Who am I?

Who am I?
--- a dancing body

The journey of my life starts with a universal question: ‘who am I?’ I constantly question the identity of being a human social animal wherever I go in life. I seek answers through my body as I move to the patterns of nature. I was around six years old when the question of ‘who am I?’ first arrived at me. My father was a curious young man still, he often engaged in philosophical conversation with me throughout my childhood and teenage years. Often, I had no answer to his questions, hence, I would look for answers in books.

On the crest of the gilded age, Emerson called it the ‘oversoul’, but I like to call it a dancing body. A dancing body seeks truth and supersedes life. A dancing body moves to the  “the parable of the highest things,” as Nietzsche refers to it.A dancing body creates meaning in life, and a dancing body is what Isadora Duncan refers to as the ‘freest body.’ In the year 2020, the echo of these voices still lingering in my ears, I find that I still share these same beliefs as these postmodernists. The tale of Earth, if there is any, is redirecting its story as humans interfere with the laws of nature through genetic engineering, biological engineering, cyborg engineering, and the list goes on. The life that I am living right now isn’t the same as the life that Emerson, Niethech, or Duncan lived. With the acceleration of digitalization in the Covid-19 era, distance learning has become a part of my dance journey. In the middle of a pandemic, I am exploring the means of living as a dancing body. 

 A dancing body remembers the forgotten knowledge derived from our ancestors, a dancing body remembers the stories of the past. A dancing body connects with the self, others, and the environment in which it inhabits. A dancing body inhales collective human memory and exhales its personal experience of life. A dancing body performs what Isadora Duncan calls “the dance of the future, the dance of the past, the dance of eternity and has been and will always be the same.”

I am the dancer of the future, and so are you. We are the dancing body of the contemporary world. Dance comes from life, and to truly understand the means of expressing our life through abstraction of movement, we need to become who we are. To become who we are, we need to delve into the personal experience and reflect historical knowledge. The history of the past is like the reflection of the water to our dancing body, it reflects who we were and where we have been in the time as humans. 

 Twenty years later, my father, the person who introduced me to the concept of ‘who am I?’ isn’t here anymore. And I am still searching for an answer in life as a dancing body. Perhaps there’s never an answer to human identity, but during the process of questioning who I am as a human is to become who I am as a dancing body in life.


References: 
Brown, J. M., and J. M. Brown. The Vision of Modern Dance, Dance Books, 1998.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882, and Freeman & Bolles. Essays. Boston: J. Munroe and company, 1841.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind. Harper Perennial, 2015.
Lamothe, Kimerer L. “‘A God Dances through Me’: Isadora Duncan on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values.” The Journal of Religion, vol. 85, no. 2, 2005, pp. 241–266., doi:10.1086/427315.
Roseman, Janet Lynn. Dance Was Her Religion: the Sacred Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham. Hohm Press, 2004.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and No One. Penguin Books, 2003