Dance, Dance, Revolution

How dance can save the world, part one

You probably know where this is going ….

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

So famously declaimed Emma Goldman — except she didn’t, really. What she said, per her 1931 autobiography Living My Life, was a bit more nuanced than the version inscribed in the historical record via t-shirts and bumper stickers. As a young, impassioned organizer and activist, Goldman did nothing halfway, and that included parties. But one night, after an overly serious young anarchist scolded her, saying it “did not behoove an agitator to dance,” she wrote:

“I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown in my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause should not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.

I was reminded of this robust correction of the historical record by Dana Mills’s Dance as Activism: A Century of Radical Dance Across the World, which came out in 2021 and which I started reading on the train into the city for rehearsal this past Sunday morning. The book is a briskly academic exploration of its subject — a series of case studies of how dance has been deployed as a tool for building an antiracist, antisexist, antifascist world in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I haven’t gotten very far, but I’ve been underlining like mad, even as I stumble through the more Marxist theoretical scaffolding of Mills’s discussion of dance as praxis, understood gloriously as “the ability to pursue radical imaginaries in an embodied shared experience.”

Her focus is concert dance — at least in the early part of the book. Later, it appears to shift to folk and street dance as well. But I’m in the Martha Graham chapter right now, and blown back again by the fact that this slight modern dancer was an international superstar in her day, one so celebrated she was invited to perform at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. An invitation she, of course, rejected, saying:

“I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting your invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible. In addition, some of my concert group would not be welcomed in Germany.”

That last sentence, almost an aside, lashing her own principled stance to the very real danger the German state posed to the bodies of her dancers, be they Jewish or homosexual or otherwise targeted. It speaks volumes — would that Carrie Underwood was listening.

Before I picked up the book I’d been reading the news on my phone. I read about the fear and confusion unleashed overseas by the Trump administration’s capricious gutting of USAID. I read about the racist, eugenicist tweets of DOGE lackey Marko Elez and about the nineteen-year-old hacker Edward Coristine, who goes by the prepubescent handle “Big Balls” and who has access to my Social Security number, and yours. I read about the cancellation of National Endowment of the Arts FY26 “Challenge America” grants, which supported small arts organizations in underserved communities, and about how the new grant guidelines will prioritize projects that “celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250)” and will deny grants to applicants whose work engages with DEI or what the right has decided to term “gender ideology.” (You can sign up for what will surely be a calm Feb. 18 webinar on all this here.)

I turned to Mills’s book for inspiration, and I found it there,

But I also found hope in two other surprising interactions with my phone. One is perhaps obvious, the other obscure, but hear me out.

I don’t care about the Super Bowl and if you’d asked me before yesterday if I thought its halftime show performers were complicit in the brain-damaging violence of the sport and the hypercapitalist, jingoistic violence of its annual cultural manifestation, I would have said yes. And yet.

Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, which I watched after the fact on Monday morning, thrilled me from its Gil Scott Heron invocation to its crip-walking Serena Williams conclusion. Even without the rogue bravery of the dancer who unfurled a Sudan-Palestinian flag hidden in their costume, the whole performance was impeccable protest art. The satirical theatrics of Samuel L. Jackson’s Uncle Tom-ing Uncle Sam put my jaw on my chest — he said WHAT? At the Super Bowl? And the onion of the lyrics peeled back upon themselves, opening up to multiple interpretations — “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music. They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence” — but I’ll maybe leave the parsing of that to others more versed in the verse, and in the whole Drake thing.

Most powerful, to me, was the whole stage of Black dancers who moved with aggressive — dare we say “military?” — precision to form an American flag made up literally of Black bodies wrapped in red, white, and blue, the bodies that built our country reclaiming, subverting, trolling the flag.

At such moments the dancers were exacting, disciplined; at others they just went off, goofing and smiling, their joy a testament to survival in the face of centuries of racist violence. It’s remarkable, to me, that most of the dancers were men, all clad in baggy pants and hoodies. In the hypermasculine sports arena, to see a phalanx of elite male athletes making art with their bodies rather than giving each other traumatic brain injuries was a balm. But perhaps even more remarkable were the women who, contra the NFL tradition of offering up the bodies of female cheerleaders as miniskirted eye candy for the male gaze, were outfitted in equally baggy pants and jackets. OK, they had bare midriffs, which complicates the point. But maybe that, too, is the point: can’t a girl flaunt her six-pack AND take down fascism too?

I loved watching these dancers command the bare stage, roaming, crouching, leaping. As the men clustered around Lamar, snapping and grinning, he challenged the white viewer: “Flip a coin, you want the dangerous me or the famous me?” Presumably choreographed long before the inauguration and the America First chaos of the past few weeks, the whole thing was a multimillion-dollar fuck you to the white supremacist kleptocracy, on the biggest stage in the country. I hear Donald Trump left shortly after.

Dave Zirin, at the Nation, has a better analysis than I can spit out in the limited time I have to write today, praising the show as “an artistic inferno rooted in Black culture, Black poetry, and Black resistance” before going on to demolish its conservative critics as “pieces of soggy Wonder bread.”

Among the many other takeaways — and I’m sure there are folks out there who disagree with me — the halftime show was an argument for not ceding the platform, something about which there is much discourse of late, as Americans seek dual citizenship abroad and writers and just normal people try to sort out how much of their digital currency they want to pour into the coffers of Trump’s billionaire enablers. Closer to home, writers on Substack have been for months agonizing over just how closely they want to be tied to a platform that is also home to transphobes and Nazis, and whose owner has bizarrely hailed Elon Musk as a champion of free speech. To stay and fight in this messy, increasingly toxic arena or to go build a better world on a parallel plane? Kendrick Lamar or Martha Graham? It almost made me believe it could be possible to be both.

Dana Mills writes, of the latter:

“Fascism seeps into the human body, allowing its philosophy to inhabit the viscera and make it a tool for violence and war. But human beings can resist and work within the body, just as [Graham’s] own system of movement allows for a novel philosophy to take hold of human flesh.”

Sunday night, on a stage shaped like a damn video game controller — I mean COME ON — Lamar’s dancers did just that. That’s praxis, baby.

To be continued …