Ballet and Museums – Why I Love Museums

To me, being in a museum is like getting to fly another’s plane. While I have my own instrument to explore movement, energy, sound, and light through dance. My body or instrument is attuned to navigating those frequencies in its own peculiar way.
The repetition of dance allows us to move through the process of gaining skills and strength to a level that transcends trying and becomes something that is a blend between the soul and the body. The body needs to have enough skill to be able to control and contain the forces that move just outside conscious awareness so that a merging happens that can begin to transcend time and space and become … art.
The body has to be trained so that the power of the soul can come more fully into this existence. In dance the body is the clay, and it must be shaped, heated, and strengthened before it is a vessel strong enough to carry something more powerful than the human condition. It has to be strong enough to be able to invite in the spirit of the soul and the spirits of all those souls who want to contribute to the moment of that dance.
In a museum, I get to feel the flows of other artists as they honed their skills. I get to look out through their eyes, see what they see, and feel the subtle touch of a stroke from their brush.
If I am really good, I can feel the intent that powered their gifts, passion, and drive.
That is what makes such spaces magical to me. It is as if the ghosts of the past are reaching through a painting, pottery, textile, or a sculpture to tell us about their world and their mindset at that time.
When I am in a museum or in a place of wonder, I work with a type of listening that is not auditory. Perhaps it is because of my ballet training that I am curious about the feelings that move through the hands that held the brush, and the powerful intention that this artist held as so precious, that he or she was able to guide the softness or the subtlety of those feelings through the strokes of that brush, imbuing the painting or art with their concentration, focus, and life.
Dance exists in a moment of conjoined magical forces. It is a physical form of art, but it lives in the ethers beyond time, and expresses the constant movement that is life and celebrates a moment. It is the requirement of Terpsichore that we dance and then we are required by her laws to completely release that dance as the gift of spirit that it is.
I believe dance is like music, something so very close to the angelic realms that it can only briefly exist in this reality. Dance is here to touch who it is supposed to touch, inspire a thought or feeling in an audience, and be fully released as a gift of the authentic and highest expressions that are mankind’s potential. Dancers are a reminder of what could be if we all learned a bit of mental and emotional discipline. All art requires various forms of discipline. That is what makes great art.
Dance is an expression of unconditional love that is so powerful that no dancer has ever been paid what they are worth. Dancers are never honored in the ways of other great artists (until this modern age of video and movies). We are a ghost that lives and breathes in a moment and then fades away with the mists of time.
Museums are much more than that. They are holding the essences of great artists for all to bear witness to their views of this world. Their energy still exists because they took dreams and made them into something that can still exist hundreds or even thousands of years later.
They not only have left echoes of themselves in their art, but they also have tried to show us powerful historical moments, the faces of our ancestors and show the toll that influence took upon them.
Museums show the art of the common man through pottery that was used for daily life. We get to know what was important to ancient peoples because of seeing that even in useful tools, the creative potential within certain souls determined to bring beauty and functionality together. They wanted to make things useful and beautiful.
Museums show me that how painters us color combinations to show how light plays and dances on faces and landscapes.
In our modern world, everything presented is so picture perfect, makeup, hair, all the small things in our world seem to want to be remembered with words, such as gorgeous, stunning, sexy, or powerful.
But in the ancient world they created from what they saw every day. They saw beauty in an ancient face, lined with grief, and fraught with turmoil. They celebrated the harshness not just the beauty. They showed not a bright sunlit world but an overcast, gray sky that seems ominous and warning of something yet to come.
They showed saints suffering to remind us that even the best of us struggle with life and are not accepted.
Real art makes things that we can relate to and that give us truth. But that truth is not made into something unattainable. It is something that reminds the human soul that it must reach through pain, through hardship, and discover a force within that is stronger than circumstances.
I love museums. I love how they smell of another time. I love how they surprise me with the powerful colors that they used and the joy that those colors intended to show us something about them.
Museums remind me that we are the manifestations of their dreams, that they were attempting to reach for. And they remind me that my dreams that were unattainable will be another’s reality in a short period of time.
We strive and we reach. As we reach, we push against the known reality and the barriers of energy that limit this existence. While we may not attain our dreams in this lifetime, museums remind me that my dreams will be attained by another wave of souls that will find a way to be a stronger, bigger, and a more powerful vessel with which to hold their own magnificence.
~Suzanne Wagner~