To Dance . . .

. . . is to become a living stream
of sensory, kinetic energy

The following is excerpted from dancer, philosopher, and scholar of religion Kimerer LaMothe's fascinating book, Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming.

To dance is to cultivate a sensory awareness of ourselves as movement-in-the-making. To dance is to yield to this development as it happens in us and to us by virtue of the movements we are making. To dance, whether one is on a brightly lit stage in a modern dance performance or alone in the desert on a dark night, is to allow oneself to become a living stream of sensory, kinetic creativity – a continuous flow of erupting impulses – banked by the movement patterns one is making.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Soul of a Dancer
• The Art of Dancing as the Supreme Symbol of the Spiritual Life
• "Move Us to Action, Loving God"
• "Then I Shall Leap into Love . . ."
• The Premise of All Forms of Dance
• And as We Dance . . .
• Unique . . . Yes, You!
• The Naked Truth . . . in Dance and in Life
• Balance: The Key to Serenity and Clarity
• Memet Bilgin and the Art of Restoring Balance
• Dance and Photography: Two Entwined Histories
• The Body: As Sacred and Knowing as a Temple Oracle

Images: Brazilian dancer and model Mario Beckman in "Body Language," a photographic project by Gastohn Barrios.

One of the things I appreciate about these images is that Beckman is photographed on a rock platform of a coastal tidal zone, that special in-between places that can be both land and sea. (One such place in Australia is a very sacred place for me, as I've previous talked about here, here and here.) The imagery and symbolism of such a place also served as an inspiration for my 2006 homily, "Somewhere in Between."