I'm A Lady, I Side Saddle

Forget about everything you thought you knew about dance. Lets start from scratch.
After 4 long years I am finally a graduate from The Juilliard School, an enterprise that when people ask me: "How was Juilliard!?" I can only answer with one word: "Demanding"
Growing up in Miami, I was not exposed to the kind of dance that is upheld in cities such as New York. My interactions with people my age went down a little something like this:

Papi at a club: So what you study in New York?
Me: I study dance
Papi at club: Daaaaammmnnn...Like Honey and Shit?
Me: Not really, its more of concert dance
Papi at club: oooooh so like dat movie with the white chik doing ballet but then she meets the black dude and then makes dance hott?....Dats hott...
Not to say that dance in popular films such as Save The Last Dance and Step it Up aren't valid, they are, and sometimes they are more successful than other forms of the craft. Coincidentally, TV shows such as FOX's So You Think You Can Dance has done a lot for the art in terms of reaching out to a greater mass, yet has transformed and sometimes limited the idea of dance to the viewer.

Dance's many facets allows it to continue to reinvent itself and never be tamed. As the original moving image, dance upholds similar freedoms found in film, such as time and visual content. Like film, dance possesses the wonders of a frame, instead of the camera directing the viewer's eye, physical movement allows for us to be directed in the frame of a theater. Kubrick was said to be a great choreographer in his own right (ok, maybe only by me, but it was said). The element of time is important in both film and dance, there is a progression and simultaneous experience, whether narrative or non-linear, that one can identify with in their own lives and memories.


Denys Drozdyuk in "The Impossibility of Death in The Mind of The Living"
Mandra DanceProject








THE MISSING LINK!
The part of dance that most cannot connect to is the physical experience of movement in dance. The first dancers and choreographers were the original Shamans (generally part of the Native American culture, Shamans are intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds. According to believers, they can treat illness and are capable of entering supernatural realms to provide answers for humans). In order to reach this "supernatural realm", Shamans would repeat one movement, with the consistent beat of a drum until the repetition propelled them into another world, of course the hallucinatory drugs were always a plus in pushing this process along.
The idea of the body moving in a way that is different from our everyday efficient needs boggles most minds, even mine sometimes. The truth is that our bodies are made to be quite limitless, and when those limits are truly explored one feels a similar metaphysical experience found in the Shaman healers of the past.
It is hard to see beyond the mundane sitting in a chair, walking to work, laying down to sleep, or even working out at the gym. But when one does, one finds movement that can, strangely enough, satisfy a a very specific human experience. This is beyond intellect and anatomy, this is unexplainable, thus, the inaccessible nature of dance for most......


Yara Travieso and Chen Zielinski
in "La Patria: A Dripping Eulogy"
Mandra DanceProject