Towards Balance: The Story of the World According to Yin & Yang

My dance company - The Goddess Dancing - just held our annual show this past June.

In the show, we debuted our latest choreography "Towards Balance: The Story of the World According to Yin & Yang"

I was inspired to create this dance after taking a class in Delsarte technique with Joe Paul Williams.

Delsarte technique is a method of expression which among its attributes, describes universally understood body postures and gestures that express Body, Mind and Spirit. As a very simplified example, an uplifted head and outward palms express Body, a forward tilted head and edges of the hands express Mind, and the steady level head position and backs of the hands express Spirit. Joe shared with us that while Body and Mind represent opposites in varying degrees along a continuum, Spirit is always the perfect balance point between the two.

This got me thinking about balance and YinYang and how out of balance our world is right now...
And so, this 3-part dance was created.

Part I takes place in the earliest civilizations - a "body" time - when survival depended on lots of physical work such as hunting, gathering, planting and birthing. Movements used in this section were primarily circular. The "Yang" dancers perform with their backs to the audience.



In part II we see the rise of the Patriarchy - a "mind" time - with it's great exchanges of ideas, formation of governments and male-deity religions, the building of structure and infra-structure, and struggles for power. The dance movements in this section are primarily linear and staccatto in quality, and this time it is the "Yin" dancers who face away from the audience.



And finally, part III takes us to a future time where we have come back to Spirit - to balance. This part of the dance opens with a short Tai Chi sequence and continues with dance movements comprised primarily of undulations. We see the Yin and Yang dancers relating to each other, moving in and out, toward and away, in a continuous motion of give and take...