My life and my art are about embodying the "fleeting moment" that is inherent to dance: the moment that makes people feel alive in the act of creativity. Two years ago I embarked on a journey of a lifetime with Dancing Around the World when I visited 19 countries to take dance to the people, but also to discover why people dance. In each location we created site-specific performances with local dancers to make it more accessible to people, and we documented the experience through short videos, interviews, and group workshops. Now that we are back in Chicago from that year-long journey, we created this short documentary film in order to share what we have learned. In our travels to cities in Peru, Finland, Kenya, Japan, and many others, we witnessed the power of dance to unite people in very creative and human ways. This experience reaffirmed to me how important it is for humans to express themselves physically, emotionally, and mentally through dance. By creating this film, we want to share how dance affects everyday lives of people as well as how movement impacts and, in some cases, even saves our lives in profound ways.

Dance is such an elusive and intangible art form. The minute the dance is performed it dies. As the late Merce Cunningham said: “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” And that "fleeting moment" that makes people feel alive is what interests me, that "fleeting moment" is what I want to capture and bring alive in this documentary through the stories and moving bodies of people around the world.

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Dancing Around The World -7 Lessons Learned