What does dance class do? It teaches fitness of moment - lessons in rhythm, space, energy - to help you set yourself on fire. So you radiate. So you are an instrument impulsing extravagant forms of electric transmission - like a lightning-struck tree, a bird on a telephone
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wire, a filament in a bulb. We put ourselves through narrow passages of movement in order to burn. There are all kinds of temperatures and shapes. While this process may be a How To, it is also a How What - an exultation or a plea. How What! I praise the current running through me. How strong, how true, how pleasing, how painful, how simple, how confusing, how weak, how absent. We burn up and down. It's a rite of sacrifice. It's a giving up. It's a putting out. It's expending all that energy not primarily to prepare for something else; it's doing it here and now. We move, feel, think, sweat. But sacrifice demands a recipient - energy expended, by all rationale, must go somewhere - so where is it going? Back into ourselves, for later withdrawal. To someone across the room. To someone across the globe. To this here and now, with all its specificity - soft silence, creaking floor, cast sunlight, aching hips, caught hair, inquisitive fingers. To What do you impulse your energy, at this moment?
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