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They’ll say, “It was good.”

I have a dance performance tonight. We’re presenting a half-hour ballet, the main feature of a night of dining and entertainment. But I wonder if anyone will really take it all in.

There are 19 of us putting this on, and we range in age from about 10 to 70. We have spent countless hours in rehearsal, plus still more time drilling moves and technique in classes. Some of us are still in high school and work extra hard to study and do homework. Others of us are working folk, and a long day at the office is followed by a rushed, cold dinner and a long night at the studio.

We have given up sleep, sacrificed our personal lives (at cost to relationships) and marked ourselves as “different” because we don’t do what everyone else does. We can’t do what everyone else does: we don’t have the time, and quite often we don’t have the energy.

Our director tells, shows, reminds, coerces, yells, admonishes, pleads, and then yells at us again to fix our dancing. She’ll criticize a distracting gesture, a look that doesn’t tell the story, a leg that could stretch another quarter of an inch, and (without fail) that we need to turn out our feet as we’re dancing. She’ll praise us if we (finally) get something right, but there’s still the way our head is turned, whether our arms are carried too high, the spacing on the stage… She pushes us towards excellence, and sometimes I wonder if the drive is harder on her than it is on us.

Worse yet, perhaps, are our own internal voices: am I dancing as well as I could? Do I want to dance that well? Did I dance with my partner okay, or is my balance throwing off their center? Beware the force of an artist’s self-critique.

But nobody really gets to see all of this. We’re just dancing - one show, on one night, and the work, the hours, the sweat, and the passion will have passed, not to return again.

So much work for one moment? Is that a fair return on investment? (Or so Western thinking would have us ask.)

How shall we measure things? Maybe what dancers offer goes beyond simple spectacle and entertainment.

We strive to offer beauty, and truth disguised as story. We dare to show that it’s still worth working hard for things you don’t get paid (money) for. We know there’s still magic in the world, and it’s worth sharing from time to time. And though the personal price is high, we dance because we have to; as dancers, it’s how we give to others.

And in a fallen, hurting, selfish world, such a giving is continually necessary (yet never sufficient…), as much for ourselves as for our audience.

Tonight, people will enjoy their dinner and have plenty to drink. Those that desire entertainment shall receive it in full, I hope.

And when asked “How was the show?”, they’ll probably answer,

“It was good.”