15: A DANCE MANIFESTO

 
i. Dance to reclaim thinking with the body. Dance to retrieve the unerring compass of your gut. Dance to speak your truth through the static of the world. 
 
ii. Dance to know the marrow of things, of vertebrae, sweat and fear. Dance to not remain a stranger to yourself. Dance to return to the original impulse of life and recognize yourself as the wilderness within. 
 
iii. Dance to undo the toll of traffic and technology. Dance to banish the curse of consumption and cognitive congestion. Dance to stop lying to yourself and to no longer reference the irrelevant in your life. 
 
iv. Dance to reveal and restore, research and resource. Dance to culminate and compensate, clarify and justify.  Dance to declare and differentiate. Dance to reframe and reiterate, re-evaluate and re-calibrate. 
 
v.    Dance for your raw and tender heart. Dance for the humming of your blood, quiet and untamed. Dance for the space between your toes and the space between your thoughts. 
 
vi. Dance to learn humility and resilience from your own flesh. Dance to know your length and width in this world, no less and no more.  Dance to feel your corporeal matter beyond the mirror and beyond the mind. Dance to define your priorities through the roof of your mouth and the arches of your spine. 

vii. Dance to stay sane in an insane world. Dance to not sink in despair about the birds and the fish. Dance to bury the dead and stop scratching at your skin. Dance to not drift asea without a line of horizon and an anchor of reason. 
 
viii. Dance to utilize the potential of your tissues. Dance to meet the longing of your bones. Dance to pour your ferocious capacity into action and production. Dance to not implode, to not wreak havoc, to not create illness. 
 
ix. Dance to expose your heel of Achilles and revel in your mistakes. Dance to roll in the mud and luxuriate in your embarrassment. Dance for your devastation and your loneliness, the texture of your hot burning shame. Dance to kiss every weakness on both cheeks.

x. Dance to tolerate ambiguity and welcome the paradoxical. Dance to relish grappling and scrambling and not necessarily finding. Dance to understand liminality through the pores of your skin. Dance to caress contradiction with the tip of your finger.

xi. Dance to get off the pedestal of your own life. Dance to question identities and risk not relying on your strengths. Dance to track new neural pathways and get off the map of your patterns. Dance to navigate with softer eyes and easier elbows. 

xii. Dance to leap forward and out, not inward and back. Dance to expand your vocabulary of motion and emotion. Dance to stir up your latent abilities and wake up your sleeping synapses. Dance to dance beyond the gestures of your personal pain into a shimmery field of vaster choice.

xiii. Dance to see that everything you have ever done, tried, gained, lost, failed and achieved contributes to your dance. Dance to lean into your edges and stretch out of your comfort zones. Dance for the pure thrill of it, the bursting joy of body in motion, sweaty and temporary and gloriously alive. 

xiv. Dance to know the forces of gravity and grace in equal measure. Dance to know the temple of your body as thoroughly as you can. Dance to bow down and offer up what you can, all that you can, everything that you are, here and now.

xv. Dance to lean into the cycles of life and death. Dance to go from dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Dance to live, dance to flourish and dance to die.

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(c) Anna Seva, 2014. Originally published in "Dance Manifestos" by Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theatre in Tel Aviv, Israel.