My creativity comes in the middle of the night.

Don't ask me why. 

All I know is that for the past week or so, I seem to hit my desire for creativity and emotion and all things deep and touching in the late hours of night/wee hours of morning. 

Even when I should be asleep, running low on sleep, or have to be somewhere early in the morning and have a long day ahead of me, it still comes. 

For example, on Tuesday night I had a burning desire to create some sort of slide show or video or something that captured raw emotion. I got as far as downloading Windows Movie Maker on to my computer and creating a folder of images I wanted to include until I decided it was time to move on to other things. That folder remains on my computer until I decide to pursue that raw emotion and finish the project.

My most recent blog posts have come about as a result of this sudden increase in my desire to be creative.

And tonight is no exception. 

This past year, I have learned a lot about my personality and what makes me, well, me. I've found it very interesting. And tonight, I decided that I was going to go through all of my dance pictures since high school and find the ones that I felt best captured what I've discovered to be my personality and my character traits. Don't ask me why, or what spurred this on, because I don't know why. 

Dance is emotion. It is expression. I have a coach who likes to say, "Devotion to the emotion equals motion." To go along with this, I looked up dance quotes on Goodreads, and these are some of the ones I've found. I've also included some of the pictures that I felt best caught my personality through dance. Credit for the photography goes to Hannah Gasinski (Hannah Liyan Photography) and my parents. 

 

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.” - Rumi

“Dance is the hidden language of the soul”  - Martha Graham 

 “To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking” - Agnes De Mille

“Dance for yourself. If someone understands, good. If not, no matter. Go right on doing what interests you, and do it until it stops interesting you.” - Louis Horst

 

 “There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.” - Martha Graham

 "When you truly dance, you dance yourself free." - Jay Woodman  

Hannah Liyan Photography

“I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man--the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.”- Martha Graham

“To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique. We forget where the movements come from. They are born from life. When you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life -- not existing forms of dance.”  - Pina Bausch

  Thank you for indulging me in my creativity.