One of the greatest challenges for professional dancers is basic survival. On the stage they accomplish the impossible with ease, but their lives are often perplexed with paucity. Few artists make such severe sacrifices. Even at a professional level, dancers must often supplement their meager income with various jobs.
In addition to this, dancers spend hours a day in the most austere spaces imaginable. The dance studio is an empty space, the unadorned interior of a box. Dancers wring their bodies of every drop of sweat to fill those voids with floods of passion, beauty and grace.
Recently I discovered a wonderful site that showcases dancers in New York City, UnderOneDances.com. The site was founded by the dancer Kyla Ernst-Alper. Like every professional dancer, Kyla has spent most of her life practicing and performing. She began rigorous training as a child and joined Ballet Tech at 16.
At this site, dancers perform improvisational or choreographed pieces with New York City in the background. Each piece is brief, around a minute, and could be referred to as “dance poems.”
Each dance poem provides the dancers the opportunity to showcase their art. Dance is a diverse means of expression. There are countless languages of dance. Of these languages, there are myriads of dialects further arrayed with distinct idioms and vernaculars. Then each dance is expressed through the individual personality of every dancer. Each performance is unique and the expressive potential is limitless.
Although it would be impossible to represent the entire range of these dancers in these brief pieces, the audience is exposed to the dancers’ styles and techniques. There are also brief biographies and links to individual websites for each dancer. Through the diversity of the dancers, the audience can find styles that suit their interests or pique their curiosity and then conveniently find listings for performances.
Musicians listen up. This site also offers an excellent collaborative opportunity. The site actively seeks musical compositions for the dancers’ performances.
The settings of the dance poems range from the breathtaking vistas of the Manhattan skyline to quirky urban settings. Not only do these dance poems provide a wonderful showcase for these dancers, one can see how they integrate the settings into their performances. The dancers become part of the scene, their movement shaping a dialog with the surrounding structures and activities where they perform. Through this, they demonstrate how every moment of our lives, within every setting, offers the opportunity for us to transcend any circumstance and dance.
Photo by Greg Haerling
Garrett Buhl Robinson is a poet and novelist. His website can be found at garrettrobinson.us.
