by Beth McMillian

Everyone's got different bodies, different attitudes, and different reasons for dancing, but dance is a language universally spoken and understood. Picture yourself on the on the street in some far-off place. A local saunters by and mummers a greeting. You don't understand the words. What you do understand is the faint smile or wave of the hand that accompanied them. A wave of the hand is a dance in itself. A gesture that says something. That wave, along with the ambling gait of the person you passed on the street, is a tiny window opening between yourself and someone who is willing and able to connect with a stranger. People seeing each other. A little dance.

We dance for each other all the time. It's just not widely noticed.

At REALM danceproject, we don't dance to make pretty pictures. We're not skinny girls with flawless technique. Our moves may have names in Ballet Academy textbooks, but we have forgotten them, selectively. We look straight at our audiences and invite them into our performance. And we talk to them, dancing to our words. In parks, on Sixth Street, in nightclubs, in art galleries, and on sidewalks, people who would not consider frequenting a theatre see us by pure happy accident, effectively ambushed into watching a performance. Even as they pass us by, the time taken to skirt our space becomes a moment not consumed by thoughts of the place they are going to or leaving from. We interrupt their path and their train of thought by being where they did not expect us. Surprising them, maybe, into a direct experience.

By using a collaborative and multi-disciplinary process, REALM danceproject creates what no one person could ever conceive, and we do it regularly. We all have a story, and together we make up another one. We do "this dance thing," and we do it this way because we are interested in our collective story, which is only a part of THE collective story that includes much more than you or I would ever experience on our own. We have things to explore that are outside of our own familiarity or understanding. When someone comes into our creative world with an experience that they explain and a point that we would never otherwise have thought to make and asks us to help them communicate it, it makes all of our understanding a little larger.

Current explorations include a project with adolescents on parole at the Texas Youth Commission (who are writing, choreographing, and designing a performance for April 2001) and a meditation on the F-word (Feminism).

If you want to become involved with REALM danceproject or check out future performances, call Rachael at 467-8157 or email me at realm@ev1.net.