Jem Kamran- Van der Leeuw

         When I was reading Van der Leeuw I really liked, how he explained dance and the beauty. Dance and the rhythm is a so much part of life. Dance is the essence of art since the primitive ages. Imagine you are at the ballet, you take your seat, you hear the chitter chatter of the audience, nothing audible, just white noise. Suddenly the lights begin to dim, a hush falls over the crowd. The silence is broken by the first score of music. The rhythm, starts out quiet and slow as though calling your name softly. The dancers emerge from behind the curtain, their graceful bodies move to the rhythm, with smooth and fluid movements, illuminated just by the florence of the stage lights.They are one with the music and one with each other, fluid as water, folding into each other. Your eyes follow their movements and your heartbeat syncs with every move, with every note. Your soul eases out of your body and transcends above the audience. It joins in with the dancers, mimicking every extension of hand, every bend of the dancers body. As the rhythm picks up, the dancers move with further intensity, your heartbeat fastens, there is no longer an extinction between you and the dancers. You are one, all through the last step, through the last crescendo of the score. Then a clashing sound erupt and you are snapped back to reality. The people around you are clapping, hesitantly you join in still recovering from the experience. As a the ballet beginnings you start out as a spectator, just a member of the audience, you have no particular feeling towards it yet. But as the ballet proceeds you become participant. The dance becomes a portals to another world. The beauty of the dance helps you transcend outside of your body, disengage with the real world and create a world of your own (Leeuw 13). Disengagement allows an individual to enter and participate into this new world. The beauty of the dance, or any art is a mere “bridge [to] some chasm that yawns between us and reality...” (Lewis 39-40). Using the bridge we can access this other world, commune with the world of the divine. So the art becomes a religious experience, an act of worship, or some sense of the divine that is not accessible otherwise.