Taking Risks – Changing the Tone and Tempo – Finding the Edges – And Embracing the Unknown

 

Life to me is a constant dance of energy, tempo, and passion. It is an expression of breath, sound, and movement. Each life is a process to create enough safety to feel brave and bold I moments, so we can leap into the unknown wildness that calls to us from beyond the cages of the mind.

I look at my life as a dancer and I see the adventure and risk that permeated my youthful expressions. I see the freedom and determination that ignited audiences and enthralled my own soul.

And I can see the places where I was still terrified.
Even then I knew I was terrified.
I just learned how to put on a strong front and had the physical and internal determination to keep going.

Dance was an extension of the yearning deep within that wanted to fly and move through the deep and complex emotions that I was afraid to express in real life.

On a stage the audience is “out there”. And I got to explore patterns, characters, and behaviors that were foreign to my being and outside my tightly coiled personality that my ego attempted to control.
And the fact that the audience was beyond the orchestra pit gave a feeling of safety and security. Audiences don’t get to touch dancers but they do get to feel them, watch them, and receive the gifts they are offering.

Ballet was the movement that allowed my heart to remember how it was to fly when it was unencumbered by the rules of a society and those societies roles that I perceived and believed were supposed to define my being.
But the roles I saw in the outer “real” world seemed much too small and limiting.
Inside of me was a jungle of wild animals, exotic plants and bright, colorful flowers trying to get out.
Coming into the theater each day was a journey to discover how sore one was from the previous days of rehearsal or performance. Stiffness was so normal to me that it was just a part of the entire package of being a ballet dancer. Each person had their own personal preferences for how to stretch out and get the body moving.
Ballet class was about giving the body what it needed to do the rest of the day effectively. It was about loosening up tight muscles and reclaiming the elasticity of the muscles that would allow the joints to move in extreme positions. Movement generates heat and heat promotes flexibility and fluidity.

Rehearsal was about doing what one is told. Whether that is a rehearsal directress, or director, a choreographer, or working with other dancers to figure out structure, timing, and flow.
Rehearsals were never about our opinion or choices. Those were clearly dictated to us by others, and we were to be an extension of a past image or performance, an extension of their own dreams and ideals, an extension of (in some cases) their own egos, but rarely in those moments did I feel that as a dancer I had total free reign. We were to move and do things with exactness and perfection. We were to learn the steps and make those sequences move and flow with the music.
But for me, that all ended at the moment of a performance.

That moment when the music started, the lights either dimmed or came up, the curtain raised and the show began … that was my moment to explode into my own version of the structures, steps, choreography, hopes, and wishes of myself and the character that I was embodying.
Because in that moment, there was no one telling me how to do something. There was no one to dictate what I was supposed to feel. I was free! And I had been given a green light that I was good enough to be on that stage in that moment.
Therefore, I could make that moment, totally mine. The stage is a space of permission and a portal that opens up. It would open me up. It would relax the rules in my mind and body and give the space for my soul to have total control and find the freedom that lives in the ethers of the pure and creative air that is a theater.

In a performance there is only this moment. It is a space to allow dreams to flourish and to capture hearts. It is a place of magic that forever wishes and sometimes those wishes … come true.

An audience is there to add the energy and excitement to the raw and real struggle of each soul on that stage to become a character, a witch, a princess, an illusion, or the birth of emotions as they explode outwards and touch others in a pure light of love and authenticity … in the midst of telling a story or taking them along on their journey.

I believe as souls we crave to be a witness of true essence. I believe as dancers we long to be felt and seen in our vulnerability, our humanness, and our authentic being.
I am grateful for those audiences that were willing to pay and play in my beautiful and magical world of Ballet.

I thank them all for their heart that felt into mine.

I thank them all for their gasps in the moments that I flew or fell.

I thank them all for allowing me to inspire their dreams and nightmares.

I am more grateful than they could ever know that I was given permission to explore places and spaces that I could not have felt alone. With those in the audience as my witness, I attempted to become more than this very fragile and imperfect human that I was.
In those precious moments I tasted the elixir of something divine in myself and tried to give it back to you in the forms of beauty, grace, anguish, despair, hope, love, joy, rapture, and rage.
Dance is something so very intimate.

And once we dance with souls in such ways, we are forever connected throughout time and space.

May we meet again on the human alters of art.

May we merge, converge, dance, and bow in gratitude for such a sacred moment shared.

The divinity within me sees the divinity in all of you. And I have become a better person for that great gift of insight.

Thank you for this most beautiful life and thank you for seeing my dance, dancing with me in your heart and soul, and flowing with my words through this tale that I spin now … forever … and still.

~Suzanne Wagner~