My Shadow...

A while ago I was watching the Disney Channel (yes I am an avid watcher of the Disney Channel and no I am not ashamed) and I came across something very interesting. Ally (from Austin and Ally - which just so happens to be the worst show to ever exist) was performing a song. I could tell almost immediately that it was a mediocre song and a mediocre performance at best. Then something cool happened. Ally walked over to a white screen and a shadow of a man appeared. The man began to dance, and what did Ally do? She began to dance too. Then she walked over to another white screen and a second dancing shadow appeared. Soon there were 5 shadows on the screen and all were dancing. It was really cool (almost too cool to be on Disney Channel). The cool part wasn't the choreography or the interesting lights, but the shadows themselves. They weren't just in the background they were actually a part of it. Ally wasn't dancing in front of the shadows but with them. What a cool concept right? A tangible thing (Ally), interacting with intangible things (shadows). Though, in the interaction the line between tangible and intangible was blurred. The shadows had a depth and a weight and a texture. They were 3 dimensional. Again, it was really cool. It got me thinking about boundaries. The boundaries between tangible and intangible, concrete and abstract, reality and fantasy. I saw this commercial over a month ago and it has stuck with me. The performance was less than extraordinary but the idea of it really  attached itself to my brain. It's the idea that the boundary between reality and fantasy are a lot smaller than you would think. There's really not so much of a difference other than the way we interpret them. Who's to say that a shadow isn't just as real, or even more so than the thing that produces it. Just because we can't touch something doesn't mean it's fake. Who's to say that the shadows aren't the producers and we are merely the image it creates? I like turning things on their heads like thins. It's like when you think about dreams. What if your dreams were what is real and what you think is your life is actually just  a creation of your subconscious. So this stupid little Disney Channel Commercial made me realize something: you should never merely accept anything in the way it  is supposed to be viewed - even if it seems to make sense. I don't know what I want to do with this yet but I really love the idea of dancing with shadows. Dancing as an art form really inhabits this idea of intangible/tangible, concrete/abstract, reality/fantasy. Other art forms are much more concrete. You either sing the notes of the song or not. You either speak the lines of the script or not. You either paint a stroke on the canvas or not. But with dance it is different. Yes the choreography is the choreography and the steps are the steps but a dancers instrument is their body. Every person's body is different so therefore the choreography will be different on every dancer. There is nothing constant. Like a reoccurring dream, dance is different every time. Even the same dancer can never dance the same piece in the exact same way twice. It always changes. So if it's different every single time than a dance enters that boundary between tangible and intangible, concrete and abstract, fantasy and reality. When you dance you live in that boundary, and that's really cool.