Not What it Was. Not Who I Was.

Dance today is not what it was. Of course it wouldn’t be because time is an endless moving changing thing. Whatever it is. And all of life seems to be trapped in the cage of time, so everything is influenced by its momentum. Dance today is raw, rusty, broken and imperfect. And in its imperfection lies its perfection because it shows what is real, what is desperate, what is dark, and what humanity hopes for. Even when some do not realize it. So we who dance, or have anything to do with dance are done with fantasies, fairy stories, myths and legends. We’re through with the pretty ballerina living in a fake world on a stage where she dismisses reality – and might even run from it. Today, reality is the stage. Stark, sweaty, bold, bloody, real, transparent, full of hate, full of desperation, full of longing, and full of love. Dance today has grown into itself. It has finally grown up from its dreams and realized the stark reality that one cannot know beauty until it knows the ugly. That joy is not joy until it knows its sorrow…Dance today has realized that its more diverse, more different, more pliable, more bendable, and becuase of that – unbreakable. Dance has discovered that it can’t escape the fallen, broken world but it can embrace the beauty in the dinginess, now that dance has accepted its grit, its mud, its war, its sorrow and its blood. There’s no other way really. But not to love it for what it is. But what it was supposed to be. What it will be.
No.
Not to love it.
Only to be discontent with it. That in the eyes of the dancer who breathes in this smoke, that in her very stillness, she moves in the darkness as if to sing of hope instead. Dance today is not what it was.
I am today not who I was.
Look past the movement and see the soul of why we dance. Why we all dance. It’s the same reason for why we all continue to live. Today, we stop being hypocrites. We will face what we hide, we will face what we fear. This resurrection is very near.
No. I am not today, who I once was.