Finding Center
22.84
Happy first week of summer! I want to try something a little different for this volume by focusing on the ✉️ . Let me know if you prefer more focus or variety in these newsletters, and as always, my inbox is open for feedback, thoughts, and reactions.
A few months ago, I flew back to Philadelphia to celebrate my college dance team’s 15th anniversary. Fresh off a red-eye, I made my first stop at berg, a tucked-away dance studio where many of my rehearsals used to be. A year had passed, but berg was exactly as I remembered it. Inside, two stripes of tape lined the width of the studio, splitting the floor into equal thirds. Abandoned water bottles and umbrellas bunched into a graveyard at the foot of the couch, and sneaker marks traced across the floor.
In dance, there is a concept of “finding center”. In the literal sense, this means knowing where you stand relative to the rest of the stage, formation, or audience. For rehearsals in berg, we would use the Marley tape and a few of the graveyard water bottles as stage markers. But ever since this trip back, I’ve been reflecting on dance’s impact on me and some other interpretations of this idea.
Center of Body—balancing intuition.
In times of self-doubt, I think back to how I used to always avoid freestyles. I dreaded them during auditions, dances circles, and the dedicated freestyle sections we included in our performances. We were never short of volunteers for these sections, and I envied those comfortable enough to step into the spotlight. For a member of a performing arts group, I was quite anxious about performing, and frankly still am. A part of this anxiety stemmed from my difficulty identifying as a dancer. Perhaps I was worried that if I danced without choreography as a safety net, it would expose me for the fraud I often thought I was.
Though, over the past few years, I began to see freestyle differently. Freestyle, while nerve-racking, is spontaneous, and this quality gives it its social gravity. It takes a baseline level of confidence to step into the center, but after that, I believe it becomes more about taking one’s self less seriously (a concept). For the people with this ability, it matters less how “good” of a dancer they are and more how sincere they appear. We all love watching displays of musicality, rhythm, and creativity, but fundamentally, what draws us into a dance circle is the chance to see personality on display in its most natural, uninhibited form.
When placed between two choreographed segments, freestyles help create cadence and make a performance more dynamic. In our daily cadence, there’s a similar balance to strike between intention and spontaneity; work and leisure. Like freestyle dancing, finding our “center of body” isn’t always a scientific or intellectual task, but a physical one. With that said, I still think I suck at freestyle dance. But, just as we won’t always be able to prepare before a friend pushes us into the dance circle, we won’t always be able to reason with our own intuition, and in those moments, I’m trying to learn how to freestyle better, both on and off the stage.
Center of Gravity—tracing purpose.
This past year has felt, for a lack of a better word, still. Despite many new life transitions—moving across the country, starting my first full-time job, and quarantining during a global pandemic—I still feel caught in the middle of an intermission, waiting for the next act. In other words, I have no clue what I’m doing.
In these moments of limbo, I interpret “center of gravity” as purpose, and through the lens of two types of choreography—solo and group. In a solo, our responsibilities are relatively simpler. Center of gravity and body are one. Our movements and use of the stage matter, but what makes solos unique and memorable is our autonomy over the performance. In solos, we choose the tempo we follow, the beats we hit, and the lyrics we illustrate. Just like dancers on stage, we should take the task of finding purpose at our own pace, emphasizing authenticity in what we choose to do and experiment with.
At the same time, group choreography gives us the unique opportunity to create something bigger than the sum of its parts. Here, our center of gravity is relative. As the choreographer, we are not only responsible for the technicalities, expressions, and textures of everyone’s movements, but how these elements interact across each dancer. Individual leaps, spins, tilts, and stunts always please audiences, but formations—the dancers’ positions relative to each other—can achieve awe-inspiring effects. As we work on being more authentic, sometimes purposeful work can be the work that extends beyond ourselves.
Center of Mind—focusing thought.
On show day, each person tries to combat pre-show jitters with their own rituals. But just before the show starts, the President traditionally gives us all a speech. For a few minutes, we reflect on the surreal journey that has led up to this point—the countless hours we spent in rehearsals, meetings, and production shoots. Our minds calm and our racing thoughts ease. Then, the President closes with our team chant, reminding us that all there is left to do is to have fun and to “leave everything on stage”.
A whole year is spent painstakingly preparing, rehearsing, and stressing over just four hours on stage. Yet, what is most powerful about the message—“leave everything on stage”—is that it ignores those details. It redirects our thoughts away from the struggles of yesterday and the withdrawals of tomorrow, to the present moment.
We often focus too closely on destinations—always optimizing how to get somewhere or something with “productivity” as the de facto social currency. While destinations exist in dance, reaching them isn’t the main goal. As dancers, we don’t choreograph a piece to simply reach the end. We create pictures throughout the piece, focusing on how we frame and arrive at them. Hard work, planning, and discipline are necessary to become the people we strive to be, but not at the expense of being present. When I need this reminder, as I often do, I picture myself back on stage. There, my thoughts refocus and my body, guided by the rhythm, takes each movement, one by one.
Dance on.
“An ability to affirm life demands bodily practices that discipline our minds to elemental rhythms, to the creativity of our senses, and to the ‘great reason’, our body, ‘that does not say “I” but does ‘I”.’
- Kimerer LaMothe, philosopher, dancer & scholar of religion
For dancers, dance can be a precise execution of sequenced steps or a free-willed display of emotional release. We celebrate, grieve, and heal with dance physically and emotionally. Through rhythm, our bodies move as vessels to express and to connect. Whether it’s a solo dancer’s vulnerability, a duo’s chemistry, or a group’s breathtaking synchrony, there are few feelings that compare to those felt through movement.
But, for all of us, dancer or not, dance is an affirmation of what it means to be. More frankly, dance is about having fun. It is a universal language that teaches us to make room for play, to follow our own tempo, and to be present—simultaneously acting with intention and trusting our senses to guide our next movements. And although I don’t technically consider myself a dancer anymore, I don’t plan to stop awkwardly grooving at the bus stop any time soon. In times of joy and grief, dance can ground us, and if we ever lose sight of these lessons, all we’ll need is to find center again.
