International Dance Day Message 2020

My Fellow Dancers, don’t forget what we have in us how it feels to get down and to soar to laugh and cry with our bodies and how we can physically speak in ways even poetry can’t don’t forget touch and what it feels like to sync with other bodies harmonize breath to take up …

The post International Dance Day Message 2020 appeared first on Decidedly Jazz Danceworks.

My Fellow Dancers,

don’t forget
what we have in us

how it feels to get down and to soar
to laugh and cry with our bodies
and how we can physically speak in ways even poetry can’t

don’t forget
touch
and what it feels like to sync with other bodies
harmonize breath
to take up space
to embody music
the deliciousness of becoming those beats, that riff, that groove

how history lives through us
that our blood, muscles and bones carry deep knowledge
that we are alchemists, inventers, shape shifters

how watching us move can change how people think, feel, live
that many envy us
the richness of our lives, what burns in us
as we do not sit idle
but when we do, we can express a 500-page novel with our little fingers

know that in whatever comes, we will be looked upon for comfort and solutions

don’t forget
to keep listening
to whatever lights that fire
your pulse, wind, white noise, jazz music

to trust our ancestors
real and imagined
that through war and famine
through enslavement and desolation
through thick and thin
dance has survived
it will always be ours

to confide in that elusive in the moment magic we have in us and always will
in how we walk
how we hold our heads
and in my circles, how we can’t help but to respond to music

please don’t forget
this thing we have
in this moment
it may be contained
it may be resting
but it’s in us and it will rise again

 

 

 

 

Kimberley Cooper
Artistic Director
Decidedly Jazz Danceworks

 

Read all the Alberta Dance Alliance official Dance Day messages 

The post International Dance Day Message 2020 appeared first on Decidedly Jazz Danceworks.