There’s an element of professional dance called musicality that competitors are assessed by. It’s the ability to hear, process, and move to the music you’re dancing to so intuitively that you become a physical expression of the song. It’s almost like being an empath to the beats and melodies; instead of existing alongside them, you jump in, head first. And then you flow through some alternate universe until it’s all over and you’re sweaty and breathless in the best way.
While the binary is most definitely a social construct, the way female street dancers catch the spirit is very telling. They’re just as bold, skilled, and thoughtful in their craft as the men, but their bodies’ stories just hit different. It might be the thread that links them back to customs of movement that date past 1970s Bronx, where breakdancing first became a thing, to West Africa, South America, and various Indigenous communities where women connected to the earth and the sky through dance.
