It’s all in the name: Dance Connects Company. This modern dance company is here to bring together people of all ages by the way of movement and, since connection is my drill, there I went to the Amsterdams Theaterhuis, on a freezing cold Saturday evening. I knew that Rita, a friend of mine, was dancing with them. I really wanted to finally see her on stage.

Abstract performances are never easy to put to words and the non-verbal is where the magic lies for me. I’m so tired of intellectualising everything that I love it when I watch something that fulfils me by the way of the senses, and stays within a realm of perception that doesn’t necessarily asks to be translated to language. In any case, there are always ideas that you formulate during an experience of this kind, oftentimes a story. The story that played in my mind while watching [mi:t] was a matriarchal one.

At [mi:t] I saw women of all shapes, sizes, ages, degrees of proficiency in movement, all together on the stage, as one organism. One big family. They took me on a journey of life seasons. I saw myself, and my mother, and the grandmas of this world, and my mother wanting to reach out to me, and me ebbing towards her and flowing away, and being sometimes fierce and hard, and other times understanding and loving, and my best girlfriend was there, and my girlfriends and their mothers, and their struggles and encounters. All the women I know were there somehow, with bodyshapes and a palette of emotions that I can recognise, as a woman myself. Women NOT trying to “empower each other”, not glamorizing their lives, not TED talking. Women being women. Expressing their needs. Mirroring each other. Allowing themselves to be seen and acknowledged, #nofilter.

These are the women I know. Women who say, this is my story, and who own it and their bodies, and their very presence in the world. Not in-your-face, not wanting to prove anything, not wearing a t-shirt with the letters f e m i n i s t grouped together, just in case you didn’t understand. Yet, their presence exploded life in all directions.

And then there was the beauty of the organism, and a sense of delicate rawness in the movements of the dancers, and the live music adding poetry to it all.

I’d say, go watch it because you’ll get inspired. As simple as that.

P.S. I got asked: “What about the man?”, a reference to the one male dancer who was also present on stage. For me it goes without saying that the masculine is an inherent part of the feminine. What I mean is: there’s no life without men. There are always men in the life of any woman, be it a partner, a father, a friend, a sperm-donor. Also, there is something male in every women, and the opposite is true as well. Susan Sontag brilliantly summarised this idea in the quote: “What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” It’s the whole Yin Yang concept.  Therefore, the presence of that man on stage gave the show all the more depth. However, the story and the focus of the show is still female.

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For more info, here’s the facebook page from Dance Connects Company. You can still watch the show on Thursday, 13th and on Sunday, 16th of December. For more events in December, jump on our cultural agenda for December WHO WHAT WHERE.