By Ali Taha Alnobani
There are dances that take place on stages, dances performed in crowded streets, and dances that belong to festivals, weddings, and celebrations. But there is another kind of dance, one that may never be witnessed by an audience because it exists almost entirely in the imagination.
I have often wondered whether a dance must be physically performed in order to be real.
As someone who uses crutches and lives with physical limitations, I know that the relationship between the body and movement is not always simple. There are movements I can perform, others that require effort, and others that remain beyond my physical possibilities.
Yet the desire to move does not necessarily disappear when movement becomes difficult.
A melody can awaken an imagined gesture. A rhythm can suggest a movement that never reaches the floor. Sometimes, the body remains where it is while the imagination travels somewhere else.
This experience has led me toward an unexpected question: Can poetry become a form of dance?
When Movement Becomes Language
A poem moves even when the poet does not.
Its rhythms accelerate and slow down. Its images rise, turn, collide, and disappear. A line may hesitate before the next one arrives. A repeated word can resemble a returning step.
Perhaps this is why poetry has always maintained such an intimate relationship with music.
We speak of poetic rhythm, cadence, and movement because language possesses a temporal life. A poem unfolds through sound and silence, much as a dance unfolds through motion and stillness.
But there is an important difference.
In dance, a gesture becomes visible. In poetry, it becomes imaginable.
A poet can write about running without running, flying without wings, or embracing someone who is no longer present. These experiences may be physically inaccessible or impossible, yet language allows us to approach them imaginatively.
This does not mean that poetry replaces physical movement or makes accessibility unnecessary. It means that human expression has more than one form.
In my essay Can You Dance Without Walking? Rethinking Movement, Disability, and Freedom, I explored the distinction between what the body can do and what the imagination continues to desire.
The question remains open. I do not believe that every imagined dance is equivalent to a performed one. But I also hesitate to dismiss an experience simply because it cannot be seen.
The Body Is Not Merely a Symbol
Writers frequently use the body as a metaphor.
Hands may represent tenderness, eyes may suggest recognition, and footsteps may symbolize a journey. The body becomes a vocabulary through which we describe love, loss, fear, and hope.
Yet there is a danger in treating the body only as a metaphor.
For a person living with a physical disability, the body is not an abstract literary instrument. It is the practical reality through which everyday life is negotiated.
Stairs, distances, inaccessible buildings, exhaustion, and other people’s assumptions can shape an ordinary day.
I do not wish to romanticize these realities. Physical limitations do not automatically produce artistic insight. Nor should disability be presented as a necessary route toward spiritual wisdom.
A disabled person is not a metaphor designed to inspire someone else.
Nevertheless, personal experience can become a source of artistic questioning.
When I write about a dance I cannot perform, I am not trying to deny the reality of my body. I am trying to understand the relationship between that reality and the imaginative life that continues within it.
Poetry gives me a space in which these two experiences can encounter each other without pretending that their differences have disappeared.
The Music We Hear Inside
Sometimes a song produces a curious sensation: we begin to anticipate its movements before they happen.
We recognize the approaching rhythm. We sense when a musical phrase is about to return. We may tap our fingers, move our heads, or simply feel an inward response.
This relationship between music and movement is not confined to professional dancers.
For some listeners, music becomes an invitation to move physically. For others, it may become an experience of attention, emotion, memory, or imagined motion.
In Why Does Music Make Us Want to Move?, I considered how rhythm and emotion contribute to this experience.
As a poet, however, I am especially interested in what happens when a listener’s response remains invisible.
Can an experience still be called a dance if no recognizable dance movement occurs?
I am uncertain.
Perhaps we need another word. Perhaps the expression invisible dance is useful precisely because it does not pretend to settle the question.
It describes an experience while acknowledging a difference.
Between the Poem and the Song
My interest in this question eventually entered my work with music.
I wrote the lyrics of Burning Colors, a song in which fire, wind, movement, and memory become symbols of emotional experience. The words began as a human poetic creation. Later, I used artificial intelligence tools to assist in transforming them into a musical and audiovisual work.
That process raised another question.
When poetry becomes a song, does it gain something, or does it lose something?
A written poem leaves much of its rhythm to the reader. Music introduces additional decisions: tempo, melody, atmosphere, vocal expression, and the relationship between words and sound.
These choices can illuminate some meanings while obscuring others.
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to the discussion. It can generate musical possibilities, but its contribution does not remove the importance of the poet’s intentions, selections, and critical judgment.
I do not regard the use of such tools as proof that the resulting work possesses artistic value. The work must still be considered through its language, its emotional coherence, and the experience it creates for listeners.
In When the Body Becomes a Metaphor: Fire, Wind, and Memory in Song Lyrics, I examined some of the images that shaped Burning Colors.
What interests me here is the unusual journey of a poem: from an unwritten feeling to language, from language to sound, and from sound to the imagination of another person.
Must Art Make the Impossible Possible?
We often say that art makes the impossible possible.
It is a beautiful expression, but I have reservations about taking it literally.
A poem cannot remove an architectural barrier. A song cannot automatically change a discriminatory attitude. An imagined dance cannot provide the same physical experience as moving freely through an accessible space.
Art has limitations, and recognizing them does not diminish its importance.
What art can sometimes do is give an experience a form that other people can encounter.
A private longing becomes a sentence. A sentence becomes a poem. A poem becomes a conversation.
Perhaps another reader recognizes something of their own life in it.
That recognition matters.
Not because it resolves the original difficulty, but because it allows an experience that might otherwise remain unspoken to enter a shared human space.
For me, this is one of poetry’s most meaningful possibilities.
The Dance That Remains Unfinished
I have come to think of the invisible dance not as a victory over physical limitation, but as an unfinished conversation between the body and imagination.
The body has its own truth. So does the desire to create.
Neither needs to erase the other.
There may never be a physical performance corresponding to the dance I imagine. I do not need to claim that writing about it is the same as performing it.
But I can write its hesitation.
I can give words to its rhythm.
I can describe the distance between the first imagined movement and the physical gesture that never follows.
And perhaps a reader, encountering those words, will experience a movement that neither of us could have predicted.
I have developed these reflections further in a five-essay collection, The Invisible Dance: Between Body, Music, and Freedom, which also includes two related artistic videos.
Yet I would rather end here with a question than a conclusion.
When we read a poem and feel something move inside us, although our bodies remain still, what exactly has moved?
I would be interested to hear how other poets understand the relationship between bodily movement, rhythm, and imagination.
