InNprogress Collective/Afshin Varjavandi | toPRAY

There is moment for everyone when we learn to look inside ourselves:

only our own eyes can have that vision.

toPRAY tells the point of view from which we observe ourselves.

toPRAY is a passage. Sometimes the journey to reach the human soul is long and narrow.

Sometimes we do not have the time to choose the ways that seem complex to us.

So let’s dance. toPRAY

What clearer expression of dancing do you want than dancing itself?
– Paul Valéry, L’ âme et la danse

Prayer and art are passionate acts of will. One wants to transcend and enhance the will’s normal possibilities. Art, like prayer, is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts. Prayer means casting oneself into the miraculous rainbow that stretches between becoming and dying, to be utterly consumed in it, in order to bring its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one’s own existence.
– Franz Kafka, (in G. Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka)

We look for an answer in every action. Maybe the acting itself is a ritual. We are always  looking for an answer, asking ourselves whether at the end we are a soul with a body.

Maybe the most sacred thing we have is our imagination that will guide us to identify the soul along the course of life.

Say naught and dance on! All must come to my side! Here take your place! The burden of joy I carry, and I lead the sacred dance. Who happy is as we, can do but this: say naught and dance on!
– Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Elektra

You may shake your head, smile, mock, or turn away, but this dance madness proves nonetheless that the man of the machine age with his necessary wristwatch and his brain in a constant ferment of work, worry and calculation has just as much need of the dance as the primitive. For him too the dance is life on another plane.
– Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance

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