Dedicated to all souls dancing in the chaos of life, who create and destroy ideas of who we are…
I am dancing – and therefore I am, and I am living, I am moving and I am changing, and with me the whole world and space are changing. My movements here and now are rippling through all layers of reality, receding endlessly into depth and height. In this moment – I am the center of reality and the creator of its laws; I am the energy of the living; I am action, tension, impulse, surge, chaos, history – and I am also stillness, dissolution, and complete merging with matter.
I am dancing. And the world is dancing through me.
What do you see — when you are looking at me? Do you grasp even a grain of what is happening right now? What great ritual are you witnessing?
I am dancing wildly and I wish, through my movements, to guess at least some fragment of the language of our ancestors’ dance. Oh… for them, dance was a living language of speaking with the Gods; it was the language of prayer: for a successful hunt and a good harvest, for victory in war and protection from disease; whether you danced determined whether you would be a chosen partner or remain alone; on the dance of the shaman depended whether the soul of the sick would return to the body and whether the road would be safe for the tribe.
How much you knew, dear ancestors, about dance and about the power it keeps…
Let dance now also give me strength – so that through it I can cry out to all the Gods: I am here! I exist! I am a simple man, I am limited, weak, sinful, unremarkable – but right now you cannot ignore me! I am…and through my body speaks my soul: movement, expression, embrace, touch, gaze, sound, impulse – this is the language of my soul, the language that can convey without words.
You are seeing me and you are understanding everything at once. Without words, in a single moment – you are already with me and with our ancestors – we are dancing around the fire to the sound of drums, and our energy is merging, and we are becoming one whole. I, you, the tribe, the fire, the drums, the night, the world… We are now one, we are the World and we are the Gods, and there is nothing else…
And suddenly everything freezes.
***
The drums fall silent in the depths of millennia… and I am alone. I am lonely and always have been alone. All my friends and acquaintances, colleagues at work, neighbours, people from courses – all of it is a social facade I pull across so as not to see this black void of loneliness, from which I have always run and hidden.
But not now.
Now in this darkness there is only me. I am motionless, like a granite monolith, and it seems as though even space has frozen alongside me. What have I been running from all my life? From loneliness? But why is it so unbearable to be alone? Why does it hurt so much?
I am still on the outside, but inside my chest is tearing apart from pain and despair. My body overflows with tension:one more second and it will explode from this unbearable feeling – when suddenly, like a lightning bolt, an insight pierces me through. I am not running from loneliness – I am running from what I will find inside it – my true self.
And suddenly my body is going limp… I am beginning to tilt forward, my knees are buckling, and to keep from falling, I am taking a step forward, then another, and for some reason, I am beginning to dance slowly.
But this is already an entirely different dance: fluid and deep. It is a meditation of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, of grounding, of gradually releasing the tension that has accumulated in the body over years of running from one’s own personal truth – and through these movements the body is cleansed, the pain and heavy emotions of the past are dissolving and leaving. Tears are running down my face but I am beginning to feel that life returning to my body with my own true energy…finally, I am coming home, to my source of love and warmth.
Thank you, dance, for becoming the guide to my inner, deepest, unconscious, unaccepted and forgotten self – and yet my most real, unique and vital one. Thank you for this revelation, and for filling me with my own meaning.
***
I am at the Festa de São João – my beloved Porto is alive with music, happy faces, and improvised battles with little plastic hammers in which there are no losers, where every tap only adds to the happiness. The bars are open and full of people, and on hundreds of improvised dance floors, beneath the sounds of popular melodies – I see you, dance, in an entirely different light.
You are not serious or meditative. You are suddenly so playful and full of mischief. In you there is so much freedom, so much pleasure, such simple possibility of joy. And I can walk for hours, marveling at your many different manifestations.
Look! Just ahead, a few guys are testing who has better learned the moves of this improvised party – and for them you have become a joyful competition. And now look to the right – a couple is dancing bachata, and this is no longer simply dance but a pure, unrestrained expression of sexuality.
Here, my dance, you are so alive. You are lightness, flirtation, joy, and sensuality. And you have your own beauty. Not the kind found in ballet, where the flow of creative energy is set into a frame of structure and mastery, and you appear before us as a product of academic aesthetics.
And not the kind found in musicals, where you become an epic spectacle filled with expensive sets, large ensembles, beautiful costumes, and quality lighting.
Here on the streets of Porto, through you one feels life itself – not ideal, complex, contradictory, yet so real, and deeply filled with love.
And I see you in the eyes of a five-year-old boy who jumps wildly and screams with joy to the sounds of bailarico — and for him you are a manifesto of the future. And I see you in the elderly couple dancing to fado, for whom you are a manifestation of the past that has been lived.
How many faces you have, dance, how beautiful you are — and how little I still know about you.
Thank you for being in my life. Through you I do not fall into trance to know God – as the Sufis do. I do not earn my living by you – as professional dancers do. But because of you, I have begun to feel the world as a dancing reality.
And that is beautiful.
