Just managed to ‘sell’ dancing to my loyal Pilates client who has just gone into 14 days quarantine in a hotel room so that he can keep his bodymind sound. Pilates is very helpful but dancing (moving freely searching for ‘feel-good’ moves and postures) goes far beyond it and touches the soul, in my experience. Well, they just have slightly different purposes although there is overlap. Pilates gives a client ‘am I doing right?’ questions all the time because as its nature each exercise is a given movement. While dancing belong to the person and there is no right or wrong. The most uncomfortable thing to happen is that the person has no idea what to do and feel lost. And it is not even a bad thing. That itself is an experience.
I have been experimenting slotting in a short moment of free movement exploration within Pilates sessions, and I feel great joy witnessing a client start discovering more varieties of movement. And also how each client moves in their unique way. My personal belief is that everyone should be dancing especially in this restricting disorienting unsettling time. Feel lost, feel uncoordinated, feel disoriented, feel out of breath, feel the ground, feel the flow, feel the strength, feel yourself, being serious, being funny, being sad, feeling connected, finding joy… All these experiences are in dancing.
I am increasingly curious how I could open up these myriad of feelings in clients’ experiences.
Katsura Isobe 