morning after morning

Making dances prepares you for death. Even as a dance is being formed, so much of it is simultaneously disappearing. There are so many other choices that could have been made, so many other movements that could have been chosen. While dances are being made, nothing stays. Even in the making, there is stillness before and after. And the final dance, the performed dance, is never what it was once, or what it could be. Dances are impermanent – both in their creation and existence. Dances are even impermanent in their own deaths. How many times have movements or themes from long dead dances returned when a new dance begins? The same dying dance is made every time a new one strives to be born. And this is reassuring. When a dance is danced, if you look hard, the unraveling of movement is revealed, what’s not there is there too, like the mythical Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey weaving during the day and pulling out threads at night. This practice of creating and performing dying dances is a ceremonious repetition of transience – like the image of her mother at the kitchen table, pouring tea into a cup and sipping, morning after morning after morning, until she didn’t, then living a full life as a memory.