The Community of Dance

I love to dance, and I think everyone does it in their own way. When people ask who is a dancer or has dance experience I always get so sad to see how little hands are raised because dancing does not just have to be a trained art. Alice Sheppard talked about the idea that when someone is talking and there is an ASL interpreter. The ASL interpreter is dancing. I really resonated with this quote because I feel that anyone no matter what can participate in dance. I thought back to the unit on stimming, and I think that stimming is also dancing. A nervous student bouncing their foot is dancing.

It is also so exciting to experience dance secondhand. The audio description from Kinetic Light was so cool. In class last week we were talking about how an audio description gave us more and different insight into the video than just watching the video without audio descriptions. I felt a similar way listening to the podcast hearing the sounds and focusing on them rather than the movement made me appreciate the dance in a totally new way. In my experience with dance classes, they have always been close-minded to the way people look or how they can move. This take on dance seems much more inclusive and aligns with my beliefs about the dance community and how anyone can participate in dance.