Thursday, October 30, 2008

Balance, or The Center Must Hold





Angelina, her BFF, JMax & I saw The Jones Benally Family as Blackfire at the American Indian museum in DC in August 2007. Clayson Benally did the hoop dance with his brother and sister drumming and singing, and Jones Benally also sang/chanted. I was very impressed by the hoop dance and how precise and graceful Clayson Benally's dancing was. (And only someone as skinny as a Navajo could even dance through those hoops, I swear.) This video doesn't really do the dancing justice, but I felt it was the one that showed the most, blurry as it is.

Jones Benally speaks in the first video about how we are the injured people and the hoop dance is a healing dance to bring us back to the center. We are still as we were when Yeats wrote his famous The Second Coming nigh on 90 years ago. Not enough dancing, maybe, or not mindful dancing, anyway...

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