This weekend shed new light for me on the nature of dance.

I spent Sunday afternoon  the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I walked through the galleries, viewing the art, I had a sudden realization: These great artists worked endless hours studying, training, honing their art to create these masterpieces. And here are these great works, hundreds (in some cases thousands) of years later, still reaching, touching, moving their audience.

I reflected back on the previous day. I began my Saturday (as I always do when I’m not teaching) by taking class with the legendary Zvi Gotheiner. Although most certainly a ballet class and clearly grounded in the work of his mentor, the great Maggie Black, the class is not a “typical” ballet class. The barre is nearly an hour long, slow, methodical and thorough. The centre combinations are more like inspired choreography and less like classroom exercises and most definitely reflect the modern dance vocabulary displayed in the works performed by his brilliant company. And then there is the music. The highly original, unique and brilliant Scott Killian is at the piano. He can make that instrument sing like a choir, pound like a bass drum, swell like a string section, blare like a brass band and percolate like a gamelan. The varied, surprising, mesmerizing sounds fill the room, fill my body, and push the movements out from the inside. The music is one with my dancing, it hangs in the air; and then it is gone. I always try to bring a performance to the classroom. I have long believe that HOW we take class will affect how we dance on the stage and that technique and artistry are inextricably linked. But in this class I don’t just dance; I live.

There was a rather inspired combination that swirled across the floor, changing directions in surprising ways, with pirouettes and arabesque turns growing out of the choreography and growing out of the music. I felt my body fill with the sounds emanating from the piano. I felt my entire being explode across the floor. I felt every ounce of my energy flow out into the room.

And then it was gone.

I see so many young dancers capturing these moments on their phones and posting them on the internet. But our technology can only capture so much. We can record a dancer and we can enjoy the video. But the real depth of beauty; the deeply expressive, highly detailed nuance of our art form can often elude the lens. There is a performance of Swan Lake danced by Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones that will forever be seared into my memory. No video of these two dancers that I have ever seen does this performance justice.

We work a lifetime to build a technique. We work a lifetime to develop an artist’s soul. We work a lifetime to dance. And in a moment, what we produce is gone. And I found a beautiful, profound sadness in the ephemeral nature of what we do.

The great art in this museum, these masterpieces that will last centuries to move and delight a limitless number of viewers, reminded me of this profound sadness.

And then I remembered that Swan Lake. I remembered that rainy evening when I sat in the dark and I watched, for the first time, two truly great artists take the stage and captivate an audience. And I realized that their performance isn’t gone. It lives in my memory, it lives in my heart and it is the reason that I do what I do. So now I am looking for ways to communicate this to my students; to help them reach their audience in a profound way. I want to them plant memories, perhaps in the heart of only one audience member, so that their work can live on to inspire someone sitting out there, in the dark.