To me, dancing meant intentional physical movement for the purpose of exhibition. It's what people do on on stages when you go see a dance show. To dance through life, then, would be to constantly be putting on an exhibition for people, and that sounds absolutely exhausting. It sounds exhausting and scary because, like all live entertainment (from dance to music to figure skating and ski jumps and whatnot), your final delivery is under complete scrutiny of the audience, and in that final delivery, and all of your hard work could pay off or all go to waste in the blink of an eye. In fact, when I found out that N- and K- were ESFPs, often called "The Performers," I felt a combination of pity and utmost respect that they lived for that kind of pressure.
Okay sure. Maybe the way I've engaged in performing arts in the years leading up to college, that's been the case. Between grade school orchestra classes and private cello or piano competitions, that has been precisely the nature of the performances I've been a part of. I've been assigned grades or scores or the like. There's been winners and losers, first stands and second stands and then everyone else.
It's funny how nicely that analogizes to how many people think about value, where value is defined as what they want. For both value and performance, we construct some system to quantify it that is misaligned with how we should think about them.
For value, we've constructed the system of currency. We quantify value in these monetary ways, and we are encultured to associate economic value with what we want when in fact, what we want is happiness and fulfillment. That's not to say that we should be naive and think that you can be supremely happy having no economic wealth; on the contrary, you'd probably starve to death. But it is to say that, past some threshold, that system falls apart. There is plenty of research that shows that happiness does not continue to grow with income past some threshold. I'd say this actually is consistent across all layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in that, once you're x% satisfied with your security at a particular level, you get diminishing returns in subjective well-being within that category.
I think what's hard to grasp is that layers in Maslow's Hierarchy can actually be contradictory to each other. An obvious example is charity. Charity is often consistent with morality (self-actualization needs) and leads to getting respect by others (esteem needs), yet is inherently detrimental to security of resources (safety needs). You're spending money on something else, how could you!
The problem is that we are taught to address (and, at a neurobiological level, can only comprehend or grapple with) the needs in the bottom-up order in Maslow's Hierarchy. By the time we have the cognitive functions to do abstract thinking (starts at 11-12 years old or so, and finishes developing at 25 or so), we're already so ingrained into thinking about the world with preference on a particular layer. By the time I am old enough to think about my esteem and self-actualization needs, I probably have been taught for 20 years to strive for a high-paying job. If I get a $60000/yr job, aim for an $80000/yr promotion. If I get that, then go for the $100000. At no point am I helped to the realization that continuing to pursue my safety needs are going to get me diminishing returns, and actually inhibit me meeting my higher needs! True value is not actually zero-sum, whereas the metric of economic value is! When you help out at a food kitchen, you could be satisfying your esteem and self-actualization needs while satisfying someone else's physiological needs, for instance.
For performances, we've similarly constructed the system of objective assessment, or at least that's how I had been taught to think about performance. When there are winners and losers, performance becomes just as zero-sum, and the currency is the mechanics or technical prowess. I hated that. I quit cello because I was so frustrated by my orchestra class. In fact, I did this against the advice I was given by counselors and my parents: one of the oft-cited reasons for doing music through middle school and high school seems to be that it helps get into college. How dry is that? It totally sucks away all of the best parts of performance.
Through Liquid Flow, pretty much any way in which we moved our bodies with conviction the instructor considered dance. On the day of our final performance, she gave us all a pep talk before we began the show, and she told us that she loves to perform because it is one of the selfless things. It is not selfish, like trying to make more money, or being the center of attention. To her, it involved inspiring the audience, and whether that was an actual formal audience at a show or a classroom of ragtag students from various walks of their student careers just trying to dabble in dance it didn't matter.
I didn't get it at the time, but I think I finally know what she means. Dance, and performance in general, is an invitation. It is something you extend to an audience, and they can choose to accept or ignore. If they accept, you as a performer and them as the audience form a team in an effort to create an extraordinary experience. As a performer, it's all about what you can do for the audience, how to touch their lives for those short minutes (or hours if you're lucky), and how you can move them emotionally or physically or spiritually.
When it comes to formal shows, the actual "performance" mindset starts well before the actual show; it involves countless hours carefully crafting an experience with the audience in mind, much of which goes unnoticed, culminating in one short-lived but spectacular exhibition. No need to worry about how technically sound your performance is; for them to show up to the show, they've already accepted your invitation, and they're there to help. Case in point: the snapping at Spoken Word when people forget their lines.
To dance through life, therefore, is to constantly live and behave openly in a way where the invitation to create something that defies zero-sumness is always there for someone to take. I think that's exactly how people like N-, K-, people in SBS, Spoken Word, and many people in Gaieties regard performance, whether consciously or not. And when that's what performance is, I love it. I always want to be extending that invitation, and I always want to be around people who will extend that invitation to me, and when I am I always want to accept it.
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Just a housekeeping note. I might have to get surgery in my eye. There's something wrong with the meibomian glands in my right eye that led to the eye infection from a few months ago and the inflammation from late last winter/early spring quarter.
