Yesterday, the show had fulfilled expectations, today was different, something else had happened. While she watched the stage entrances and exits, while she waited her turn between the wings of the stage, while the brightness of the lights drew the movement, and the music impregnated the atmosphere, she was really moved That day she had really been able to dance, she had transcended the form, the counts, the technique that she had barely tasted, to feel herself in harmonic movement with everyone and with several moments of her life. In an instant she felt the sorrow of her cousin who had passed away before his leg was amputated. Both, at a distance from each other, knew how difficult it would be to relearn how to accompany Tabaco y sus Metales, al Grupo Mango, La Fania All Stars, La Ponceña and many other orchestras, using crutches or a wheelchair. Maybe that’s why he decided not to fight anymore; music and popular dance had been for him, the world of joy and sorrows, the meeting with his mother, the world of friendships and girlfriends, the world of vices and problems… in short, the world of life.
So perhaps that’s why he said to himself: why live it without being able to move in the same way? She was so moved during the second day of the performance that she relived how she had found peace after the death of her second mother, her aunt, during the ritual ceremony to San Juan Bautista. Dancing in the town square of her ancestors’ village what she knew by tradition, she was able to soothe the pain of loss. The image of Bautista came to her mind, with his red preponderance, floating above the heads of hundreds of devotees, and held by the invisible vibration of the drums. She remembered and felt how dance was the way to release weeping and to ritualize grief. The loneliness of sadness was blurred once again, when submerged in the collective energy, it ceased to be in that instant to transcend in time, it ceased to feel its own, to know it belongs to the ancestors. Finally, when she returned to the stage on the second day of the performance… dance had returned to her in its multiple expressions, and had once again become part of the meaning of her life.
