M. Suzanne Terry

I may have written this post before, and I don’t want to do a strict rehash. It’s not always easy to articulate how dance relates to joy, because…it just does? It seems too obvious, maybe? We leap for joy. Joy seems to be inherent in spirited movement.

Except when it’s not. When you have so much anguish built up that you feel trapped in your body. You have to release it or burst. So dance can be angstful (full of angst? I like angstful better) and angry and all the things we may think of as the antithesis of joy.

Dance can be many things. It can be happiness. It can be frustration. It can be catharsis. It can be release. It’s both/and. It’s holding all the realities in the same hand.

It can start with muscle memory but it doesn’t stay there. Dance is always at least partially now.

I love the way that dance immediately pulls me not only into the present but also connects me to all that has come before. Into the body I have now but also into the memory of just how much my body has done before. How much it can do. How much it still has to discover.

Dance can be possibility. Dance forms dreams and gives shape to progress.

Dance can be joy.

I’m writing about chasing joy for the 31 days of December. Click here to see the whole list.