P52 Week 6 - Side Light

Last Thursday I went to see the So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) tour concert in Seattle. Most of the stage was lit from the sides. Occasionally the spotlights shone out into the audience – right at me as if to say: I’m talking to you, lady. The spotlight is on you, too! I want you to pay attention and to remember this night.

And so, the sidelights have my attention.

Dancing has been a sidelight in my life. As a kid, I adored the ballet lessons I took for almost ten years. I loved the time-honored discipline and the established flow of it. I quit when I realized I didn’t have the body or the turn out for ballet. The young SYTYCD dancers last Thursday didn’t have perfect reedy, diaphanous ballet bodies. And that got me to wondering: what if I hadn’t dismissed the ideal ballet body notion? Could I have made dancing more of a highlight than a sidelight?

Growing up, ballet helped me to express my emotions in physical form. I was delighted when my dance instructors singled me out to demonstrate expressiveness in port de bras arm movements and in character dancing such as the Italian tarantella and my native Hungarian czárdás. But what I saw last Thursday far surpassed the dainty dramas of ballet.

SYTYCD had taken sedate, structured ballet and thrown the dance art form into a display of pure creative abandon. The emotions were raw, their expression exquisitely choreographed and beautifully interpreted by the dancers. I marveled at the genius and originality of the dance moves: where I expected a step to end, the choreographers extended the movement and pulled my emotions along with it. A pose moved into a drag, a spin shifted to a leap, a lift rotated into a breathtaking plunge and feet were fused together in a heartbreaking paired walk. Stunned and riveted, I was drawn into each of those extensions. My body surged as emotional thrills flew up and down me like arpeggios.

I am paying attention.

I’m noticing how sidelight accentuates the light – and the dark – and the program last Thursday highlighted the whole spectrum in the various dance genres: rolicking hip-hop, joyous Bollywood, saucy broadway, romantic jazz and anguished – and at times destructive – love-gone-amuck contemporary. I felt like I was watching a full-length movie, getting every nuance of what it wanted to convey in every single movement, every expression on the dancers’ faces. And a whole story was packed into a two minute dance – without the need for words.

I believe this cutting edge art form is building a reservoir of passionate emotional and soulic expression – and all of it is helping to shape and transform our collective consciousness. And haven’t the arts done just that through the ages? Hasn’t artistic expression led political, social and even scientific change for eons?

And then I wonder, if artistic expression is so important, then why on earth have we sidelighted arts programs in our schools?

I am paying attention.

On a more personal note, how often have I side-lighted my feelings when something grabs my heart and moves my soul? What if I go home from a concert like SYTYCD and tell myself: well that was cool, that was fun, that was impressive but I have work tomorrow, a living to make and I can’t stay in a dream world like that; or yeah, I thought of taking writing classes but who has the time or the money; or that felt good, that felt passionate for a moment but now it’s back to the real world and life isn’t always passionate – it’s mostly mundane. How often have I minimized, how often have I turned a moving experience into a sidelight and then sidelined it forever?

Well, I am paying attention and I have taken a step. My humanity has given me the privilege of expression and I have desires that are clamoring to be heard: the light and the dark, the good and the bad, the joy and the pain. I have chosen to create, to write about it. I am choosing to live my life with passion. A sidelight has become a highlight.

So thank you SYTYCD – and bring it on! I wish you every success with your TV series and tours for many years to come.