Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

 

– W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition

 

In this session, you are invited not to dance but to be danced. Let go and let your body be danced by desires that spring up from the quietly deep parts of you. Flow like water. Avalanche like a glacier. Crackle like a bonfire. Murmurrate together like a flock of starlings. Be still like the deepest blue lake. We will play with our human bodies, a most wondrous gift to us from 3.5 billion years of life’s evolution.