Dance celebrates, heals, mourns, and brings joy and emotional release. It fills gaps our tongues and cultural differences cannot bridge. It creates new communities and strengthens old ones. It carries history and transports culture from mother, father, aunt, and uncle to child. It is a way of remembering our roots and anchoring those who come after us to those roots. It embodies values. It invites, and sometimes forces, us to see ourselves and the places we inhabit differently. Dance has been used to entertain, confront, distract, plead, protest, flaunt, and bully; to build up and tear down. The one who dances possesses a breath-taking power and staggering responsibility, because dance only exists where dancers do. Where do the dancers exist? Everywhere. Wherever there are people, there are dancers among them. We dance because we are human, and dancing is inescapable. It is intrinsically part of us: dance is art, and so are we. Essayist Lewis Hyde writes, “Those who are gifted should give something back.” Art is a creation and a gift, and as ourselves works of art, we have been called to create and to gift, regardless of ability, origin, life stage, or worldview.

Being gifted with the passion for dance is one thing; honing the gift into a craft is another. Mastering the ability to say something brilliant and arresting with our bodies requires time, focus, practice, perseverance, sacrifice, joy, and hope. In my journey as an artist, I commit to honing the gift given to me by creating and portraying work that makes people examine themselves and the world differently. I commit to brave work which brings people together instead of driving them apart. Work that uproots only to anchor, tears down only to build up. I commit to reflecting critically on how dance communities and the stories we tell through dance affect the societies we belong to. Why all this? Because dance is ours. It is mine, too. My power, my responsibility, my gift to those I love, and those I hope to grow to love.