I went to the wedding this past weekend where the bride was a Louisville Ballet dancer and many of the guests were her friends from the Company. The bride glided gracefully down the aisle in a perfectly fitted white dress, surefooted and with no performance anxiety whatsoever. She led, without seeming to lead, the first dance with the non-dancer groom. After a couple of we’ve-been-sitting-too-long dances by the rest of the guests, now fed and well-watered from the open bar, something atypical happened.
What happened was that the DJ started playing Abba’s Dancing Queen, and all the young, elegantly dressed, lithe and limber young people formed a flash mob. The men were in suits, the women were in gowns, and this wasn’t a ballet. But the fact that the young revelers were trained professionals shone through. They were precisely in time with the music, and no one took a step back that should have been forward, or a step left that should have been right. But the overriding thing they did was radiate expressivity and joy. Their hands waved above their heads, their faces shone with smiles and with lip synching or actual singing to the song, they took confident, sweeping steps unconcerned about whether they might bump into someone else (which they didn’t).
In the context of this wedding event, it was more than the sum of individual expressions of joy. It was more than an artistic expression of a well-trained corps de ballet. It had two something extras in it: 1) awareness of the bride’s surprise and delight at what seemed like an impromptu performance; 2) love. This love was of a particular kind – it was for the bride. One of their team, their corps, was marrying her long-time love. Upon inquiry later I found out that the dancers had stayed late into the night, after their rehearsals for Cinderella, when they must have been already exhausted, and planned this dance for her. They loved the bride, their fellow corps member, and their celebration of happiness and hope in her life was both for her and for more than her – it was for love, happiness and hope overall. Correction: it WAS love, happiness and hope embodied.
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