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Enter Dance Delight

Enter Dance Delight
Entering dance is entering delight. Dance is a way to engage my whole self, a way to focus all my attention on a full range of experience.

Dance has many forms that use basic principles. Ballet is the science that has organized dance principles into a progressive system of learning. The power of Ballet as a science has been its ability to add to and influence discoveries in other disciplines. Using the term dance applies to all dance forms and refers to the codification of movement by Ballet.

To fully engage, dance begins with simple movements using an image that guides the building of networks that interconnect the entire person.

Similar to the tradition of Tai Chi, dance imagery is the falling and rising of the body as one unit. This simple image will be applied to every area of the body and to every system from emotional to cognitive.

Also like Tai Chi, dance begins with slow movement allowing time and space for the body brain to record the movement and distinguish it from other movements.

When I lose the sense of delight in dancing, I simply return to the falling and rising. In Ballet it is the plie. In Tai Chi it is the basic lowering of the entire body by bending the knees and lowering the arms from an outstretched position.

In both Ballet and Tai Chi, this is a basic movement that prepares for many other movements from stepping to leaping. The slow connected movement is the gathering of power and the integrating of position in space.

Enter Dance Hope
Dance is the process of anticipating more life revealed in the connection of movement. The experience of anticipation is a recognition of the process of creation and growth in our cells. The cells divide as a creation of more life. Neurons interconnect by the creative process of sending and receiving signals.

Hope is the process of anticipation, response, and integration that brings us to an active curiosity.

Anticipation prepares to recognize the surprises and the shifting of these different networks.

Enter Dance Networks
Dance is a way of training our focus to manage creative connections between our different networks. One network related to focus is the specific goal oriented focus that can identify specific actions and proactively adjust them. Another network is the broad spectrum focus that oversees full person acting at once.

Another pair of networks are the directive and the collaborative. The first is specific and directional while the last is reflective and integrative.

Enter Dance Image
The image simplifies all the complex work of the body brain and empowers the person to wield an instantly changing focus.

One key image is energy. Energy in dance, as in sound and light, can be varied to many levels of force, speed, intensity, and quality.

The dancer uses imagery to shape energy that goes beyond their limitations physically, emotionally and mentally. The interaction and interconnection of energy is studied both within the individual and between members of a group.

Dance is a way to build the curiosity of anticipation and the images as tools that can apply to the uniqueness of the individual and the unity of a group.

Enter Dance Complexity
Dance is a process of beginning with simple movements, adding variations that are easily distinguished, and integrating the movements so they can be combined in multiple ways.

The unique realm of dance is to distinguish the connections within each different network encompassing the entire person. This process recognizes not only skill development and structures of mathematical, geometric, and motor calculations. Training distinguishes experiences of intention, malleability, and states of network collaboration. Building the care for the self as an interactive part of life is at the center of all learning.

Enter Dance Power
Dance is an experience of power from many different perspectives. Clarifying signals through all the types of entry mentioned, the dancer creates a moment by moment portrait of their experience in the form of dance. This portrait is changeable with the wide range of qualities and states of experience. Claiming and building this dance of the self represents a long journey of entering dance.

The source of power is the interactive nature of our systems that receive and send signals allowing the person to evaluate their location in space, the intensity of force they are applying, and their relationship to emotion and intention.

Two other aspects of power are important. One is the openness to surprises that may exceed any expectation. The other is the willingness to ask for help and to experiment with the help given.

Asking for help may be a personal action of specifically asking within the self for the attention and courage to recognize the help that is offered and for the vulnerability to fully receive it.
Tim Hurst 03/24/18