When you ballroom dance and have done it for a while, it becomes so natural and so innate, that you tend to forget what you really do when you move. You grow and refine your action, your style and your presence. And, that’s all amazing. But, it is also important to recall what is it that you actually do, when you ballroom dance. So, let this be a poetic reminder…
When you ballroom dance, you don’t just check boxes out of a long list of pre-established criterias. Posture: check. Timing subtleties: check. Connection: check. That difficult step you’ve been refining for the past few months: check. When you ballroom dance, you leave the boundaries aside, in the changing room maybe, or the parking lot, or anywhere else as long as you do not carry it with you to the floor. Because there, boxes vanish, walls fall, check lists collapse. That is when the dance floor becomes your whole world. Because, whatever you do, however you dance, your movement embodies your very best.
When you ballroom dance, you don’t just count the bits and pieces of the music, add numbers one after the other on a rhyming shelf, start again and again, as if you were the lost lambada of a mathematical equation. When you ballroom dance, you, my friend, are the rhythm. All of you. Each part of you is a breath of time that fills your presence on the dance floor. Each part of you bursts with energy, marking out the melodious string of your dancing. The more your body breaths, the more you live, and the more you show life.
When you ballroom dance, you don’t just wave your hands around, pushing your hips forward and backwards, bounce with your knees, or carry your feet from one spot to another. Hiccups and sneezes can make you do that too. But, dance is different.
When you ballroom dance, as the music unwraps, you feel the rhythm, you feel it as it transforms into actions, and then you feel the actions shaping the body to the core and to the tips. The movement springs from within, to the stretching shell of your skin, to the fabric of your clothes.
And clothes! When you ballroom dance, you don’t just wear clothes, put make-up on, style your hair and perform in some shoes. When you ballroom dance, YOU ARE the dress, the hair and the shoes. All these are extensions to your body, like the “punctuation marks” to your “dance sentences”. They are intriguing, astonishing, give sharpness, breath, and echo. They play with the rhythm.
When you ballroom dance, you don’t just mirror or oppose your partners dance steps, as if you were the active gears of a mechanical action. When you ballroom dance, you are The Whole and The Half, The Total and The Part. You are yourself, but you go beyond it, to embrace unity through the Yin and the Yang.
When you ballroom dance, you are present and complete.
So go, and dance. Be present. And be all what you are!
Author: Alexandra Kodjabachi
Photography: Maggiore Fotografico
Exclusively for Dance Comp Review