It’s hard not to love Nina Power’s attempt to write a theory of dance:
- Dancers intimidate normal, unhealthy people. Their superior physique and general good health, despite their often casual attitude to smoking and drinking, is infuriating. Non-dance people like to pretend that dance people cannot read books, despite evidence to the contrary, because we have nothing else with which to bolster our sluggish and inwardly weeping egos.
- Embodiment is a curse and a nightmare, lightened only by moments of abandonment, excess and the odd gratuitous sexual event. Dancers move as if this generally recognised truth was somehow unknown to them. I secretly hope all dancers are punished for their lilting, engaging and carefree bodily relation to the world by suffering consistently terrible sex, though I suspect that this is, in reality, unlikely.
The rest are here: ninapower.net/2019/12/15/theory-of-dance/