Dancing crooks embody the individuals in society who put on an act to make others believe that they leading perfect lives. Often these individuals have many admirers, who only know them as well as the crowd knows the performer. In order to be as admired as the dancing crooks, we might give up our time to dress like them, ‘paint our faces’ with make-up and false emotions or change the things we love and opinions we hold. We don’t realise that our precious time is being robbed. The dancing crooks are covering up their true selves to gain our approval, and as we begin to do the same, we slowly become one. Having some time to reflect can allow us to realise that life is too short to fit into a mould of the ideal person. Harbouring creativity and individuality is more fulfilling than striving for perfection.
Our scattered, exhausted, overstimulated minds need the purity of live movement, the focus of a show. When someone walks into the theater they silence their phone. They hone in their senses on the box of light in front of them. The rest of the world falls away for a short time and they’re transported into new ideas; beauty, entertainment, pain, sadness.
Dance offers a new perspective to view the world. So much of our thinking is done with words. Social justice movements organize around reclaiming language, redefining words, creating vocabulary. We read, write, text, call and speak every day. But not everyone’s brain works best with linguistics, and even those who excel at language have trouble communicating in different cultures or expressing something that linguistics can’t do justice.
Sometimes, the movement itself is therapeutic. As any professional dancer knows, life doesn’t calm down just because it is a show week, and one year I went through a breakup right before a performance of Swan Lake.
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