Natalija Radivojevic Banovic, PhD. is psychologist, HR educator, gestalt psychotherapy student, mum and a dancer.
For Dance and City, she talks about how good dancing has brought her.
“Dance has been with me since I know about myself. However, it is not easy for me to put into words everything that dance has brought into my life and that it still brings.
When I was 2 years old, going “to music” was a source of pure happiness (and a great motivator for my parents to get rid of diapers :)). At the age of 6, dancing was the fulfillment of my desire to be a ballerina. In my free time – a way to express my joy, and later, as I grew up it was a way to express much more complex experiences and emotions.
After ballet and group performances that seek the harmony of all dancers, I discovered standard and Latin American dances that get meaning in partner dance. At 14, it was a whole new dimension of the play that met the equally emerging My-Self. I was discovering a whole new kind of rhythm and movement, my femininity and dialogue in movement. Numerous hours spent in the dance hall made the dance gradually cease to be a sum of learned steps and become sophisticated creative communication at dance evenings, and later in dance tournaments. It was something similar to the experience when you master a foreign language by stuttering word for word, and then suddenly you manage to turn all your thoughts and feelings into whole sentences and essays. As magic, of which you suddenly become an integral part, without even being aware that you can and know how to produce such aesthetics.
I watched how we mature through dance and vice versa – how dance changes and matures together with us. In the beginning, I liked energetic Latin dances. Waltzes and other standard dances were somehow slow and sort of empty in relation to them. Just as it can seem to us in life that a lot of action and a lot of people is the same as a feeling of fulfillment. Somewhere when I was already in college, I began to discover the richness, elegance and fullness of English waltz, Slow Fox, Tango. You can say that for most dances reserved for ballrooms, the principle applies – less is more. Slower, more delicate, with greater commitment to every movement, both in performance and experience, for me it meant more awareness, more being, more presence, more harmony with myself and my partner, more true satisfaction.
The days have come when there is not much time left for active sports dancing. Even then, dance was and remains my secret ally and source of inexhaustible support and joy. Whether I’m with my little ones who love to wear skirts and make a “disco”, or get together with one of my dance friends at a dance event or when I am on my own and I “turn on the music” – dance is always there to entice the best and the most beautiful in us, to entice our soul to show itself and play in all its luxury.”
More about Natalija and her work you can find here:
https://www.instagram.com/natalijaradivojevicbanovic/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalija-radivojevi%C4%87-banovi%C4%87-phd-7939aa32/
Photo: personal gallery
