Yesterday, I attended a dance performance. I left with a new outlook.
It all started with a chance encounter. I had recently bumped into an old classmate from law school – one of those random throwbacks to the past that reminds you how much time has passed, and how much has changed. In catching up, she mentioned almost in passing that she was into ‘dance’, and that she had a dance performance coming up. She shared the details. I looked into it. It wasn’t for me, but I thought my family would enjoy it and I also wanted to support my old friend. So I bought 4 tickets. I brought my daughter and her two daughters – my grandchildren – to the show.
I’ll be honest: I assumed my three girls would enjoy the dance performance far more than I would. I imagined that I was there in a supporting role – the dutiful father and grandfather – happy to sit in the dark with one granddaughter on my lap and another on a booster seat holding my hand, as I whispered to my daughter through the show. I hoped they would all enjoy it.
As it turned out, it was ‘me’ that most benefitted.
Before the performance began, the organizers of PushPULL Dance Toronto took a moment to introduce what we were about to see. They told us the name of the piece: UNFRAMED. And then they said why the piece was given this title.
To be UNFRAMED, they explained, is what happens when we remove the lens through which we look at things. When we set aside the filters that we have accumulated over life, our preferences, dislikes, habits, pretenses, assumptions, attitudes, and simply meet the world ‘as it is’, that is when living arrives.
I sat with that for a moment before the lights went down. It is such a small word (UNFRAMED) to carry so large an idea.
What followed was a performance by a group of mid-life women (dare I say older) of PushPULL Dance Toronto who had come together through dance, through companionship, through a shared commitment to expressing something that is difficult to put into words, which is perhaps why they chose to put it into movement instead.
Watching them, I found myself thinking about what it takes to do what they were doing. Not the technical demands of performance, though those were evident. I mean something deeper. These were women who had already lived a significant portion of their lives. They carried, as all of us who have reached a certain age carry, years of experience that have shaped their tastes, their judgments, their reflexes. They knew things. They experienced things. They had opinions. They had history – good and bad. And yet there they were – choosing not to be framed by any of it. To be UNFRAMED.
What I have been turning over in my mind ever since is this. As we age, we frame. It is, in many ways, a natural and even necessary process. Experience teaches us how to make sense of the world, how to navigate it, how to survive. We discover what we like and love and what we hate and avoid. We learn which relationships nourish us and which ones drain us. We build preferences, boundaries, identities. We become, in the best sense of the word, FRAMED. But there is a cost that arrives so gradually, we barely notice it. The frame, which began as a structure for living, slowly becomes a constraint. By the time many of us reach middle age and beyond, we have decided – often without realizing we have decided anything – what kind of people interest us, who we tolerate, who we avoid, what inspires us and what we cancel. And so we stop looking outside the frame. We live inside the frame. We disregard anyone and anything that is not in our frame. This doesn’t occur overnight. It doesn’t occur all at once, but incrementally. Year by year, the aperture narrows. We see less of the world and those in it, not because our eyes have failed us, but because of our lived experiences. The frame is built and we are in it. We are FRAMED.
What PushPULL Dance Toronto offered their audience on that stage was not simply a performance. It was a demonstration. Here were women who, by all conventional reckoning, had earned the right to their frames, to their settled sense of who they are and what they value. And they were choosing, deliberately and joyfully, to tear those frames down. They were not pretending to be young. They were not reaching backward. They were doing something far more interesting: they were reaching inward and outward simultaneously – into themselves with honesty, and outward toward the audience with openness. UNFRAMED.
I did not anticipate this discovery when I bought 4 tickets: The idea of being UNFRAMED is not a young person’s philosophy. It is a mature person’s discipline. It requires something to unlearn, which means it requires age. The women on that stage understood this. That is why their performance was not a celebration of youth – it was something richer than that. It was a celebration of continuing. Of choosing, again and again, not to be finished.
So thank you to my old law school classmates Daphne Simon and Roland Taylor for the chance encounter and recommendation. Thank you to my daughter Talia Benmor and my grandchildren, for sitting with me in the dark and sharing something I did not know I needed. And thank you to the PushPull Dance Toronto https://www.pushpulldance.com/toronto-274594.html for an afternoon that was entertaining and inspiring.
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