In practice

Cleo knows, as your Jewish great-uncle might say, from dancing. She can curtsy with the best of them; she knows how to pirouette and spin; she'll sometimes suggest a game that revolves around suddenly stopping, en pointe. In Cape Town, she liked to visit a frozen yogurt store (banana and honey smoothie, please) that played mellow house music, under lights that warbled through a range of pastel colors: typically, she'd start swaying at some point, and her two little arms would become aqueous, expressive tools in the service of dance. Heck, the girl likes to wear tutus in her down time: she loves, like so many kids her age, not merely dance but also the trappings of dance.

Does the video above, taken at Port Discovery last week, show Cleo dancing? Not in the formal sense: there's no routine, no given series of steps. And there's no accompanying music; Cleo's simply moving across a pad onto which are projected images of a lily pad, of fallen leaves. But I'd argue that formal distinctions don't, in fact, make much sense here. The generic background noise of parents, toddlers, and air conditioning units is a sort of music, and Cleo's elliptical orbit, if not precise, is certainly expressive. At 3, in short, Cleo is still at the age where dance and life and music are still seamlessly integrated in both principle and practice. The definitions of the aestheticians will have their day, in time: for now, words, activities and spheres overlap.