Shimmering Thresholds: October 2025 Newletter

Shape Shifting on the Dance Floor

Lately, as summer’s heat lifts away and the wind takes on that particular sound—rattling dry leaves still clinging to tree branches—I’ve been thinking about thresholds: those delicate, trembling places where boundaries blur. 

Boundaries between inside and outside. 

Between human and other-than-human. 

Between what we are now and what we are becoming. 

When I dance, I often find myself spontaneously shapeshifting. It feels like something from outside becomes suddenly real and alive within me, expressed through the dance.

One night at Dance Lab, I found myself writing circles on the floor, starfish-like, then ticking time as a clock. Later, when journaling, I listed what I’d become: horse crab, glitching robot bug, Big Ben? I hadn’t chosen these shapes; they found me. 

Where did they come from? When we dance to music, are we shapeshifting into the music itself?

Shapeshifting can be spontaneous like this; it can also be deliberate. Both are alive when we dance. Sometimes, shapes and visions arise automatically, mysteriously. Other times, we take on a form with intention, like when we do an impression of an energy, a rhythm, or another dancer. Both are ways of crossing thresholds: between self and world, or self and song.

But maybe it’s not so polar. There isn’t really one thing on one side of the boundary and its opposite on the other. Reality feels more like a hall of mirrors. When dancing, we reflect one another, the music, the space. Each movement changes the field. Each gesture ripples outward, shaping what comes next. 

And this isn’t just true in Dance Lab. Dancer and author Kimerer LaMothe writes: “Humans, as we dance, participate consciously in making the movements that make matter matter, reality real, and humans human.”

Everything is movement. 

When you touch my skin, we both feel it. 

When you move, my world shifts. 

We are neither wholly separate nor wholly merged.

If how we move is the world, then attention to movement is attention to creation itself.

If how we move is the world, then dance is an ethical practice. 

It asks: in what way do you want to move to shape the world?

We are all always dancing. When we enter the dance consciously, we play inside that shimmering threshold between inner and outer, matter and motion, self and other.

There, every movement becomes a prayer for a life-enabling world.

Warmly,

Rebecca Cohen Boyes-Watson

P.S. To read more about shapeshifting, you can access my Harvard thesis here.