[sunbug]

Lovely essay, Kristina.

This passage is very true:

“Rhythm in art and in the art of life is essential. Rhythm imprints its patterns into our body, mind, and very souls. This incorporation builds strength and resilience in ways that our everyday cortex awareness is never able to fully grasp. And if it does detect these imprinted patterns, it rarely appreciates them. Rather, our left brain’s general default tendency is to judge, compare, and doubt their worth.”

I can attest to this as a dancer *chuckle.*
The left brain becomes both judge, trickster and interloper and yes “doubter.”
I have rehearsed a dance and sometimes had my mind wander…did I do this or that? Or wonder about something not related to the dance and then the Left Brain says: “Where are we?”
Or it even jumps in the middle of the dance with its doubt and “what is the step?”

The left brain learns steps, or memorizes the choreography that is created, BUT then the Right Brain and the Body Mind take over and say: “I’ve got it from here! And they do!
Unless that pesky left brain jumps in and says “where are we exactly?”

Then the feet can stumble over the steps in that moment of doubt.
Rehearsal is one thing but in performance Oh Dear!

But improv can help with that heh heh.
However I’ve been continually amazed by the “Other Side.”

It does not always let the Left Brain have its way.

I have had other moments where my left brain went into panic where are we mode…and literally FELT my body BOTH the feet and the arms execute the Exact move to the music without my Thinking about it! It just HAPPENS!

One can almost hear the Right brain and Body Mind say “Don’t you dare! Or just Chill! I’ve got this!” (To the left brain.)

You need both sides for the dance but one side eventually takes over.
The body-mind is also capable of retrieving movement memory from numbers performed years before.

(when one might wish to bring a dance “back.”)

It is wild!

And You are so right about the Rhythms Kristina! It is truly imprinted upon us! And inside of us!

That’s what makes memory of words better as well.
The rhythm! There is a kind of rhythm in poetry, but once you have a song, a beat the memory of those words flow!

Does not matter if you are the one who wrote it or are just singing along.

Or even helps all memory in general!

The power of music! The power of rhythm!

Imagine it might go back to the bards and the story tellers of ALL cultures world over.

I still think about Allison’s presentation last year on dance and how she emphasized that dance started on the earth, the ground…that’s where the rhythms began.
So much of professional dancing of all styles is conceived as movement to be performed upon various stages, that it is easy to forget where it began…

Until you look back at the traditional cultures of dance, where dance was also story and ceremony.

Or look at Hamadryad….

Or imagine Isadora Duncan standing by those columns.

Though Isadora might take exception to me from the tap dance perspective where the feet have to move heh heh…

Though I was also trained in ballet and modern.

But it’s interesting reading that passage as well, because I once imagined an Isadora Duncan style move in a tap dance (I sometimes add ballet and modern style to tap.)

The move I chose felt like the arms were lifting and pulling the torso and feet along rather than the other way

Or at least that was the impression I had from watching old videos of Duncan.

So her experience before the columns makes sense on many levels…though it seems there, she feels the energy/dance rising up from the center and torso, up into the arms reaching in “reverence,” from the way she describes it.

When you talk of the underworld Kristina, rhythm as integration makes sense…

I was thinking again of Robert Mirabal’s “The Dance” (which I have yet to post again)

but the last line of the verse is “where there is suffering, there is the dance.”

And I think in the last of your essay that’s what you highlight, how the rhythms can help one or many deal with the dark and light…to find balance. Maybe it’s a way to healing or some wholeness…

Through the rhythms of music and dance or even the rhythms of a paint brush, one finds expression…and release…

Maybe it helps with pain too. And sadness. Frustration. But the rhythm turns it all into Something Else, something, which transcends its original form or perception.

So when people like to have a routine to their day and in their life…maybe what they seek or long for is a Rhythm. Funny how routine looks like a double or triple entendre now! Well I can’t escape that as a dancer any more than Gregory Hines “can’t escape the rhythm” in TAP. Heehee.
But the Rhythm has been with us since the beginning of time and story.
That’s why the Creation tales that begin with song or the song of the universe fascinate me so much…

(song lines, psalms, even Tolkien’s imagined mythic history…universe sung into existence)

Because in all of that there is rhythm as well as sound.

okay better close.

But thank you again for your essay Kristina!