Dance

"What's dancing like?" he asks me, the early April breeze tugging at my hair.

To my own surprise, I have no reply.

"I don't know. It's... just... dancing," I answer lamely.

After years of dance, can it be possible that I have never thought through this question?

A week later, I stretch backstage before a performance and think again of the conversation.

For twelve years, I have done this, the rehearsals and performances. I can't remember what life was like before dance. Many of my closest friendships formed in the dance studio. Throughout my life, dance teachers have served as my mentors and role models. Dance has supplied countless analogies and explanations, and I see every sport, every step in terms of dance, but I can't answer this simple question.

What's dancing like?

How can you explain what it feels like to breathe?

Dance is movement. It's sound, rhythm, and shapes. It's breath, rising and ebbing. It's the juncture of visual and auditory, physical and mental, athletic and artistic.

Back in the wings, I wait in the dark silence between numbers. The music starts, and we step on stage. We dance of the Kingdom, of heaven coming down to this room, and the chorus courses through us and among us. It's a praise hymn, a battle cry, a declaration to make truth into reality here and now. We worship through movement. One song, one rhythm.

In modern dance classes, they tell you to breathe together. Listen to the breaths of the others dancing around you and breathe with them - and then move to that heaving rhythm. Under the glaring lights of the stage, our breaths draw us together like wind rustling through a field or a breeze tugging hair, and suddenly every dancer forms part of a greater movement, a piece of a whole. We become a body of bodies, and I trust the person at my side to catch me, lift me, and shift to or away from me in time with the music. We share our weight.

Through thick and thin, we've shared countless weights together over the years, ranging from health issues to heartaches to head battles. We've fallen and risen and fallen again, and every dancer knows that you have to let go of your tension in order to press forward into the choreography. Contract, release; plié, relevé; drop and then lift. We feel the expanse of space and time, and we move through it, every step accounted and every second counted in order to milk the full glory out of each moment.

The movement holds power and freedom. As the music ends, I grow conscious of each vein pulsating with rushing blood. With muscles exhausted and heart beating fast, I think I can feel every cell in my body teeming with life. When we come off stage, grinning and panting for breath, I whisper to myself, this is dance: it's life at its fullest, concentrated and rich and sweaty and beautiful.

On a Sunday in May, I perform for the last time with girls I have danced with since I was five years old. Shifting roles in close succession, we play evil hags and then fairy-like victors. We pour ourselves out on the stage. In the dressing rooms, we laugh and reminisce on childhood wishes and treasured memories while a whole new generation of young dancers lines up in the backstage hallway. When we take our final bows, the curtains close, and with them closes a year. For me, it marks the end of a chapter in my life.

My time here is finished, although I did not want it to end. I don't think I've really processed that it's over. I was raised in this dance studio. Leaving it seems like abandoning part of my identity, yet the lessons I learned in the studio are permanent, and they will remain true even when I step off the marley: share your weight with others; extend your arms fully; make sure strength does not become tension; don't be afraid to fall on the ground. Here, I have tasted pure joy. This is dance.