On surrendering

For more than a year, I’ve been attending a dance practice in Dartington, UK, which has become my regular playground for letting my body move with abandon.

We dance for almost two hours in a mix of stillness, sublime music, precise words, interactions with others, and, at moments, drawing.

To one side, we have a long white sheet of paper and boxes of colours to draw with, playing with lines and shapes. It’s amusing, and often amazing, what is created there.

It's wild, free, and childlike all at once. The figures drawn can be seen as a metaphor for the dance floor – where a mysterious force is at work, drawing us in with an unseen hand.

No other dance appeals to me. I could be in that space for hours on end, every day, at any moment. It would make me jump on a plane to land in it.

In that space, our movements feel like lines on a canvas: we move obediently, our bodies trusting in something greater than ourselves.

I have learned to recognise a dance that is not that. It exhausts me very quickly. I see it when my mind begins to wander, my soul is nowhere to be found, and my movements feel aimless and adrift. I've been there many times—self-conscious and disconnected from rhythm. It's as if I'm just a body bumping into others, clumsy in my execution.

The dance I love is clear and infused with beauty.

You can sense it in the conversation below, recorded a few years ago with Alla Petcheniouk, an experienced tango dancer. For the first time, we've agreed to share it publicly.