The arts are all about choice and expression of voice, right? But dancers very strictly train their technical ability, and whilst we do learn performative skills and improvisation, these things develop later on. I certainly didn’t experience these before studying dance at university.
A personal struggle for me – admittedly, that I’m still trying to develop – was finding my own movement identity, knowing my own style and being confident in my ability of that. I think this stems from the amount of techniques that dancers study to develop our training and regularly being told right from wrong. It can be formulaic and almost robotic. Further, until I started witnessing more variations of contemporary dance I didn’t even consider what movement could be beyond the its technical, very skilful, capabilities.
A few pivotal lectures throughout university have been key in discovering my own personal development and discovering this identity/individuality/freedom. For me, it comes from the feeling of being so immersed and totally letting go that I didn’t give myself chance to question what I was doing, and instead I found a natural rhythm that felt comfortable in my body. It’s very stereotypical for a dancer to say that they love the expression or ability to let go and be somewhere else that dance allows them to experience, but this is something that has never particularly resonated with me. Personally, I find that it is the internal re-energisation, weightlessness and satisfaction you feel when you just do you and let your body find natural ways to continue that is beyond exciting; this is the reason I keep on dancing.
We have such a luxurious platform to be truly ourselves and I think it is really important to encourage finding individuality and freedom within movement earlier than we currently do. Finding our identities as humans first, and then as dancers and being totally confident within this is surely how we satisfy ourselves and feel content. Then, where you decide to explore next opens up endless opportunities for self discovery.