Dance Politics

A few weeks ago, Tara Parker-Pope wrote a jazzing story in the New York Times that she called "Dance Even if Nobody is Watching." It was a short piece with that most-delicious, invigorating, tears-for-happiness Matt Harding youtube at its heart (you haven't seen it? you have to see it. click on the link below). Parker-Pope's story was short and it was definitive: Dance for joy. Dance for your health. (Thank you, Denise Cowie, for sending the story on.)

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/dance-even-if-nobody-is-watching/?ex=1216526400&en=7286a589f5b04fb3&ei=5070&emc=eta1

This morning, I got all caught up in another superior story about dance, and I share it with you here; I encourage you to read in full the essay by Philadelphia dance choreographer Rebecca Davis, who went to Rwanda to teach orphan boys to dance and who emerged from her month in that genocided land with a question I hope she won't mind my repeating: If an exchange of dance moves can transcend barriers of language, race and age, couldn’t dance also play an important role in rebuilding an individual, a family or perhaps even a nation? The boys Davis met could dance, oh, they could dance. They were orphans. They had been stolen from—the very worst kind of stealing. And yet, inside the frame of their dancing, there was joy, there was heart, there was healing.

http://www.broadstreetreview.com/article.php?idc=5&ida=985

Dance as politics, Davis suggests. Dance as medicinal, a salve.

I'll vote for that. I will cast my ballot for the politician who casts a gaze out upon the gathering crowds, who sees people there, yearning people, not just voters, and who sets aside his or her rhetoric for a song turned up loud. For the politician who bows to the exultant, bonding gift of dance.