unique in its exact moment. Never will I make the same movement in the same moment. Even if I tried to emulate it, it'd never be the same. That movement and that moment has passed on, dissipated by the oncoming movement and moment.

I am not a dancer. Nor will I ever be. That is not my purpose. When I dance, I do not think of what it means to be a dancer. My mind, my body, my talent does not operate in that fashion. I only dance because I can. Dance, dance, dance.