Dancers & Dogs

It is a particularly artful weekend here at the homestead. Paul is working on music day in and out with his brother here to help, and I have been rehearsing up a storm. We have some guest artists in town setting a piece on the company for our upcoming show. I'm pretty stoked about the piece - it is all dance therapy-ish with themes about identity and self and what-not. Very cool.

But to the point of the story. Throughout my training and experience as a dancer, I have worked with five professional dancing couples. (The artists here this weekend are now included in this bunch.) The whole concept of dancing spouses is mind boggling to me. Dancers are such strange folk (which I can say because I am one), and then you take that strangeness times two, and then you put that into a marriage. Whew. I cannot even imagine. It is like a fascinating yet terrifying social experiment, and thus I am totally intrigued by the dynamics presented when working with these artsy types.

Now, of these five different couple sets, four of the five have had dogs that they think are people. Okay, maybe that is a little over the top, but let it suffice to say these are some of the most intense animal lovers I have ever met. Which is cool, I love animals too. It's why I don't eat them. But the depth of love in these cases is so great that the dogs actually consistently come to dance classes and rehearsals with their owners. And in some cases, they have patterns of behavior (barking, howling etc.) in reaction to different kinds of movement. That's impressive.

I'm ready to conduct some sort of social psychology experiment about the marriage relationships between dancers and the role of the dog as it pertains to this specific marital dynamic.

There's my random thought for today. What do you all think?