Using the Wisdom of Dance to Find Our Way Back to Our Bodies - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Festival.Credit...Angelo Silvio Vasta for The New York Times

By Gia Kourlas July 8, 2021

Using the Wisdom of Dance to Find Our Way Back to Our Bodies

What does it mean to watch and move through space, in dance and in life? As we emerge from the pandemic, we still have a moment to hold on to all that’s slow.

Everybody join in: The Illustrious Blacks invited bystanders to participate in a dance at Belvedere Plaza in Battery Park City, as part of the River to River

Somewhere in the middle of April, I started taking up space again in the world, the bigger one outside of my apartment, beyond my neighborhood. Taking up space is a bizarre feeling after a year spent inside. It’s sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying. It’s always strange. As we emerge from the pandemic, we’re not just walking around without masks, we’re learning how to re-enter our bodies. It’s wild out there — meaning the merry, unnerving combination of New York City and lifted restrictions — but it’s still time to hold on to all that is slow. The pandemic, devastating in so many ways, has also been a chance to explore the value of the body and of the everyday, a chance to refocus your eyes, to realize, as the dance critic Edwin Denby wrote: “Daily life is wonderfully full of things to see. Not only people’s movements, but the objects around them, the shape of the rooms they live in, the ornaments architects make around windows and doors, the peculiar way buildings end in the air.”