Thanks to Carolina Performing Arts, the public had the chance to take a free class with Lee Ching-Chun, associate artistic director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, and a fellow Cloud Gate dancer. They taught a fusion of tai chi, ballet and martial arts.
Among all my classmates — with their sculptural arms, lissome legs, and dancerly vitality — my neighbor looked at me, smiled and introduced herself. Her name was Laura Bani, and she was a dance enthusiast from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Admiring her airy carriage, I asked if she had formal training.
“No, and I’m glad I don’t,” she said, “because I can dance for my soul. And I don’t have to unlearn anything.”
Presented with such courage and passion, I decided to discard my concerns about my gangly form, lack of training and other excuses. I decided it could be fun.
Class began with disarmingly serene instructions to “relax.” We loosened our arms, wiggled our hands, and bounced in place. The image of limbs flapping like Jell-O made me smile, even if I remained stiffer than the rest.
After we did stretches in a partnered exercise, we learned to kick by slowly lifting our knees, and then striking our feet. It was my favorite exercise — and something that may prove useful for me on the street.
My ultimate lesson was that it didn’t matter that my gnarled double-jointed fingers could not bend into precise, smooth curves and arcs, or that my asymmetric elbow joints, each two centimeters awry, could not mimic the fluid undulations of the professional dancers in the rotation exercises, much less that I was spatially challenged compared to them.
What mattered was each person’s unique kinesthetic relationship with his or her body. The instructors guided me into the universal art of breathing, relaxing, tuning into the wondrous calligraphy of our bodily form and energy.
I left class healthily embarrassed and marveling at the gravity, warmth and kinesthetic artistry of every human body in the lucid, limitless medium of day-to-day air. As Lee said, outside we may appear as statues, but inside we are alive, and we can be any form.
The masterclass convinced me that dance is a democratic expression of freedom and more than just proper form, technique and panache. It is an earth-bound flight, and anyone is free to fly.
See Cloud Gate Dance Theatre perform Friday at 8 p.m. in Memorial Hall.
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