Dancing Without Choreography

The only thing that I know for certain is that today, right here and right now, I don’t know anything for certain. Life is flux, knowledge is fluid and relationships at any point are always a snapshot taken of a complex dance. I spin Matrix-like around the frozen people in all their many shades of gray and their bright beautiful spectrum natures. And I realize that I can draw all kinds of conclusions from the way they’re standing and their expressions and body language in that still frame. Yet in the real world as opposed to the movie world, I cannot know where they will go in a few frames time when movement begins again. Because everything changes and without the process there is no meaning.

I know people who can’t understand the attraction of dancing with a partner. Oh, they say, I have danced very happily on my own up to this point. I feel the music. I express my feelings. Yes and this is good. Yet it is more involving and very different to act and react with a partner to that music. How can I be led? I’m not a good follower, I have my own rhythm, my female friends say. Yet this looks like fear. Fear of letting go and embracing the unknown. Fear of moving away from… of letting go of… of perhaps losing the dance that is already known and knowable. I remember a dance instructor once telling me that the hardest thing of all was to get people to face their fear and take the step through the door into the class. Once they were there and inside, everything else was possible.

And it doesn’t really work that one person simply leads and the other simply follows. It is process and change and flowing with the music. Push me pull you, pull me push you. As one partner moves, the other has to be in the right place to be where they will arrive when they get there. In that sense, there is more anticipating than leading. The leading is to provide some form, some structure. But really it is all give and take. Energy and feeling. Fire and light. It is feeling and connection and flow in an endless now. Just as life flows with the music that we each create. Our symphony where any of us can pick up the harmony or the melody or the rhythm or sometimes remain silent and still. Life is its own music. A powerful song and a complex dance. And each of us has our own solo dances that will always be there, unique and brilliant.

It’s one way of looking at it. Shades of gray, bright spectrum people dancing gently then wildly then formally then letting the body go where the music takes it and sometimes making mistakes and laughing in the process. All valid. Look up and don’t forget to smile as you fall over your own feet.

Imagine that Matrix-like still frame with two people facing each other and how the camera angle determines how we feel about them. Looking down on them makes them look weak. Look from a low angle and they look powerful. Looking over one’s shoulder and including that shoulder, framing both people together, might indicate a relationship. The expression on the face of the person we see might indicate what the relationship is at that moment. Yet a choreographer will want to see how those people move together, how they flow through the continuum of life, how they react to the music they hear, to understand comprehend feel grok the relationship in a richer truer way.

We are heart and soul, mind and spirit, beings that cannot be simply broken down into uncomplicated elements for some kind of eureka insight. We are all psychologists, trying to understand ourselves and others on so many levels and it is a subtle layered thing. Just as a photon can be understood as both particle and wave, so we can be understood as complex and paradoxical notions. None of them is the whole truth. And again I realise that the only thing I know for certain is today’s uncertainties. I embrace them, the uncertainties in those I love, my own inability to know everything and the constant flowing dance song symphony of life.