Trevor Georgi

Mar 24, 2014

Ed Austin

My Philosophy about Dance

What is dance? This seems like a simple question on the surface, and yet is it

really that simple? I’ve been in the dance department long enough here at BYU to hear

lost of different definitions of what dance is and what it is not. Depending on the dance

group you talk to they will have differing opinions about what the others might believe

dance to be. To a folk dancer it might be tied to ancestry and peoples routes and

traditions. You could then turn around and ask a ballroom dancer what dance is, and they

might tell you that dance is about the feeling and emotion invoked by a dance/song. As a

dance major here at BYU I sit and contemplate what dance means to me. Depending on

the class I can become a ballet dancer, then an hour later I step in and I am now a

contemporary dancer. Dance majors at BYU are expected to be a jack-of-all-trades in the

dance world. Thus, I take you down the road of what dance means personally to myself.

I started my dancing career at the age of fourteen with break and hip-hop dancing.

Due to a severe back injury I was forced to stop that style. I then had my closest brother

Jeff (an avid ballroom dancer at Timpanogos High School) talk me into doing ballroom

my sophomore year of high school. My brother Jeff died in my arms that following

summer. I quickly became an angry and troubled youth who had a death wish. Dance

became my lifeline and a way to express myself in ways that I couldn’t in words. Dance

became the outlet for me to unleash my darkest emotions; the torrent of anger buried

deep; the confusion of being lost and losing all hope; the welling sadness that I tried to

hide from the world. I went from looking forward to nothing in my life, to looking

forward to dancing and sharing in other dancers company and joy. Once dancing helped

me to express all of my darkest emotions, it then became a tool for me to express good

emotions. I became a flirty, mysterious, and joyous dancer who looked like he was

enjoying life to the fullest- and I was. Dance helped transform me into my happy and fun

loving self again that I was before tragedy struck. That is part of my past and my pain,

and there is know one in this life that escapes this life unscathed. Dance can do this for

anyone and everyone who will simply invest themselves in it.

There is much debate about what kinds of movements should be considered

dance. This to me is one of the most frustrating parts of being a dance major because

everyone has varying opinions. My belief is simple, and I will explain myself after- any

movement done with rhythm is dance, and any movement that expresses true emotion is

dance. I hear people respond to me when I say these two statements all the time with the

following, “So Basketball is dancing then huh?” or, “Then acting is dancing too right?”

Almost every time these statements are said sarcastically, but these people are

overlooking the simplicity of my beliefs. First they don’t understand what rhythm is.

Everyone is born with rhythm flowing through him or her. We live because of our bodies

rhythms- once those rhythms stop, so do we. If a rhythm makes you move, then that is

dance. It’s that unseen force of hearing or feeling a rhythm and having to get up and do

something about it that makes it dance.

As for acting being dancing, my retort to people who tell me that is simply they

are not expressing true emotion. They are aligning their feelings with some outside

character- it is not their own feelings. The greatest part of being a dance major at BYU is

seeing the ownership happen in dancers everyday and every practice. We have

choreographers enter our studios and work spaces and create movement for us. However,

we take it upon ourselves to make the movement ours by putting ourselves on the floor,

literally. We put our own personal emotions into our dancing, regardless of what people

have told us we should be feeling during a dance. We take what they created, and then

make it our own by putting our emotions we wear on our sleeves into it, sometimes our

deepest emotions that no one else knows about. That is what I mean when I say “True

emotion.”

My beliefs concerning dance are simple, yet extremely personal to me. Dance is a

healing and expressing source for our souls, and it can also be found in our movements of

rhythm, and true movement expression. As Martha Graham once said, if you must ask

(about being a dancer), then you are not. Dancers are born this way, and we must dance

till our rhythms stop.