WATCH: So You Think You Can Dance Pulls At Our Lesbian Heartstrings with Beautiful Same-Sex Routine

As humans, we have always turned to art to help us articulate and understand the powerful emotions that drive us through life.  Love, relationships, heartbreak, loss, grief, joy, anger, fear---everything that truly matters manifests most clearly in artistic expression.  

Dance, more than any other form of art, has the power to distill human relationships down to these most basic and necessary emotions.  When we watch pair dancing especially, we project ourselves into the strong and beautiful bodies of the dancers and can feel everything they are expressing.  It's one of the most raw and powerful expressions of love, lust, sexuality, and connection between two individuals. 

And throughout history, pair dancing has almost always been heterosexual.  We are so accustomed to seeing man-woman dance partners--who is leading, following, etc. has been so sharply defined that it is hard to envision dance in a way that breaks these norms.  

Which is why last week’s opening performance in "So You Think You Can Dance" was so remarkable. Instead of pairing the four remaining contestants into heterosexual couples, choreographer Travis Wall changed things up and in doing so unraveled the model we are used to seeing.  The result was beautiful.  I don't need to say anything else, you should just watch this:

My friend Jodi who is currently making a documentary about femme lesbian visibility had this to say about the performance:

"Sometimes we forget the potential we have, as women, as lesbians, as LGBTQ people, to actually FEEL connected to things because we're so accustom to feeling detached from the myriad elements in the world around us that make us feel foreign -- the feeling stems from compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity.

When we see ourselves in art --- when I see myself in art -- I gravitate toward it. I feel a connection to it in a way that is uniquely invigorating and emotionally unparalleled to my connection to heterosexually oriented art, music, film, etc.

Straight people have all of history --- while we are currently writing our own. Once again, I find it truly astounding and admirable that we're able to imagine and explore what romance is actually about between two women, when we have so few examples to look to."

Here's to Travis Wall for opening up a dialogue on how to express all forms of love through dance, and here's hoping that as we wade deeper into this new century, that more and more LGBTQ artists create pieces that openly and powerfully celebrate our relationships and cement a place for the community within the art world.  Movies, songs, dance, painting, writing that have dominant LGBT themes and relationships at their core will be the key to a cultural shift in this new era.  Breakthroughs in art have always shown humanity new ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, so if we begin to shape art in new ways, we will see the effects ripple outward and create a more beautiful, open, accepting, and enlightened world.