So here's another:
2.
I attended a university dance recital the other night and truly enjoyed it. I don't often have the opportunity to watch dance, or rather I don't often take that opportunity. It's not something I grew up doing, even though we had the ballet almost in our back yard. My parents weren't really interested in dance, nor in the symphony. And sometimes old habits stick.
As a result, I'm ashamed to admit I can rarely identify a piece of classical music. But I can pick up just about any Broadway show tune from the 1960's anywhere in the middle and finish it off for you, complete with words and orchestration. Which tells you a lot about my childhood.
It could also explain why dance has always felt slightly elusive to me. Many of my childhood friends danced. I wanted to, but was directed toward writing and music instead. By the time I got old enough to insist on trying some classes, I was too old to really excel. The other girls my age already had a decade head start.
Anyway, now whenever I get lucky and smart enough to take the opportunity to watch dance, I still find myself thinking, "Ah...dance! As an art form! Why didn't I think of that?"
Anyway, at this particular recital we got a few numbers into the program when a piece began that suddenly had me under its spell. It pulled me in completely and I couldn't look away. The costumes, the staging, the movement, the music, all combined to create a story I felt I'd read before. Or thought of. Or dreamed about.
Or lived.
After a few minutes my sister, who was sitting next to me, leaned over and whispered, "What was this one called?" And I said, "That's exactly what I was just trying to remember."
Because I was. I'd looked at the program at the beginning, but I didn't remember the name of this piece even though it was the one that had brought us to the recital in the first place. We knew the choreographer and had come both to support her and to experience her work.
I somehow got the impression my sister wondered about the title because she had the feeling the piece was about her. Meanwhile, I was thinking it was all about Me.
I saw things in it that I recognized. Things that felt true. There were places where I imagined I could have climbed up on stage and moved in the same ways, stepping seamlessly into the narrative sway as if I'd been dancing those steps all my life.
At intermission, I begged the choreographer to tell me everything. I had to know what that dance was actually about, what had inspired her to tell my story.
She was a bit taken aback, I think. She hadn't expected me to react to it on the level I did. But then in my creative experience, I've learned that it's hard for an artist to anticipate the ways in which her work will connect, or fail to do so, while she's creating it.
We just fling it out into the world and hope that someone--anyone--throws something back.
I learned that the piece was about her older sister who had died during their childhood. Specifically about the moment when her father called to tell the siblings of the death.
It was about a moment at a kitchen table. With her family. A specific, awful moment she could never forget because it changed everything that came before, and after.
Of course.
So it was about me after all. And probably you.
The whole experience reminded me that art, real Art, is pretty easy to recognize. It is that thing living behind whatever story an artist is busy telling. I'm not sure the artist can put it there, they can only build something and hope Art shows up and decides to move in, bringing the thing that, when we see it or hear it or read it or experience it, needs no further explanation. The thing that makes us say, "Me too."