During my time in high school, dance was always something I found myself coming back to time and time again. At the time, I did it just as an extracurricular activity, something to occupy my free time with. I did it because my best friend did it. She introduced me to belly dancing sophomore year because she loved it and I wanted to be able to share her passion, so ever since then, I became involved in all of the dance performances held at my school. I even ended up becoming a director for a dance crew, but, looking back on it now, I really had no idea what I was doing at all. I didn’t understand the art form, I didn’t understand the music, and I didn’t understand the story. I choreographed moves that looked like they belonged or made sense or just simply matched up to the beat of the music – I didn’t really know dance. I just danced.
I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the Fall for Dance performance as much as I did. I definitely didn’t have a negative bias towards it, as I try to keep an open mind about things, but the performances that night exceeded my expectations completely. There’s something so magical and refreshing about seeing a dance live rather than on a computer screen in the comforts of my own home. The way the auditorium was designed allowed the music to echo through the room in a way that elevated you to a whole new world and the lights were incorporated strategically so that they would emphasize certain parts of the choreography in contrast to others, giving it dynamic.
Every single one of the performances was so spectacular yet so different from the others. The only thing they had in common was the effortlessness and grace the dancers had. There was something so beautiful about the amount of control and precision they executed with every move, and the attention to detail that made the show so seamless from beginning to end. Watching the show, I was absolutely speechless. I could never imagine myself doing anything remotely as spectacular as what they were doing up on that stage, and to think that I had actually directed a dance crew back in high school was hilarious to me. There was so much more to dance that I had failed to acknowledge before and I realized how much meaning a combination of movements could convey to an audience. The stories they told with their bodies, the emotions they evoked, and the feelings that resonated in the room long after the curtains have closed were all part of the performance. Dancing wasn’t just someone moving around on stage aimlessly. There was a bigger purpose, a greater force behind it, and I was finally able to see it that night, sitting in that huge auditorium with hundreds of others in the audience.
My two favorite performances were by Junior Cervila & Guadalupe Garcia and Acosta Danza. They were both couples dancing on stage but they were quite the opposite of each other. Junior Cervila & Guadalupe Garcia were a heterosexual couple doing the tango with each other, while Acosta Danza featured a same-sex male couple doing acrobatic movements across the stage, almost as a reflection of one another, and their bodies were intertwined as if they were telling a love story. It was intriguing and different to see two men dance in the way that they did, because it isn’t very common in our society and it’s against the norm.
