I started sobbing the other day in Sabrina’s class. I was learning how to move my arms. And I wasn’t getting it. Maybe I just needed to cry. Maybe it was the beauty that broke me--that adherence of clumsiness to finite and infinite beauty was spellbinding, horrifying, and brutal at the same time. The exactness and precision of the line itself and the passage of the line in motion; it is breaking space within space, reworking it, shaping air, flesh, and bones, incorporating sculpted air into your body. It begins with resistance, creating a resistance against your body so strong that you screen out all possible options except the one. The one thing of beauty: a beautiful shape that continues to renew itself within space, time, memory, and existence. A shape that holds presence, character, nobility and pure, unadulterated strength, intelligence, diligence, and discipline. These are the lessons of our lives.

To dance is to speak in the language of images: to speak with abstract articulation, precision and eloquence. This is the language that you never learned how to speak, but find yourself speaking, hoping someone will understand what your limbs have to say. To dance is to walk with failure lingering at your heels, ready to take your arm when you are not wary, an ever eager partner waiting to whisk you offstage and out the door, an unwelcome stalker. But I tell you: do not dance with failure waiting to embrace you in the wings, because failure is external and success comes from within, tucked intricately into the folds of carefully constructed organs and sculpted muscle fibres, in the mitochondria of every cell. Call them to arms and integrate your body into one organ made up of many parts. In dance, you must frame every movement in time and space, within and without so that you will never be caught in the flat death of a two-dimensional plane. To move is to create illusions of truth, truth through illusion; create infinite depth, length, extension, and suspension. At the end of every no, at the utmost end of every road, there will be a yes, a path that leads to the beginning of the next extreme, so that the more your drive your ribs down, the more your sternum will rise to the light; the beginning of presence, the exposition of heart, hence soul, spirit given forth beneath light, shadow--sharing.

That day, I was realising the utter loneliness of every moment. I think that’s what made me cry. If you want essence, which was what was going on, you will have strain everything through the sieve with every ounce of strength you have in your body. Otherwise, it’s not enough. It is absolute simplicity, an unbending, uncompromising simplicity that has the power to break through every thing you hold dear, everything you have ever known or thought you knew. It is mind-boggling, beautiful and breath-taking. It is purification. Simplicity is the act of purification, of erasing wayward lines, superfluous bits and pieces that distract from the core of existence of being. As you push through every barrier that impedes the expression of simplicity, you are wandering through thorns on your own. When you walk out on the other side in rags and tatters, you will see the truth on the edge of the cliff, but you will be standing alone with no riches, no status, no recognition, only the knowledge that you have surpassed the temptation to give up sustains you and you will be radiant. Only then will you be able to fall; fall to the depths of the mountain’s craggy surface to discover the pockets of softness and suspension that will catch you in your disciplined abandon. This is integrity. This stripping away of every material comfort, every vestige of all that is human, social, economic; the core of humanity. Be forewarned; your body will betray you. You will be deceived. You will stumble, thirst and cry out. But the path is ahead, the sky above, the earth below. I challenge you: walk.

I cried because it was real. Because I felt real. Because everything was gone and I had only myself; I had to face myself, where I was that day, that second, at the end of it all, at the end of failure, and the beginning of comprehension.