Saturday, September 5, 2009
LIFE IS A DANCE: A TV Series exploring Shanghai’s vibrant Dance Scene
“Life is a Dance.
Sometimes you lead.
Sometimes you follow.
You don’t need to know the steps.
You will learn them along The Way.”
In Shanghai, dance is a great metaphor for life. Things are on the move, stepping to their own rhythm. The city is a cacophony of movement and sound to which we will never know all the steps.
To many, dance is a blueprint to a new life in the city. The noted Webster’s English Dictionary tells us that to dance is “to move in rhythm, ordinarily with music, to move lightly and gaily, to be stirred into movement, as leaves in a wind.”
While many plod through life like the burden is too much to bear—as if it was a meaningless heavy-footed journey, some have discovered that to survive in Shanghai
they need to be stirred into the lightness of life’s movement as they search for meaning in this constantly moving city.
The meaning is in the journey when we are aligned with the course of Nature like the leaves in the wind or a watercourse way. The purpose of life might be nothing more than to fully participate in its dance—to trust that we are a part of its unfolding choreography. Don’t worry if you don’t know all the elaborate steps. Nature will be the teacher. Salsa and Samba are in the sultry southern air you breathe. The Polka and the Jig are for you to skip over crisp cold northern ground.
In bustling Shanghai, the steamy sultry summer is greeted by the hot Latin fire of Salsa and Tango. While Swing, Blues and Jazz bring comfort to the cold winter chill. Through out the year you are never at a loss to experience life as dance.
You do not need to know the steps, you only need to try – “to go with the flow” (as the Daoist would say) and learn along the way. Shanghai is filled with hundreds of outlets for this learning — the learning of Life’s Dance.
In “Life is a Dance,” we explore those being stirred into movement by this city’s dazzling dance scene — From the stylized precision of ballroom dancing, the elegant sensuality of a Tango Milonga, the hot salsa and rambuctious hip-hop, reggae and swing parties to the convulsive mashing at an all-night rave. The contagious revelry even spills over into the city’s parks and sidewalks.
Will engage each of these dancing subcultures on their own turf, on their own terms.
The focus will be on participation, not mere observation, performance or classroom teaching – the musicality of expression as one is stirred to move with the rhythm of the scene, not the mechanics, patterns and routines.
Dancing is not a spectator sport, it is a joyful expression of life to be enjoyed by all.
“We should consider every day lost in which we have not danced at least once.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
David B. Sutton is a human ecologist, biological philosopher, artist and writer with whimsical, evolutionary and earth-centered biases. After a thirty year academic career in the US, he has made Shanghai his home where he indulges, among other things, in his passion for dancing.
He has come to reside in China with a wealth of worldy experience, having been an Army Officer, a basketball player and Coach, a Businessman and a Scientist, a University Professor (for many years) an author and an International Consultant. He has lived and traveled in 50 countries.
Recently, he has been in four movies, in Shanghai as a dancer – the most recent, a Hollywood, Merchant/Ivory film, called “The White Countess” was just released on DVD. He is a frequent visitor to many of the city’s best dance venues.
A dreamer, an old-fashion idealist and romantic, dedicated to the Taoist practice of the “Celestial Knight,” he is quick to say that he feels most alive when he is dancing. It is his opinion that we were built to dance and it is a crime against our nature to not allow ourselves to respond to what our body wants to do when it hears and feels the music’s muse.
In addition to the “Life is a Dance” quote cited above, his business card has this to say,
“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”