Walk the Line

How dance can save the world, part two

“I hope you’re working on something about the interpretive dance revolution,” a friend texted me this morning. “Signs and chants are boring. More situationist protest art!”

I was, in fact working on writing just that very thing.

Earlier this week, thirty-four people showed up at the Kennedy Center to dance. Wrapped in scarves and parkas against the cold, they walked, single-file, around the building, performing Pina Bausch’s “The Nelken Line,” a 1982 movement phrase by the late German choreographer that is itself part of a much longer concert piece called Nelken (in English, “Carnations”). The movements are simple, meant to represent the four seasons. In a concert setting, the dancers move slowly across a stage strewn with the titular flowers as the work explores love, cruelty, and human relations. But the piece can be, and has been, performed anywhere, by anyone. In 2017 the Pina Bausch Foundation issued a call for dancers to stage “The Nelken Line” worldwide, and posted a video tutorial on the choreography online, for all to access. Here’s a clip from Wim Wenders’s stunning Pina (2011), in which members of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch dance the line on a mountaintop.

I was moved watching the Kennedy Center dancers, whose simple act of showing up and dancing affirmed the endurance of art, whether it’s inside or outside an institution, whether it’s sanctioned by the powers that be (which it wasn’t) or an act of protest against their destructive, hate-filled actions (which it was) — just read up on the Center’s abrupt cancellation, under the childish control of new board chair Donald Trump, of the national tour of acclaimed children’s musical Finn (about a gentle boy shark who likes sparkles) and, just yesterday, a planned performance by the Gay Men’s Chorus of DC.

For some reason a lot of people on X are annoyed by this simple act, on both the right and on the left. I decided not to go down the rabbit hole, to save my soul. But from what I can gather the right thinks it’s dumb, mocking it as “interpretive dance” (per my friend’s text), and the left thinks it’s hollow virtue signaling; someone compared it to Hamilton. OK my dude.

I was struck by the choice to perform this particular piece. Organizer Kelly King told NPR that she chose “The Nelken Line” because it was simple and easy to learn for all ages (there was at least one child in the dancing line). But in Nelken, the full work, antifascist imagery adds astringent irony to the beauty on display, as the dancers play aggressive childhood games on the flower-strewn stage while surveilled by armed militia and barking dogs. Others are accosted by a scary man in a suit, who demands to see their papers. Bausch was born during World War II and came of age in the activist and avant-garde flowering of the postwar West. She transcribed her own experience of the violence and terror of war onto the bodies of her dancers, who throw each other to the floor, cry, scream, and cling blindly to the walls. In a week when Illinois governor/my guy JB Pritzker made explicit the connections between Nazi Germany and the surging tide of authoritarianism in the U.S., you have to be pretty blinkered to see Bausch’s work as “hollow.”

Her focus throughout her career was on the fine grains of the human condition, the ways we love, hate, harm, and care for each other, and the often violent power dynamics between men and women. She famously said, “I’m not interested in how people move, I’m interested in what moves them.” This insistence on the humanity of the dancer is foundational to her work.

Back in the early 2000s, a group of Chicagoans, including my friend the late and brilliant Dara Greenwald, formed the radical feminist dance collective the Pink Blocque. Dressed in, yes, pink, they performed choreographed dance routines at street actions and protests, to challenge “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal empire one street dance party at a time.” They got some flak from outside and inside the house, from creepy right wingers and men’s rights activists but also from leftists who found them, as Emma Goldman’s critic did, unserious in their attachment to cute outfits and the power of radical booty shake. Personally, I think it’s time for a reboot.

As Dana Mills, author of Dance and Activism, writes:

There are undeniable similarities between dance created for the theater and dance as protest. Bodies moving together in front of other bodies, both marches and performances are underpinned by the same organizing principles. Yet the politics of the dance world are different to a set of bodies assembled in the city-square, claiming a better future for all. This is also, then, a phenomenological inquiry into the experience of activism through movement. What does it feel like to be in a collective of bodies moving together? How does this experience alter our human experience and our relationship to other?

Dance is essentially analog. It exists solely in the moment, in the body of the dancer and in the relationship of that body to those in the shared space. When you dance you are affirming your body’s presence in the world, asserting your right to take up that space. You are affirming your humanity. For women, undocumented migrants, trans kids, and all others whose bodies are under threat from the current regime, this light and simple act carries heavy weight.

Dancing in protest may or may not accomplish actionable deliverables, but it will remind the watcher and, more importantly, the dancer of their shared humanity. Or, as Bausch also once said, “I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel.”

I was reminded, thinking through the Kennedy Center protest, of another instance of of the humanizing power of street dance: the men’s dance that happens in the last episode of Joey Soloway’s Amazon Prime adaptation of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. I call it the “men’s dance,” because that’s how I remembered it, but I was delighted to be reminded that, really, it’s called the “Beauty Dance.”

Throughout the show, a secondary character named Devon has been trying and failing to put on a play. After her on-again/off-again lover Toby strips naked at the site of a oil driller’s “man camp” on the outskirts of Marfa and invites the men, and half a million Facebook Live viewers, to look at her naked body, Devon — who thinks Toby’s performance stripped the men of their agency — ditches the play and decides to stage a dance. She invites all the men in town (a mix of cowboys and artists) and the men from the camp, mainly Mexican migrants, to participate.

“Gentlemen, what we’re doing today is, we’re going to offer up our beauty,” Devon declaims. “We’re going to give our best, bravest, strongest beauty.” The men sway from side to side, stamp their feet, shake their fists, hug themselves. Drums pound, mariachi music kicks in, and these various specimens of rugged masculinity dance, without shame, grinning from ear to ear.

I love this scene so much for everything it says about dance, collective movement, humanity, vulnerability, bravery.

Last weekend I was in Orange County attending a workshop on teaching ballet to cancer patients (a story for another day). One of the many things that came up in the rich curriculum was the idea that moving together fosters trust and connection; that group movement can combat loneliness, and that for a generation increasingly reliant on screens, dance helps people develop proprioception — to understand the location, force, and movement of their bodies in space.

It’s naive, but I like to think that if the technocratic young men now running amok through the halls of power in DC stopped for ten minutes to move together without shame, they too might better understand their humanity, and their beauty — and be better able to extend that understanding to others.

Or to quote Pina Bausch one last time, “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”