Connections/Dance

My name is Sofie Andersen. I'm an audio and multimedia producer, and my topic is "Dance."

I was a dancer from the age of about four or five. It was a

huge part of my life and passion of mine. I

learned through the body, technique, and through gesture, that I could create some kind of greater experience. That foundation

has always put me in mind of what is the artistic process. One of the things I really admire about artists in general is

their ability to capture fleeting moments and dance is one of those. There's so much myth about

who dancers are and what they put themselves through and what it means to be a performer. I was five

or six when I was first on stage. The nerves outweighed the applause. That kind of experience I think really stays with you.

As a dancer you learn to tell stories and communicate in direct ways, but also in indirect ways. The gesture of your fingers right down to the weight-bearing toe can make a difference to how the whole pose can look. One of

the qualities of dancers is their ability to make very difficult acts look effortless.

The physical impact of these arms and legs compressed together would not seem to suggest dance and grace, but I think shows through the multiplicity of hands and the multiplicity of arms and the way in which the viewpoints are all skewed, this incredible force and tension comes through.

This Jean Dunand screen with these falling seraphim really caught my eye because they're progressing through this rocky ravine, and this is sort of a terrible moment, they're falling down, but there's joy in the gesture in the flinging of the arms wide. There's almost a joy in that free floating, free form.

I think that expressionistic mode in art finds parallels in dance. It will look like the dancer is

deciding just in the moment whatever impulse they have, but of course there's so much that goes into it beforehand that is behind the scenes.

There's this incredible movement through the center of this pierced form and the strings that run through it. And it reminds me of an organic form that is about to become something that is connected with the physical artist being a dancer.

The Narcissus creates a sense of calm and it creates a sense of internal light and freedom, which you can sometimes feel when you're in that moment where the dance is coming together. It looks like chaos but it's actually incredibly beautiful and choreographed and still.

Susanne Rosenthal is my grandmother's cousin. She was the soloist for the Stuttgart Ballet. Unfortunately, she was living in a time when her background as a Jew made it impossible for her to have that career fulfilled. But when I look at this I'm just so happy because I know that she had that moment but also I just think of the joy that dance gives you as a person.

I have a very young daughter who has started to dance completely uninitiated by us.

She just hears music and she loves to dance and she is this vision of

sheer happiness when she's dancing. It's a time in your life when you're uninhibited and you have no idea about what you should or shouldn't being doing in life, that you're just responding instinctively to music. I really can't think of anything better

in life than seeing that in my daughter.