Clair Wills on the Joy of Dancing
Clair Wills describes her experiences dancing, how it relates to reading and to art, in an article in The New York Review of Books.
“The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent. It is a process of deciphering—a sort of hermeneutics—and yet there is no secret to be uncovered. Nothing is being expressed except movement, and it is a mute language, empty of hidden extras, empty of enigma. Memory has no work to do, and nothing to work on. Time passes and experience is had, but meaning can attach to it only by a posthumous storytelling, or the frame offered by the language of the predicate.”