October Asides

Moving thought: Feeding the world 

One of the reasons that dancing and dancers are so critically important at this moment in time, is because we are able to participate in thinking that is not formed in words. When we move, and the focus of our movement is within, then we tend to call the movement “authentic” and formed by our feeling which is distinguished from our thinking. Feeling is a tricky word, because we use it to describe multiple modes of being: the tactile or haptic world, the world of emotions, affect, and heartful action, and our inquiry into the unknown – thinking that refuses words. It is this last sense that I would like to draw our attention to. When our experience exceeds the words to describe it, when we must turn to poetry to stretch words and thoughts that reach and indicate experience or our ability to connect, then we are in dancers’ territory.

I use the term dancers to mean anyone moving beyond the realm of verbal language yet still intent upon communication and immersion in being in relations of experience. Very often dancers imagine their job is one of interpreting experience, and so they turn to “self expression” as a mode of moving. Indeed, most of the world thinks this is what dancer’s do. I profoundly counter this idea through everything I do. I am not an interpreter. I am an engaged being who inquires and speaks through modes that do not form within verbal frames. I know myself to be of the world in this place of being. It is as critical to me as breathing. It is how I am able to bring the world into its liveliness as it also brings me into life. I am intent on expressing nothing. This does not mean there is no expression, but rather that while moving, my “thinking” is organized through attention that cares for, reaches toward, and lives beyond my singular being so that the dance is indistinguishable from the world. Words can never go here. But that liveliness is how I feed life itself. The dance I care for is a dance that feeds the world. The food is borne through physical attention. Only dancers can do this work. And, the world is so very hungry.

Call me a Dancer

I am always in an active inquiry about what a human being can be – which presumes that I don’t quite yet know. And I don’t! I know us to be more than our cultural conditioning. I know us to be more than what medicine or science can distinguish because these disciplines are bound by the measurable universe and we humans are not. Why? That which is immeasurable, which we also are, is incredibly important to sustaining life on this earth, at least, to sustaining a life worth living. Give a child your true attention and you will have filled up a cup that can never be adequately counted. Measuring gets a lot done, but it stops at just the juncture where the bodymind soars toward the unknown, those other unreachable limits that allow for the unexpected, the unexplainable, and that which we stumble to find words for. Humans can do more. Yet, we never will unless we imagine the possibility. Culture controls those limits. Dance unleashes them. Call me a dancer every time. 

Excerpt From Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter