It is 4 o’clock pm on a Saturday afternoon and my muscles are screaming. I’ve been dancing for the last 2 hours straight and I still have one more hour to go in the gymnasium of the German School of Boston. Technically, this gymnasium is not our studio. My dance school has rented this space for at least 30 years to be used from 11am to 5pm on Saturdays, and generations of dancers at the O’Shea Chaplin Academy of Irish Dance have grown up both fearing and loving this space. So in my mind, we own this space.

Often, when I leave the gym to gulp down some much needed water, I look at the crayon drawings elementary students at the GSIB have put on display in the hallway. I look at their abandoned lunch boxes and jackets in their cubbies, and I imagine them running down the halls and their warm-hearted teachers trailing after them. In these hallways they learn to read. They learn to add and subtract. They finger paint and learn to play the recorder. And when it’s time to enter the gym across the hall they form a line and walk through those white double doors and play whatever game is awaiting them on the other side. When I walk through those double doors, I walk into a cacophony of blaring jigs and hornpipes, and fiberglass tips trebling and clicking away. I walk into a space that has held some of the most pivotal 4 hours in my life. It is a space that has dictated my goals and aspirations since I was 8 years old. It is a space physically defined by a sea of dance bags arranged in social hierarchy. The queen bees sit near the left hand windows, while the rest follow behind. Even on the easiest days the air always feels heavy to me. Everything is heavy in that gym. Everything has consequence. And if my core friends aren’t there, the air is even heavier and space more empty.

In this instance and personal experience, space is defined by memories, by connections, by an artform that has defined my passion, and the effects of physical exertion. This is my space.

On the surface, “space” seems to be a wash concept. In our daily interactions and conversations space seems to be synonymous with emptiness. But in reality, space is something that we fill with our own perceptions, anxieties and hopes. We define it so that it shapes itself in a way that allows us to make the most sense of our lives. We give space borders and labels to create a sense of “us.” Sometimes the “us” is created first, and the spatial boundaries are dictated afterwards. Othertimes space is seen only as a physical mass that can be expressed on a piece of paper, and because of this understanding spatial borders and labels can divide “us”es and create a sense of resentment towards what the space symbolically represents. Space is both an idea and an experience and it is moldable. It is an address, a place, a definably undefinable realm of experience. It becomes space when we can leave it and return to it, when we assign it a purpose and a place in our lives.