Dance Like a Child

Sunday, January 4th, 2025
Facilitator: Ted Riskin

“Babies don’t perform movement — they discover it.”
— Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

From a recent NYTimes article:

Babies and toddlers are un-self-conscious when they dance. They’re spontaneous, present, unconcerned with who’s watching them. This approach brings us back to our own intelligent bodies, our own basic understanding of what it is to be alive.

Do adults perform movement when they dance? They do. We do. We have no choice — we’ve done it before, so each time we dance we’re re-enacting the remnants of every time we’ve danced previously. We try and fail and try again to catch the rhythm; we think about how we’re being perceived. But what a privilege it is to move, even if it’s awkward, to be embodied and expressing and trying to be responsive to a beat, to be more subject and less object.

So much of our movement is just using our bodies like reliable vehicles to get ourselves from one place to another. Dancing is an act of remembering that, once, when we were small, everything was new. Once, we moved our bodies primarily in order to play, express and discover. The more online we become, the farther we drift from our earliest soundtrack, the rhythm that’s in us before we’re born, the basslike thump-thump of our mother’s heartbeat and the oontz-oontz of her circulating blood.

You can watch adults learning from a toddler here and here.

Parents: ask your little one if they would be willing to teach us all some moves during the first several minutes of the wave!