International Dance Day message by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

International Dance Day is coming up, April 29th, 2011. Here in BC celebrations are already underway in Golden, Smithers, Salt Spring, Kitimat and Nanaimo, and The Dance Centre in Vancouver has a line-up of activities too.

This year UNESCO's IDD message comes from Belgium's Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker of Rosas:

I think dance celebrates what makes us human. When we dance we use, in a very natural way, the mechanics of our body and all our senses to express joy, sadness, the things we care about.

People have always danced to celebrate the crucial moments of life and our bodies carry the memory of all the possible human experiences. We can dance alone and we can dance together. We can share what makes us the same, what makes us different from each other.

For me dancing is a way of thinking. Through dance we can embody the most abstract ideas and thus reveal what we cannot see, what we cannot name.

Dance is a link between people, connecting heaven and earth. We carry the world in our bodies. I think that ultimately each dance is part of a larger whole, a dance that has no beginning, and no end.

And some video of Rosas, for inspiration: