Very often when I am teaching, the material seems to speak as much about everyday living as it does about dancing and the technicities of moving in relations to our earth, the universal forces acting on us and the physical states of embodiment that support our engagement with them. This is tricky territory, translating the art practice into everyday ideas for living well because while ideas provoked by dancing are worth hearing, exploring, and questioning, I realize that they hold potential pit-falls if one too easily embraces a “meaning” that can be honed to speak to our life choices and actions.
“Meaning” is a tricky notion in the first place. Meaning is a verb with three core intentions.
1. Signification, conveyance of an idea of something.
2. Intention or purposefulness, even as an excuse. And
3. Denoting its consequence or resultant.
Since I have been speaking a great deal on the imagination lately it needs noting here. Since the imagination is present in everything we do, see, hold as real and believe. I need to bring it in here, as a caution to all who enjoy how dancing and analyzing dancing can enter into our understanding of life itself. The imagination is ever-present in our embodied states and in our ideas that are emergent from being a bodymind. Consequently, we have to get this “meaning” thing right. It is a fierce practice to continually question the veracity of one’s ideas, to not romanticize our work, no matter how generative and elegant it shows up to be. It is important to see oneself in our ideas, our values, our leanings, our wishes and wants: the mere desire for things to fall together. And, it is important to know the basis of our current knowledge, our ability to understand the consequences of our questions and mode of asking them, and to investigate how we “suppose” things to be.
Why? Well, because all of our meaning making is rooted in our living and our living is never without an imagination which in some ways holds us hostage to all we have determined is true. Learning to recognize the presence of the imagination is to know you cannot go forth without it even when you imagine you have finally exceeded it, and thus to determine that there are real consequences to human relations, communication, health and the health of the earth that require us to imagine well. We have to exceed the hurdles our impoverished practices have amplified: fear, greed, isolation and so many more human propensities in order to accomplish this very important task. But, I have to ask, "Who better than dancers?" to do this task!
Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter