I was a ballet dancer from kindergarten to first grade, fourth grade through my freshman year of high school, a gymnast for the remaining three years and now I am a member of Miami Ballet Corps. In some way or another, dance has had a huge impact on over half of my life. Dedication to any passion in such a way would shape any individual. But it wasn't until I started taking dance classes again in college that I realized something weird: dance helps me to be a better writer.
Almost any dancer can attest to being guilty of choreographing dances in their head. When I have trouble sleeping at night, I put on my headphones and fall asleep imagining choreography to go with my music. Much like the lyrics and/or tempo of a song tell a story, dance conveys a message too. It's conveyed through expressions, positions, lines, angles and movements. Everything has meaning in the grand scheme of the piece and the heart of the music; look at all the movements together, and there's a bigger picture. When I dance, I am telling a story. When I choreograph, I am writing one.
Dance and writing are both the art of expression: what are you trying to express, and how are you going to get an audience to see it? In her essay "The Diction of Dance," Wendy Lesser writes, "Like poetry, choreography speaks to us about the familiar, but in a way that makes us see it anew. The materials, in both cases, are part of everyday life (speech, movement), but these materials need to be transformed in a way that makes them more than merely a documentary. So a certain level of stylization...is required in both art forms for them to be art forms...It is a certain vocabulary of movement which insists that the body can tell stories and render emotion more truly even than the voice—not through miming or sign language, but by arriving at particularly poignant or stirring gestures that emphasize their meaning through repetition."
Beyond stylistically, dance has affected the content of what I write. As a creative writing major, I'm writing different things all the time. Many times I've been inspired to write something based on experiences I've had or the people I've met through ballet, or even try to spin stories from pieces and songs I've performed in. The openness and freedom of dance has also made me more open to and amused by the genre of poetry, something many people tend to shy away from.
The fact that I am a dancer and a creative writing major aren't two separate, unrelated parts of who I am. I am not a writer and a dancer: I am a dancer who writes and a writer who dances.
