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dancing and memory
Thursday night I had a fabulous time dancing at a friend's apartment.
I've always enjoyed dancing at clubs and suchlike, even in the midst of stodgy crowds. Long ago I decided that it was better to look foolish dancing than it was to look foolish standing still, and this is a decision I've never regretted. Even so, out in clubspace it's hard not to be at least a little bit self-conscious; it's hard to really get into it and do, shall we say, deep dancing.
Since, on Thursday, I was in the presence of no one other than an old friend, I found myself able to shed some of this self-consciousness and dance pretty "deeply," which led me into a set of unexpected emotional realizations; it wouldn't be going too far to call them "epiphanies" of a sort.
Even the casual observer can make out relationships between dancing and stretching: in fact it's hard to pretend that there's any sort of meaningful boundary between the two. But I hadn't realized the extent of the relationships between dancing/stretching and healing. At the risk of sounding too New Age here, I really feel like I can say that this particular experience of dancing was a healing experience, both emotionally and physically, or at least the start of one: after I was done I felt like I needed a therapy session to help work with some of the emotional material that the dancing helped to dredge up.
The fact that a lot of the material that surfaced was old, semi-forgotten business, is leading me to posit relationships between physical health and memory that I wouldn't previously have considered valid. When I try to explain the connection between the two concepts in a linear fashion I end up using "emotional health" as a mediating concept (physical health is related to emotional health which is related to memory) but the experience I had on Thursday suggests that the interrelations between all these things are so deeply gnarled that to use a linear chain of discrete concepts to represent their interrelationships is actually a fairly profound misrepresentation.
So: it seems fruitful to consider dancing as a kind of tool by which the body can access past experience—in a different way from the way that thought and reflection (what we normally consider to be "remembering") accesses past experience.
I feel fairly certain that there are writers out there who have written on this idea, and I also feel fairly certain that there are probably dancers out there who make use of this idea in their practice. But who are they? |
Monday, December 22, 2003
8:12 PM
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