When we want to drown out the everyday noise that goes on around us and essentially escape, what do we humans tend to do? We plug in our headphones and put on music. When we want to kick back and be distracted by a story that is completely separate from the events going on in our life, what do we do? We watch a live performance. When we are feeling happy, want to celebrate, or just want to simply get down and groove, what do we do? We turn on our favorite song and dance.
In society today, human beings tend to get caught up in the hustle-and-bustle of everyday life. We get stuck in monotonous routines that sometimes lead to a lacking of creativity and imagination. It is rare that we take the time to stop and appreciate the little and beautiful things in the world, and sometimes it is hard to find things that can pure and simply take us away. However, it turns out that most of our outlets in life are already some form of artistic medium. Recgonizing and capitalizing on this idea that art can truly feed the soul is essential in life.
Art is a healthy way of escape and expression. It can be a cathartic and emotional outlet that allows us to briefly step aside from our ordinary day and venture into a new world where the limits are endless. This world comes with a lot of stress whether it be stemming from financial worries, relationship issues, problems regarding the world in general, and more. Having an everyday outlet stops people from keeping emotions bottled inside and then drastically erupting. It is essential for people’s health psychologically and physically. Without outlets and being in touch with our emotions, humans can severely suffer from underlying psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression, and those often carry over and affect physical health such as creating heart conditions. Having this particular outlet also stops people from using harmful substances such as drugs or alcohol to get those “highs” or escapes; therefore, this is definitely the healthier and safer alternative.
There are solutions to preventing this potential issues, and the answer is pure and simple: an artistic escape. In a theatre production, we as audience members can become a part of the story and be taken into another world whether it be in history or across the country. While watching a dance show, we can become enthralled and captivated by the movement that it stirs up a specific emotion inside of us. When listening to a piece of music, we can be affected by the tone of the tune, and it can completely take us away from the noises we hear during an ordinary, busy day. When observing a piece of art, we can analyze the beauty of it and be inspired to create something of our own.
This transition from a state of discord to balance through artistic outlet is a hard one to grasp because it is so complex and abstract; however, it can be life-changing. For example, when being asked to partake in an improvisational exercise in dance, a dancer must truly just feel the music and move however comes to mind. This is an extremely powerful process because you are truly just moving however your mind and body wishes to, and the way you are moving can tell you a lot about yourself and your cognitive thought process. This exercise makes a dancer feel extremely vulnerable because he/she is on his/her own just doing movement that he/she creates on the spot. While being vulnerable, it is also incredibly liberating. A dancer is able to self-express and discover things about himself/herself that he/she did not know before bringing to surface. This can be an extremely powerful practice while trying to discover and analyze underlying problems that may be interfering with your life. Dance has the ability to ground and centralize you by coming to actualization with yourself and your emotions, and it also has the ability to take you to a place of euphoria in the process because of the endorphins that dance allows to be released in the mind.
Beyond the subset of dance, every artistic outlet has something to offer and provokes some kind of feeling or emotional response. Besides all of the other benefits including becoming cultured, understanding diversity, and being entertained, the most important one, I believe, is that as an audience member, art stops time and takes us to a new world. It allows us to live a more fulfilled life with a healthy means of escape. There is no simpler form of medicine to prevent underlying psychological and potential physical disease than art, there is no greater benefit to humanity for cathartic expression than art, and there is no better escape in life than art.
