The people you admire the most are the people who do the impossible.

Alvin Ailey‘s dancers therefore deserve the utmost admiration for what they do with the human body. They do what dance is — the body and how it moves becomes an art form. Not once during the performance did I think “hey, that guy who just flipped probably weighs a hundred and something pounds, and that other guy lifted him, and that must have be really hard.” I was surprised to see sweat on the dancers’ faces at the curtain call, the entire dance seemed so effortless.

I usually think that I don’t understand dance, that it’s pretty but sometimes pretentious. For some reason, however, the simple skill of the dancers made me forget any preconceptions. The more I see modern dance, the less I try to get it and the more I just enjoy it. It was captivating. Styles of music and dance blended to a modern medley that was anything but boring in the first dance, then in the second, it was suddenly the Wild West. The third dance brought everything together. There was soul.

As I walked to the show it was cold and I was wearing my dress for school. It was kind of late, and I had a biology lab to do and college applications to send in. I forgot to eat dinner and the subway had been slow. When I came out of the show, as my friend noted, all I wanted to do was dance (my friend even did so, down 55th Street, to the subway stop). It was a true experience of the performing art, pleasing, mind-changing and awe-inspiring.