To be a dancer

Dear reader,

When we say she is a dancer, what do we mean? Do we mean someone who dances? What does it mean for someone to dance?

What does it mean for someone to choose to spend hours, days, months, years, and decades of their life on the practice floor? For that’s what it takes to be a dancer — your body is your instrument, and you practise and practise till the soles of your feet are hardened, skin callused, and every muscle trained and honed to move.

What does it mean to train and hone every muscle in your body such that it has recalled and memorised the way it was meant to move? Yes, recalled, for even before we could read and write, we moved. In the rock caves of Bhimbetka, our palelolithic ancestors drew themselves dancing. It is this ancient tacit wisdom a dancer recalls, refines, and reimagines that in witnessing them, we are moved too.

What does it mean to wield that eldritch power, the power to connect to, commune with, and move another human being? A dancer melds music, mood, movement, and meaning and maps it all into an emotive landscape inscribed on her body, and in that moment a dancer births magic.

Upeka Chitrasena – Photo by Lukshmanan Nadaraja

What does it mean to make magic? We are held in a trance, as her limbs arc through space, challenge time, for time too stands still, enchanted, wanting to linger on, just a moment more, to bear witness, for it is a rare magic, you cannot recreate it. It exists for that moment, and for that moment only.

To be a dancer is to battle with time.

To be a dancer is to witness the dance of time on your own body. The relentless hours of practice are not enough to push time away. Gritting your way through agony and ache is not enough. You are reminded constantly that you are made of sinew over skeleton, cartilage and change.

To be a dancer is to not just know when to submit to time, but to know when that pause will arrive, and to choreograph that moment artfully. To be a dancer is to then take a bow with such grace that the arrow of time too bends into a fulfilled circle.

Happy 75th birthday, Upeka. Your life is a testament to all that dance is, and perhaps, can be.