Nondancers, too, have remarked that dancers resemble a “different species.” The reason, I think, that you can spot a dancer from across a room is not her hairstyle or her makeup or her thinness; it’s her ineffable presence in her body, her superhuman awareness of space and herself. It’s her presence in every movement, whether a grand jeté or a tilt of the head or nothing at all; her stillness, too, is deliberate, is pregnant with potential movement. Even a dancer’s headshot—a close-up of just her face, perhaps her neck—conveys the possibility of motion: she seems poised to leap out of the
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