When Your Ass Hears the Ecstasy: On Dancing
I grew up in a culture where dancing was a sin. At the small Christian “liberal-arts” college that my parents had attended, and that my grandparents bribed me to attend, I was made to sign a contract—the lifestyle statement—in which I promised to do no dancing, amongst other gross iniquities. Were I to break the contract, black marks were dispensed and disciplinary measures were enforced; youth pastors would pray over me and ask God for my forgiveness. It was a Swedish Baptist school and, like the puritanical Baptists in general, they held a great distrust and hatred of the body. Why don’t Baptists have sex standing up? Because they are afraid it will lead to dancing. This interdiction against dancing always struck me as absurd because, well, I never wanted to dance. Like my parents I was indifferent to dancing; nor did we even know how to dance; it was as if we were immune to the dancing spell cast by music. We could nod our heads to a song, but shake our ass? Never.
I have since taken it upon myself to marry outside of my culture. This has had the benefit that, somehow, I’ve gotten over my inhibition and learned how to dance. Where once I was the wallflower and would stand cooly in the corner at a party while other people danced wildly, I have now, with the insistent encouragement of my spouse—who is Indian—discovered the manifest powers of spontaneous dancing. If I was once afraid of dancing, with the right soundtrack I can now dance like a goofball, in front of anybody, at any moment.
From my minimal dancing experience, I’ve made a number of startling conclusions:
One does not need skill to dance. The trick is to move your ass to the rhythm. The ass leads and the body will follow. If the butt is prancing, there is dancing.
Dancing is nonserious. While there are many serious dancers who dance seriously, the key to dancing, for me, is to get over my mood of uptight humorlessness and surrender to just how goofy my moving body is. It’s no wonder that certain popular jazz and blues dances in the recent past had names like Black Bottom, Funky Butt and the Boogie Woogie. The key to dancing is to have a sense of body-humor and to turn it on.
Dancing moves energy. There is no better way to shift the vibes than by spontaneously dancing to James Brown.
It has likewise recently become obvious to me that my culture’s stuffy resistance to dancing is a resistance to Blackness. The novelist Ishmael Reed lays out this antagonism between black dance and white prohibition in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo that concerns a blues and jazz dance virus known as Jes Grew that is sweeping through 1920s America. The Order of the Wallflowers, a sinister cabal of white power, together with the Knights Templar, are attempting to stamp out this jungle fever dancing virus in order to maintain the dominance of a hegemonic—and humorless—monotheism. Here, white stick-up-the-butt seriousness deploys prohibition, inhibition and violent repression against all of the viral and vital powers of Blackness; or what has been referred to more recently as Black Joy.
But dancing had been a virus long before our modern age. Like for example the dancing craze emerging in the high-weird high middle-ages that fell upon whole villages throughout Europe in which the inhabitants became transfixed by non-stop dancing. We look upon this compulsive dancing trance today with fascinated horror: what was that? Hysteria fast-tracked by Ergotism is one pretty good theory making the rounds: that is there is something in Caliviceps purpuria (the psychoactive fungus periodically found growing on rye and barley, and from which LSD was synthesized) that produces an involuntary rave. There is good reason why people can and do dance for 20 hours at the Berghain in Berlin. Acid, and maybe ergot too, makes one far more susceptible to the dancing trance.
Ishmael Reed traces this trance back to the night time raves of the mystery cults in ancient Greece, a ritual setting in which the participants were allowed to go “out of their minds” with dancing and the Dionysian intoxication (likely also involving ergot) a form of telestic madness that, originating in Africa via Egypt, is the means by which “nature speaks through humankind.” These festivals survive today in the form of Carnival and Fat Tuesday, not to mention underground rave culture.
Nevertheless, while dancing on MDMA may be the contemporary version of Dionysian ecstasy (and IMO is nonpareil in human experience—if you know, you know), dancing by no means requires intoxication or “ecstasy” to be ecstatic; whatever the psychotropism draws out from the music is always already there in the music—if you have the ears to hear it. And by that I mean: your ass hears the ecstasy before your ears do.
