By Eric Valentine
I took a dance history course in college. On day one, the first thing my professor said was: “Dance is the splitting of time, with movement.” So perhaps dancers feel life a little differently, and I envy their ability to show it off.
I’ve been following a handful of them lately on social media, including one dancer who cut through the clutter and captured my attention several months back: Makenzie Dustman.
Makenzie is an emotive dancer and her athleticism is nuanced, not Lebron-esque. She and her boyfriend, Phillip Chbeeb, choreograph and perform in Justin Bieber’s new release, All Around Me. The setting is minimal—just two gray walls and a dark floor. Their wardrobe is disheveled and torn. Their dance is beautifully messy, an intertwining of arms and legs, catapulting off floor and wall and each other. It reminds me how some of us must look and feel right about now.
Makenzie lives and works in L.A. but has been isolating during the lockdown in Texas, apparently with family, making the most of her newfound prison of free time. The other day she said, “As weird as it is to hear myself say it, I’m totally OK with not caring about dance right now.”
How many of us have heard the opposite message of late? I believe she’s stumbled on the power of surrender, the disintegration of the ego, the feeling sentient beings usually don’t uncover until death. A literally self-less experience of love.
Surrender is something our culture and our life instinct tell us not to do. But scripture does. The word Islam means “surrender” and in the New Testament, Romans 12:2, it says “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will know God’s will.” And the Old Testament, from Ecclesiastes, “There was a man all alone. There was no end to his toil, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth. ‘For whom am I toiling,’ he asked, ‘and why am I depriving myself of joy?’
Women who have experienced childbirth have told me it’s when they surrendered to the pain that it went away and their child was finally born. It’s like sacrificing one’s self might be the only way we live truly free. Christ didn’t save us while he was preaching, he saved us—so the doctrine goes—when he was nailed to a tree. Talk about taking one for the team.
So consider the possibility that your greatest dance is when you are splitting time, without movement. No need to wait for orders from the CDC. You can find endless, self-less love in that choreography, with astonishing ease.
Rest up if you can, dear friends, and watch less become more.