DANCE HALL DAYS

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, THE WEEKLY SPECIAL LIFESTYLE EDITION IN MANILA BULLETIN, FRIDAY, 29 FEBRUARY 2008)

If I had the energy—and if I could muster the courage to “shake my booty” without feeling like my arms are all tangled up and my feet are stuck on the floor—I would spend as much time as I could dancing.
Apart from swimming, it’s the only rigorous physical activity I enjoy that involves practically all of the muscle groups. It is a spiritual exercise, a meditative, therapeutic, if cathartic, experience, releasing excess energy and distributing what’s left of it in equal parts throughout the body or even the spirit.

Besides, dancing is an expression of glee, at least for a non-dancer like me, who only burst into dance when the spirit moves me, which is usually when I wake up to a bright, sunshiny day feeling bright and sunshiny myself and when, after generous rounds of Black Russian, I begin to see everyone else as a backdrop rather than strangers at a dance club.

BLURB
You can’t lie when you dance. It’s so direct. You do what is in you. You can’t dance out of the side of your mouth. —Shirley Maclaine

Of course, it’s not always an act of joy. To the professional, such as the ballet dancer, it is discipline. In fact, in most Asian cultures, dance speaks a language of symbols and gestures that express the whole gamut of human emotions, including but not limited to happiness. In many places, it is as sacred a ritual as the devil dances of Sri Lanka, which are said to cure as well as cause disease, or our very own Bumayah, a religious dance of the Ifugao tribes in gratitude for a bountiful harvest of rice. To American choreographer and dancer Martha Graham, dance is a tribute to the miracle of life. “Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests,” she said in a speech in 1965. “It’s a miracle, and the dance… is a celebration of that miracle.”

Needless to say, it’s more than entertainment. To me, dance is as high a form of entertainment as an exceptional film with great acting, mesmerizing plot, and good script, not to mention cinematography and musical scoring. Many of my favorite movies have dance highlights that are as memorable to me as the movies themselves: Al Pacino sweeping Gabrielle Anwar off her feet to the tune of “Por Una Cabeza” in Scent of A Woman, for instance, or Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith dancing to “I’ll Be Seeing You” in Shining Through, or even Belle and her prince waltzing their way to romance while Mrs. Potts, Angela Lansbury’s character, is telling her son Chip the story of Beauty and the Beast and lulling him to sleep. Let’s not forget Ziyi Zhang’s picture-perfect, edge-of-your-seat dance performance under a shower of snowflakes in Memoirs of A Geisha.

No wonder, as the British New Wave group The Buggles claimed in 1979, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” In this visual medium, music found a new dimension that is as powerful as, if not more powerful than words and melodies. Sometimes, dance is what endears you to music, whether because the music makes you dance or because a dancer gives the music a whole new meaning for you.

Indeed, in the words of George Balanchine, one of the founders of American ballet, who also defined dance as “music made visible,” dancers are “poets of gestures.” I mean no disrespect to the great divide (if any) between the finer art of dancing and the pop dances or even street dances, but I do believe that all dancers are poets in motion. Although many of them are faceless and nameless, they are the moving force behind some of the biggest pop stars in the music industry today. It’s no surprise, for instance, that despite all of her dirty laundry being washed in public, you can pretend it’s not yet the end of Britney Spears as you try very hard not to get into the groove when she challenges you to a “Piece of Me.”

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com