Dance Culture?

Quite apart from any issues around recording music, I have yet to experience being financially valued as a musician in the network except by a few. Part of this is - I feel - because recorded music has devalued live relationship in music. In a switch on and click world, predictability and perfection of form, reliability and controllability of outcome, have to a very large degree replaced live music as a culture. Not unlike the drum machine often replaces the drummer in the band these days.

I might add that I frequently - if not normally serve musically to move dancers at a deeper level than merely 'doing the tune' - and have no sense of being devalued personally. (ie unappreciated). Perhaps there are other issues with the Teacher of the steps not being in the same role or position as with a recording. A live option is not a product that can be gotten legally or illegally - that can then be in the teacher's tool-belt - and doesn't contribute to their 'livelihood or income'.

For my part, I feel to accept that the world I live in values things over relationships, but that I choose to live differently regardless - because I feel relationship itself is the Ground of Meaning that all else finds its place in. To the 'getting mind' a relationship is merely something to get from or make transactions of mutual getting. I say this is for-getting!
To the getting mind, the point of relationship - our now - is a fleeting experience - easily dismissed or disregarded in the culture of mutually agreed definitions that serve to validate and reinforce the essential and active motivating values that underlie our activity.
But the difference - as far as I see it - between dance as a healing, renewing and unifying cultural expression, and of dance as a another part of the marketplace of getting something for oneself either privately or in mutuality of private interests - is ALL the difference.

I am not advocating sacrificial relationship - but I am advocating an openness and generosity of spirit in the context of a larger culture - within which a greater sense of value is shared.


Our larger society and our world has been and is being systematically asset stripped culturally and ecologically, through a mentality of divide and rule - often hidden in promise of personal benefits at the expense of others, or of ownership of key elements of supply.  I don't feel it is just the climate that is changing, but of unavoidable exposure to re-evaluation of the values by which we live.

Law IS vitally important as the embodiment of, and maintenance of, the values of Life- but human made law is not always serving the interests of the whole. The concept of wholeness is absent from the market minded approach. But the market has a legitimate function as a service and expression of the health or wholeness of our society.

Until wholeness is awakened as our own living expression, the problem always seems to be that others fail to live as we think they should - and who really expects that to ever work except in fantasy?  Without real communication, communication itself is lost to the attempt to manipulate or coerce personal outcomes. There are no real winners in a battle of wills - as surely every parent knows!
And while judgement and blame are atmospherically active, who would come out and share what is really in the heart - whether it was reactive from a sense of injustice or even if it were responsive to the wellbeing of the greater good.
So, for my part, I see no renewal of nor sharing of a truly human culture while blame and shame are employed as meaningful concepts. I am quite ok with waking up to that I hurt myself by acting selfishly and feeling remorse and a change of heart - but not with being coerced thereby.

Nothing is as tricky and deceptive as our minds. Every so often this truth comes home to us all in very humbling circumstances. But such also offers the fresh root of an Innocent perspective.
At risk of losing my readership, I feel to finally note that the mind uses 'recordings' or images of self and reality, as substitutes for living relationship - and gets lost in the own spin of its own story.

The culture of honouring and bringing ourself present in Life - in our relational Now - is not a fleeting moment - but is the context of every moment. So even the recording of something that you have danced and heard a thousand times can smite you with its beauty afresh. BUT do we cultivate this? Or do we use technology to insulate ourselves from Life's Wholeness, and fall for an ever more dissociated dream of a life?

In Life, the word 'should' doesn't hold meaning as an imposition - but simply the honesty of our heart's desire. In mental shenanigans, we have all sorts of resistances to owning our heart's desire - and are afraid of it!
Education, education education!

(I trust that some humour is evident in what is also genuinely felt in this posting)

in Love's blessing
Brian