The February Forecast by Erika Goldsmith

Crossing over

Living a dance saturated life means that looking out, I sometimes see a world divided between those that dance and those that don't. I mean those that will move their body to music using whatever physical vocabulary they have and those that don't, won't and feel they can't.

It would be fair to say that it has become my life's purpose to get people dancing and I am pretty stoked to have landed on that so early. To do this it is of course necessary to empathise with the minds and bodies of those who don’t, won’t and feel they can’t dance. No two people are the same and their identities, experiences and motivations for being on one side of the divide vary tremendously.

In my experience I have found the two key elements that are most successful in cracking a ‘hard no-dance egg’ are time and leading by example. People need time to come around to ideas that so severely oppose their own or to unlearn the ideas about themselves that the world around them has fostered, and also people are sheep. They have either decided or been conditioned to not see dance as within their capability or best interest, or they are just waiting to be invited!

It has become part and parcel of my work and the work of our company Bring A Plate, to demonstrate regularly, often by surprise and in public, the act of unashamedly enjoying a dance. Note that I absolutely do not mean taking the piss out of dancing which my observations lead me to believe is the unfortunate tendency of Australians suffering from cultural cringe and the side effects of drinking culture. I mean dancing for joy. Bring a Plate usually round this off with an invite to do so, next thing you know Bob’s your uncle, and he is dancing :)

Just to be clear, I am incredibly hesitant to spit out the rhetoric that dance is a universal language, because I am well aware that it is a language I learnt from a young age and people should be given agency to choose the language they wish to speak. That being said these days I feel more and more like the ambassador of a cult or religious group who thinks they ‘know’ something that others don’t. I am currently unpacking this because it makes me uncomfortable. Nevertheless it is really hard, as I am sure many of you reading ‘know’, to shake the feeling that you’re onto something pretty superhuman and otherworldly!

---

MEET THE ARTIST: ERIKA GOLDSMITH

Erika is a performing artist, producer and cultural community development practitioner based in Brisbane.

As a dance artist she has trained and worked across multiple cultural and contemporary dance forms. Currently she performs with Y.C.V an International Street Dance Company in Brisbane and was previously performing with Dance Masala, Queensland's premier Bollywood Dance Company. She is the founding director of Kinetic Collective an organisation that utilises the arts for international development.

Her cultural community development practice has seen her deliver educational and recreational programs for correctional centres, detention centres, youth and community services, NGO’s, training organisations, schools, universities and in community. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Dance)/Bachelor of Human Services from QUT and is a Dance/Movement Therapist in training having completed the Alternative Route Dance Therapy Program at the Dance Therapy Centre in Montreal.

She has been working at Ausdance Queensland since 2019 and also works part time on the tools with her dad as a joiners assistant. She obviously can’t keep still!