Communities Through Dance

Last semester I took a dance class called Introduction to Modern Dance and I felt really comfortable with everyone in the class, more than I ever have in a class before. After learning about communities this semester, I have realized that the physical nature of our class created a community in which we were comfortable with each other. Through being willing to try and make mistakes and embarrass ourselves together, we became a community.

Modern dance is what I think of as the modern art version of dance. It is contemporary and breaks stereotypes for what we think of dance. Having done modern dance with a company in middle school and high school I feel able to say that modern dance can sometimes simply be weird. I learned through my class last semester that this strangeness is created by dancers moving not to make it look pretty, but to make it look interesting and to do what feels good for the dancers’ body. Nevertheless, the trying the movements of modern dance can be embarrassing. Why the embarrassment brought us together I think is best explained by Stephen Colbert’s description of embarrassment, “I like to do things that are publicly embarrassing, to feel the embarrassment touch me and sink into me and then be gone… The feeling you feel is almost like a vapor. The discomfort and the wishing that it would end that comes around you.”

We all felt this sense of discomfort and wanting the embarrassment to stop, but through this we became a community. We had to be willing to engage in this discomfort together which made us comfortable with one another and created what I felt to be a strong community.

Featured image source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/arts/dance/what-comes-next-for-cuban-modern-dance.html