Every now and I then I have experiences that make me wish I could go back several years and walk a different path of life. I am generally very happy that I have decided to take the "polyglot and globe trotter" path, but sometimes I do feel deep desires to life a different kind of life. These moments of desire and reflection are usually focuses on dance.
As I am sure that most of my friends who read this blog know, I spend my senior year of high school at an arts school where the mornings were spent on academics and the afternoon on various arts. For my junior year there I was in the theater department and for my senior year I was in the dance department. I loved using my body everyday, rather than just allowing it to be a simple vehicle to help me walk from point A to point B. The skills that I had gained from doing karate as a youth helped me use my body for dance, and although I felt that all of the other students were years ahead of me in terms of technique I still loved the learning and the moving.
When choosing colleges the book recommended that I shouldn't pay attention to what majors a college had, and so I didn't. I had planned to be a dance major and to continue dancing, and if I had gone to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis I almost assuredly would have started out as a dance major my Freshman year. I actually didn't find out that Kalamazoo College lacked dance classes until after I agreed to go there, so when I was signing up for classes I was surprised and changed my planned major from dance to undecided. If I had known I might very well of not gone to Kalamazoo, and I would almost certainly not speak Chinese, think about working for the U.S. State Department, or be a globe trotter.
To bring this back to the present, my time as a dancer in high school left in me a great appreciation for dance. Whenever I go to a new place I always look to see what the local dance scene is, and in Beijing I think the local modern and contemporary dance is defined my LDTX (雷动天下). Last night I went to see their Spring Thunder (春雷) performance series, and I was awestruck by the beauty of it. There was some very excellently done partnering, and much of the movement pulled at me in such a way that made me wish I had studied dance instead of China, languages and international studies. I lack the skill as a dance critic and writer to describe them fully, but I will attempt to give a brief overview of the final piece in the performance.
Name of a Rose (以玫瑰之名) involved strong red lighting on the entire stage, and six dancers dressed in strong and dark colors, mostly blacks and reds. On the left part of the stage there was a rosebush, and throughout the stage there were rose petals scattered on the floor. In this way a strong mood was already established for the dance before any of the artists moved a single limb. Throughout the dance, strong partnering was used, and the various duets between the male and female dancers (who were evenly matched) made it clear that passionate relationships were beyond played out before my eyes. Although various pushes, pulls, and struggles were played out in these on-stage romances, the climax involved a female dancer tearing apart the rose bush and leaving her former partner to mourn her leaving.
Watching this beautiful and inspirational performance had renewed the desire in me to dance, so whether I am in Beijing, Southern Spain, Minneapolis, or I may go in my life I will do my best to find local dance companies to teach me and to inspire me.
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