In My Defense

At the end of a non-majors creative process class I taught one student wrote in his paper that he couldn't understand why anyone would ever study dance at a university. He was a chemistry major. A nice proper profession. I wrote out a brief defense of my decision, the field, and aesthetics in general on the back of his paper. He never came to pick it up. In the off chance that a chemistry major I knew two years ago for the span of a semester would ever stumble upon the blog of a dancing, Christian mom, who looks vaguely familiar, I now present my case.

The chemistry major, the aspiring scientist, the undergraduate physicist, enters the lab with the goal of conducting experiments. They learn how to make rational science happen. However, the goal of this practice is not truly to follow scientific method and prove a hypothesis. The undergraduate student does not produce original research. They recreate the experimental process of their predecessors. Success is not determined by the actuality of the results proven, but whether those results match previous endeavors. You can know if you have made a mistake. You can know how it should all turn out. As far as I understand it, the undergraduate scientist does not have to think, they have to replicate and regurgitate. I don't begrudge them this bliss. It is not a dangerous road.

The first day I entered the modern dance department as a Sophomore in the program, I had to create three movement phrases and manipulate them into a short work. These works we then combined with other students to make more complex pieces. The first day I was a dance student I fashioned something the world had never seen before. Original research, at 19 years old! It wasn't brilliant; it won't appear in experimental theatres along the dark alleys of New York, but it was new. And it mattered.

There are those who believe art is unnecessary, that we cannot live without experimental pharmacology, but could endure the millennia quite happily without Poe, Forsythe, and Cage. I propose quite the opposite. At this point, the young scientist can make no contribution to the field that will in any way prolong our lives. How could he/she when original research doesn't really occur until masters or even doctorate work? Even the most accomplished physicist, the leading minds of our time, our Hawking, our Haroche, our Gurdon and Yamanaka cannot cure us of our mortality. We all still die.

When I first read Bukowski, I flew. When I first moved with Koester and Handman in ways I had never imagined, I thought perhaps I understood immortality. Yet, it was when I first created, fashioned and sweated, built and devastated, when I took that thing from nothingness into fullness, that I transcended. I locked eyes with my God and understood a small breath of what it must be to fashion a gazelle and watch it run, to carve a waterfall and feed a valley, to mold a child and hear "I love You" from her lips. Science continually reminds us that we are dying. Art has a far better chance of making us immortal.

Ellen Dissanayake is credited as redefining art as "making special". Art takes the everyday, the ordinary, the plain, and makes it special, a little more alive, a little more lovely. If this is the case, I choose a short life without penicillin, I choose a minute reality without genetic engineering, I choose a brief flicker on this planet free from mechanical lungs, spinal rods, and slicing needles, if it be a flicker more beautiful. Of course I don't have to (and haven't) lived without science. But I don't have to (and haven't) and won't live without art.