Trust

Hype, the dance company I'm in, is learning this dance that's been around for a couple of years now called Thank You. A duet, it's one of the most choreographically interesting pieces we have in our repetoir, with a lot of weight sharing and interesting shapes. For a long time now, there have only been three of us who knew the dance at all, and each of us knows only one of the two parts, so we finally got around to teaching the rest of the company the piece. Those of us who knew the dance were dispersed throughout the masses, working with different partners. Kyla and I have been dancing this piece together for a couple of years now, but I found myself working with Lindsey, an extraordinarily shy girl, though she's getting better about it now, and I was amazed by the difference it made. I felt her introversion in a very physical way when I found myself not holding any of her weight. She didn't want to trust me. Maybe she did mentally, but her movement gave her away. I will be the first to admit that trusting another human being with your weight can be difficult at first. There is always the fear that somehow you will slip out of their control and land on the floor. The hard thing is that that fear and the reservations that come with it make it more difficult and therefore more dangerous. As the 'base' which others have to learn to trust, we have to make ourselves trustworthy to them. If something does go wrong and start to slip, our duty is to break their fall any way we can, usually by maneuvering ourselves between them and the floor. We are responsable for their well-being. My problem is that, having been a base for so long, I expect too much of others on the rare occasion that I am lifted or supported by others. I am ready to try new, bold, death-defying feats, but we both usually end up on the floor sporting fresh bruises and sometimes full-blown wounds.

You guessed it; it's "unveil the analogy" time again! Just as we have to learn to trust each other physically in dance, so also in life we must learn to trust one another emotionally. Otherwise you will land on your flat rump and won't be able to sit down for a week. This applies to every kind of interaction, be it friend to friend, parent to child, sister to sister, lover to lover, or God to man. Each of these has different rules as to who bears most of the weight.