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. Where once I was afraid of dancing, with the right soundtrack I can now dance, 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 will be dancing.
Dancing is unserious. 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 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. Feeling stuck? Bust a move. 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 the Jes Grew that is sweeping through 1920s America. The Order of the Wallflowers, a sinister cabal of white power originating in the Knights Templar, is attempting to stamp out this jungle fever dancing virus in order to maintain the dominance of hegemonic—and humorless—monotheism. Here, white stick-up-the-butt seriousness deploys prohibition, inhibition and violent repression against all of the viral powers of Blackness; or what has been referred to more recently as Black Joy.
But Europeans have regarded dancing as a virus prior to modernity. Like for example the danse macabre dancing craze that fell upon whole villages in the high-weird high middle-ages in which the inhabitants, transfixed by non-stop dancing, would literally dance themselves to death. We look upon this terminal dancing trance, today, with fascinated horror: what was that? Ergot poisoning is one pretty good theory making the rounds: that is there is something in Caliviceps purpuria (the psychoactive and toxic parasitic fungus periodically found 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 Bergheim in Berlin. Acid, and maybe ergot too, makes one far more susceptible to the dancing trance. This trance, in fact, is ancient and was known once upon a time in a ritual setting as Dionysian intoxication and, according to Ishmael Reed, was the means by which nature speaks through humankind; it was a god and a ritual that, originating in Egypt, is African.
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.
