The Dance

Algonquin traditional dancer

One of the fundamental dimensions of our commitment to justice in the world is that of integrating the various elements of ourselves in that struggle. The practice of Aboriginal people could be helpful here. We begin with a celebration of life and thus a deep engagement with life: all life, all the life around us, all the life that sustains us and of which we are an interdependent part. When Aboriginal people gather there is always dance. Dance is central to the engagement with life.

Dance involves three dimensions.

There is first of all the music that flows through our bodies and touches our heart. Music energizes. It is central to all social struggles and our capacity to engage with music in our struggles and our gatherings is therefore of great importance, as so many social struggles have shown. 

Along with music there are words, usually very poetic words. Words are important; they engage also our minds. They call us to critical thinking, to getting our heads around the complex dynamics at work in society; the words help us name things as they are and to discover what needs to be done.

Most of all we need to integrate our minds and our hearts. There are, in Aboriginal culture, two ways of knowing: that of the mind and that of the heart. We can know with our mind, we can develop analyses. We can know with our heart and let our heart lead us. However, in Aboriginal thinking knowing, whether of the mind or of the heart, does not become an engaging truth until the two, mind and heart, are integrated. From that integration flows a purity and simplicity of mind and heart that is very powerful.

Music has words but eventually we have to dance: to move our feet, to locate ourselves in face of the struggle and to engage our bodies. Without that we have only pious intentions. Ultimately it is the integration of mind, heart and feet that make the dance as it is also the mind, heart and feet that makes us social actors capable of changing society.

There is also a pedagogy to the process of this integration: We begin by standing up, placing our feet beneath us, standing on the ground where the struggle is happening. We stand together and we begin to listen to the music until it touches our heart. If we do not love, we cannot act. If we are not moved in our hearts, we will never dance. Then, as the music beings, we hear the words, we sing the words, we make those words our own. Through the music we begin to feel the power and truth of those words. We allow the music and its words to sink into our bodies until they reach our feet and we begin to move – together. A movement is born.