Contemporary Dance: The Beauty of Self-Expression

When Chloe Ilene was younger, she was on the shyer side, which made it harder to connect with others verbally. She then found the beauty of expressing herself physically through dancing. Now Chloe does this for a living as the artistic director for New Industry Dance, a contemporary dance group in South Bend, Indiana.

She shares, “In life, going through difficult moments, using dance and the process of movement as a way to just get out emotions and thoughts that maybe you don’t even need to communicate to someone else, but they need to be released in some way.”

Video Transcript

Meet Chloe Ilene, a dance leader in South Bend. 

A group of women dance silently in a room with movements that reach for one another.

When I was a child, I was really, really shy. And so in school and at class, a lot of times I just didn’t talk, and I was very afraid to express myself verbally. But I realized that I was never afraid to get on a dance stage. Sorry, I’m getting emotional. So I wasn’t afraid to express myself physically to say the things that I couldn’t say with words. 

The women are shown dancing and stretching in slow motion. 

Chloe gives an instruction: Holding here.

Something that I’m always thinking about is just the vulnerability — someone dancing using their body as a medium to express themselves to an audience. So I think ultimately, to dance and to move is very human. And so dance taps into the humanness that we have. 

She is prompting more movement with the group: Eight, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, one, two, three, four. Yeah. So I think you can, once you get the hang of the lift, just this lift, just escape a little.

So I think I find a lot of joy in sharing the creative process, where it’s not just my creative process. We all have a stake in that. So it’s a lot of me just witnessing what other people are doing and how other people are improvising, and then just seeing something that someone else is doing and saying like, “Hey, that’s really neat. Let’s explore more of that.” 

But I like seeing where other people — what choices they make and how that creates something new that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.

The women move and dance in slow motion. 

In life, going through difficult moments, using dance and the process of movement as a way to just get out emotions and thoughts that maybe you don’t even need to communicate to someone else, but they need to be released in some way. And so I think a lot of people in the company, especially, would agree that movement is very important to us because it’s a way that we process things that happen in our life. And sometimes those things become a part of a show that other people come and watch, but sometimes it’s just about coming into the studio and moving and getting things out in a physical way.