Why We Dance

From earliest childhood to old age, people dance. Why We Dance asks why we do it. More specifically, why did I, a 76-year-old woman, get on Zoom five mornings a week all during the Pandemic along with other women ranging in age from forty-nine to eighty-five, to dance?

The film explores this question from many angles. Why We Dance is about two kinds of movement: each dancer’s unique physical expression, and our movement from one phase of life to another, seeking renewed meaning, community, and purpose as we age. Our teacher, Ketty Munaf Rosenfeld, a remarkably free-spirited woman in her mid 60s, is the film’s driving force. An Indonesian immigrant, she welcomes all comers. Many of the dancers are also immigrants, bringing their own cultural understanding to what dancing is all about. When in the course of making the film Ketty became a grandmother, her intense connection as a child to her own grandmother highlighted the abiding relevance of women across the generational divide.

For me, this project grew out of my rebellion against the invisibility of older women and the dominant culture’s tendency to silo people by age, ethnicity, class, political affiliation, etc. Ketty’s positive energy managed to turn my anger into celebration.

The Pandemic imposed constraints on us in making this film. But those constraints turned out to offer unforeseen benefits. Of necessity, this was a personal, hands-on project filmed by the dancers themselves. As I usually do, I edited the film myself. All this meant that the material had a refreshing immediacy and gave me a new sense of freedom. And I needed to raise very little money to produce Why We Dance. The Pandemic, so traumatic in so many ways, became the impetus for an exploration of the issues we ourselves embody.