One response to “Dance + Change 2017: February’s Question”

1. 

   Claire Calalo

   Feb 1, 2017 at 8:36 am

   This is the question I have been exploring with my dancers at for change dance collective for the past 7 years, since we began our journey as a company. Thank you so much for posing it now, in this time of necessary action, community building, and solidarity. I can’t wait to hear others’ responses.
   For me, dance creates change for the dancer by subtly shifting your perspective on your own experience. When we create movement and text based on stories from our lives, we are forced to confront our embodied memory, and place it into the new contexts of the present moment and the eyes and ears of others, which inherently invites relationality between the individual and a community. When we dance we are not just creating shape and carving space with the body, but also experiencing heightened emotion, filling and emptying with breath, and constantly engaging in a dialogue between the judgements, ambitions, and perceptions of the mind and the corporeal reality of our bodies moving amongst those of others in the room. We dance with bodies that don’t look like ours, that don’t move like ours, and yet we dance together in a shared moment of common intentionality. All people who love dancing know that feeling of pure ecstasy that comes from a thrilling moment on stage, in class, or on the dance floor, when you feel completely unleashed and full of power. It is intimate, and it creates bonds in ways that words do not.
   There are other ways dance can create change for the observer, for the dance student, for a community, and even for a society at large. But I think this is a good start for me, for now.
   -Claire Calalo, Artisic Director of for change dance collective

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