Dance is not a metaphor

Nataraja by Barbie Robinson

How many times have we seen the metaphorical statement that life is a dance? Or that somebody’s words dance on a page? Or where more directly people will say they danced but mean that in a metaphorical way? Dance is ubiquitous in our evocative experience of Reality. Yet, it never really becomes more than a metaphor or a representation.

I (too) often hear people saying, I do not dance. And they say it with some outrage as if to be expected to dance is a frivolous assumption. Dance is not serious. Unless it has a therapeutic purpose. Or fitness benefits. Or it entertains.

We never really consider why so many ancient traditions centralised dance as the language of their archetypal and ritual wisdom. We never pause to consider why Deities, shamans and mystics danced. We look at sculptures from the ancient past holding archetypal movements that seem to have universal “meaning” but we do not feel a dance-led intelligence might be important in investigating the significance of those meanings.

I recent watched the Netflix documentary, “The Cave of Bones” which is the story of the discovery of how a “non-human” species may have practiced rituals about 300,000 years ago. The scientists pondered about gatherings with song and drawing, but not one of them thought of dance. Yet the cave is the archetypal space of ancient dance invocations in cultures across the world.

I come from a culture where a dancing Deity has been invoked as the expression of Reality. Nataraja, or Dancing Shiva, is one of the world’s most sophisticated offerings of dance as the intelligence of Reality. Today we mostly speak of His dance as representative of a cyclical movement of Reality of life/creation/birth and death/destruction/ending.

However, when we dance Nataraja’s dance, the vastness of dance as the intelligence of Reality is immeasurable. It is a paradigm that is not referential to verbal translations. One must attend to how the dance here is about itself just as the verbal languages are about their own cosmos. We have been conditioned to transforming our experience into the cosmos of words and assume that this is the only meaning-making option.

I once gave a lecture-demonstration about my work to a group of eminent scientists in India. Before the talk I was told they would be an unsympathetic audience who would not “understand” dance. I began my presentation by inviting them to listen with their hearts. I told them that asking me to speak “about” dance was the same as asking them to dance their scientific work. They accepted my invitation, and it was one of the best audiences I have ever had.

When dance is about itself, the cosmos is of Rasa or sensation. In this cosmos, the heart is the mind. Indeed, in many ancient texts the word for mind is used in the sense of heart. Rasa or sensation is of the heart and a Rasika, or experiencer of Rasa, is sahrudaya or of the same heart.

To navigate such a cosmos, we must lead with Body. This is not our usual mind narrated Body, but the archetypal Body that mirrors the Rasa nature of Reality. This is a cosmos where plurality is the essence, and community is amongst all life rather than a tribal belonging.

And here is where I start to struggle with words because the rest must be danced.

Dance turns the world upside down. And we discover that upside down is the right side up.