Let's Dance
How dance can save the world (or just your life), part three
This is a short one. A stab at “engagement,” if you will, wrapped in a blanket of research. Or is it the other way around?
When I walked into a dance class in 2023, after thirty years away, I joined the ranks of thousands of adults motivated to do the same. Just check this recent article in Glamour (The Joys and Pains of Adult Ballet)! Or if that’s not enough how about the New York Times (Ballet Is a Great Workout for an Aging Body), or the LA Times (Ballet is Back)? Even the professionals are hip to the movement (Why Adult Ballet Dancers Should be Taken Seriously).
Ballet, per usual, is sucking up all the air in this conversation. But while there may be less media excitement around adults returning to Graham classes or Horton technique, based on my own explorations of modern and contemporary classes around Chicago, I can attest to a sizeable population of adults who are also still out there on the marley working on their contractions and their lateral stretches, and so much more.
Ballet, modern, hip-hop, jazz, improv, pole, aerial, burlesque … I haven’t even gotten to social dance. But you can’t deny it: people are dancing.
Why?
Of course it’s good for you and feels good, endorphins and all that, and as the research on the benefits of regular exercise on aging bodies continues to pile up, I expect to see more and more older dancers in coming years. But you could also do CrossFit or HIIT, go to yoga, pilates, or Pure Barre. You could play pickleball or run the marathon. What are people getting out of dance class that they’re not finding anywhere else?
I have my theories; there is some data. As American culture has become more diverse and heterogenous, dance — long coded as “girly” or “gay” — has become more accessible and acceptable. TikTok, of course, is in there somewhere. But top of (my) mind lately is the idea that with our every professional and social move increasingly mediated through screens, dance offers an experience that is undigitizable, as I wrote last week. This immutable fact offers not just a chance for an individual to put down the phone, and experience all the consequent benefits, about which there was a story on NPR just this morning. It also offers a space to collectively get out from under the thumb of surveillance, tracking, and the grim deliverables of the current cryptofascist takeover.
See, for example, the takeaway from this excellently succinct essay, which I stumbled upon over the weekend: “AI does not not have ass to shake, and it never will.”
In the 2023 NYT essay pictured above, Gia Kourlas doesn’t quite deliver on the grandiosity of its title, but her conclusion hints at the metaphysical underpinning of the proposal, salto, ergo sum:
As the world gets darker, and it will, remember that we all have the capacity to be everyday dancers. But it's more than capacity: We just are.
So, my question to you: Do you dance? If so, how and why? And if not, I’m curious to know the answer to that too. What stories do you tell yourself about why you do or do not dance? Are they true? Let me know in the comments! I’m working on writing a longer piece (and also a book proposal) and I may want to follow up with some of you, down the road.
Thanks!
A recent dream that seems relevant: My dream was so weird!
I dreamt that I was arguing with the billing office at the hospital where I teach, because they were slow and inefficient to pay me the next $3,000 for my writing workshop (true story ha). But because I was arguing with them, I was forced to get ready for a small breast surgery. The woman who is the chair for the Center of Digital Research and Archives at the University of Nebraska was performing the surgery. But right before it began, she told me she was going to have to do a “full explant surgery” to remove my implants without anesthesia because that’s what the State mandated after all the trouble I caused. I got up from the operating table, said “No way,” and yanked out the catheter which was also somehow a breathing tube.
In doing this, I turned the world into gray ash and stone, filled with violence and guns and men flaying people alive. My family and I all knew we had to try to find somewhere to go, so we booked plane flights to the other side of the world “which wasn’t much better but was better than this” according to the dream. We’re all in line at the airport, my parents and loved ones all get on the plane but some bad person had stolen my ID so I’m not allowed on. We decide they should leave while Lois, the TSA attendant (who in real life is the sweetest secretary at the Sentara cancer center where I get chemo) says she’ll remain behind with me and help me make a new ID. She goes to the photocopier store across the street as bombs start going off. I hide all my colorful clothes underneath a conveyer belt at the airport and change into black dress pants, a black blazer, a black fedora, red tassel socks and black tap shoes.
I start dancing in the streets amidst the bombs, waiting for Lois to finish with my fake ID or waiting for the world to end, whichever comes first.
I dance a lot in my dreams. In real life, we have Friday night dance parties at home with my five year old.
Hi Martha, I am way into your writing and your way of being in the world. I've recently written a book, Never Ready, which will be available June 20. I worked at the Paul Taylor Dance Company when we lost two of our nine men to AIDS. I waited decades to write about 'working at a circus during a plague;' I just wasn't ready.
Then as I finished the first draft, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. I would love to talk to you about all of it and share an advanced reader copy. Please visit NeverReady.net and reach me through the contact for a secure link, or just to talk about your writing, female creativity, the beauty of dysfunctional dance families, or anything else on your mind.
Many thanks; stay well,
Lucie André