Students will articulate a philosophy of dance compatible with the mission of BYU that guides their personal choices in the professional or recreational worlds of dance.
Painters utilize brushes, sculptors clay, musicians an instrument, but dancers create using their bodies to express their artistic efforts. It is a revealed truth that part of coming to earth is to receive a mortal body. Understanding that my body is God’s greatest creation and the medium from which I create blesses me as a dancer. It inspires me to realize that I have never been more like my Father in Heaven than now in mortality. And as I dance and create my own movement, I begin to taste the potential the Lord has for me as I become my own creator and to find my own individuality.
Many in dance exploit the human body and justify this misuse as artistic creativity or as a means to make money. However, those serious in the discipline of dance recognize the sanctity of the body and appreciate when an artist respects and reverences it. Any dancer who has ever performed has felt moments of euphoria as they communicate without words. Those moments motivate and drive an artist. Mortality is the first time that we have experienced physicality, and performing allows for the soul of man to express itself in no way it has been able to before.
While not everyone in the field of dance knows that the soul of man consists of both a spirit and a body, that feeling of integration resonates with all who have danced. Dancers recognize that feeling and understand the beauty of dance. By promoting the sanctity of our bodies and realizing that dance is a means of expression and not of exploitation, we offer to those in our discipline an understanding that our bodies are divine.
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