Finding Inspiration in Dance
Last Friday I was invited to a pop-up dance performance on a local beach. My friend manages a retreat centre that I’m lucky enough to borrow a few hours a week, and when she told me I should come see the dancers, I listened.
Mathews Point is a long narrow strip of sandy beach on the inside of Active Pass, a fast moving strip of water between Galiano and Mayne Island. When my kids were younger we’d spend hours there watching whales, seals and otters, plus the ferries powering through on the hour.
But its a steep switchback trail from the top of the cliff to the beach at the bottom, and I haven’t been down there in years. My kids are grown, and I’m older, and the trail is too hard on my knees. But dancers. On the beach.
“You should come,” says Dayna. And I trust her.
Like a good middle class English kid, I took ballet and tap dance when I was little. Until I turned nine and my childhood shifted. Even though I know nothing about modern dance, dance is art, and I’m a writer, and sometimes painter and print maker, so art I understand.
There were six dancers gathered on the sand, and another woman playing the violin. Magical is an overused adjective, but it was that. It was also incredibly intimate and stunningly beautiful.
The performance of Ocean Roaring lasted forty minutes. Movement invoking loss and grief and our necessary relationship to water, against the backdrop of waves, and the forests of Mayne Island. And I didn’t look away. Dancers inhabit their bodies in a way I can’t even imagine. They chose gesture and movement in the way I might chose words or colour.
Halfway through the performance, I decide dance is like poetry. Poetry being a genre I’m afraid to try. Poets are all metaphor and beauty translating words into images on paper, like the dancers gestures translated story into movement on the sand. Poetry stops me and makes me think, and the dance was like that too. At times there was a perfect inevitability to their movements that I couldn’t have predicted, but when they happened I was like “yes” that was exactly what needed to come next.
I wondered if I could find that in my own writing. If I could lay down trails in my story telling, so that when the essay followed the trail, it would feel both inevitable and also unforeseen.
And I know the next time I sit down to write, I will be thinking of those six women, and their violinist, the waves of the pass lapping around their calves as they demonstrate both connection and loss in the movements of their bodies.
Credits:
Choreographed and Directed by Anya Saugstad in collaboration with the performers
Performed by dancers Eowynn Enquist, Nasiv Kaur Sall, Daria Mikhaylyuk, Shion Skye Carter, Sabine Raskin, & violinist Marlene Ginader
Music concept and created in collaboration Cindy Kao
Costume design and creation Julie Roussy Newton
Photography: Dayna Szyndrowski
