Dance, somatic movement, and physical forms of play can all be extremely therapeutic. Meditation and yoga, by slowing your heart rate and becoming aware of your limbs, your breathing, and your surroundings, are physically and emotionally restorative activities. Today we’re celebrating all forms of physical expression.
At its heart, much of expression through movement is about emoting. Marion Post Wolcott's 1939 photograph A Negro going in the Entrance for Negroes at a movie theater, Belzoni, Mississippi captured a moment of sheer exuberant delight, against many odds. On this edition, John Edwin Mason wrote: "It's an extraordinary, forever frozen moment of youth, grace, and joy. The moment is all. Nothing else about the photo is the least bit memorable. But that moment is more than enough. The moment is universal and at the same time specific to the time and place. It's a reminder that, even in the heart of the Delta and even at a time when civil rights for black Mississippians were but a dream, people were never defined solely by their oppression."
Eadweard Muybridge's iconic photographic study of motion, such as Animal Locomotion; Plate 187, Dancing (Fancy) have a timeless grace. He created more than 100,000 images that became his 1887 portfolio collection entitled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements—a scientific experiment as much as a monumental artistic endeavor. Almost like a baby learning it has feet, Muybridge wondered, what does it look like when we move? What does jumping look like? In a very beautiful way, this examination of an elemental, and oft taken-for-granted human function—movement—is an investigation that never ends.
