The Blog

2022-

2022-09-13 a
DANCING DECONSTRUCTED

VERTICAL EXPRESSION OF A HORIZONTAL URGE

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? They want, evidently, to dance. Why? Why, in the days of my youth, did girls permit themselves to be seized and clumsily pushed about by sweating, overexcited, embarrassed boys? Not only did they permit it, they dressed themselves in taffeta and tulle and strapless bras to encourage its happening, and wept when it did not.

For tears to be evoked, the importance of dances—school, country-club, Saturday-night, tea, square—as a means of gauging female desirability and mateability must be firmly established in feminine nervous systems. Society, to perpetuate itself in an orderly fashion, needs to arrange controlled outlets for the sexual impulses of the young. In the West, couples dancing became such an outlet, a ritual sublimation. For the male, the opportunity to put at least one of his arms around a female, inhaling her perfume, feeling her body brush against his and her palm moisten in his grip, was its own breathtaking reward.

In Homage to Blenholt, by the great Daniel Fuchs, Mendel Munves, a scholarly etymologist, is belatedly taught to dance by the amiable Rita. Taking her into his arms opens him to cosmic speculation:

Munves pressed her tightly to him and shivered. Ooooh, it felt good. Soft, soft. Women were originally built like a jackknife, like a Westchester roll, and all one short round lump, he was thinking, and when God opened them up straight, the body protruded in round curved masses. He hugged her tighter and tighter, his skinny arm on her shoulders aching.

On the other side of the world, where the Japanese were tentatively imitating this risqué Western custom, the hero of the great Tanizaki’s Naomi has a harder time of it, at first:

I remember taking Naomi’s hand and beginning the one-step, feverish with excitement, but after that, I lost all sense of what was going on. I couldn’t hear that music any longer; my steps were chaotic; my eyes were dazed; my heart pounded. It was all so different from dancing to records above Yoshimura’s music shop. Once I’d paddled out into this vast sea of people, there was no turning back and no going forward. I didn’t know what to do.

Another partner, however, settles him down:

But when I danced with Kirako, I was surprised to find how light she was. Her whole body was soft, like cotton, and her hands were as smooth as new leaves. She quickly got the knack of dancing with me, awkward as I was, and adapted herself to me the way an intelligent horse does to its rider. Lightness carried to this degree is indescribably pleasant.

Though he is supposed to lead, a man dancing is a guest of his female partner, welcomed into her province. Girls take to dancing with a mysterious ease and keenness. Lacking a male partner, they will dance with each other, as we see in that ecstatic painting by George Luks, The Spielers, showing two slum girls locked in a musical embrace so energetic that their hair is a blur of brushstrokes. The fondness for conjoined rhythmic motion relates, perhaps, to a gender trait—a female somatic unity, a sense of the entire body as an expressive and erotic means. Men, relatively, are compartmentalized creatures, and in couples dancing the parts—the feet, the tongue, the libido, the diagrammatic brain—go flinging in different directions.

Guide me, master me, the woman’s posture says, as she lifts her arms to be danced with. How sweetly forbearing she is, shuffled back and forth in a pathetically stunted version of what Fred Astaire might have sweepingly done with her graceful compliance. Astaire epitomized the romantic hero as dancing man; his reedy voice, his odd face, his slight build, the trifling nature of his screen personae were all small coin within the largesse of his permission, to his female partner, to dance. Even Astaire, paired with a female, became an excuse for her greater suppleness and grace to display itself, to discover itself, in dancing. It is Ginger Rogers’ trailing boas and shimmering gowns that stick in the mind as tokens of an indescribable pleasure. We remember her face as coolly averted, not so much from her partner’s face as from the naked sensation of dance, an invisible white fire that is engulfing her from below.

The maenads, intoxicated by wine, danced themselves into a murderous frenzy. Eliza Doolittle could have danced all night. Dancing is one of the earliest and most widespread expressions of culture—that is, of human raw material channelled into social form. Stone Age cave paintings show dancing shamans in animal dress. Fertility dances occur from Australia to Alaska. Rain dances reinforce the shaman’s danced appeal to the gods. The upper classes of advanced societies tended to leave dancing to the priests and the peasants. “The cultured upper classes of Egypt do not appear to have indulged in any form of social dancing,” I read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and, “Dancing of all kinds was regarded with disfavor by the cultural and intellectual people of Rome.” No authorities are cited, but I believe it. The Romans did have war dances, however, in which the priests of Mars danced with weapons, while those of Cybele and Attis gashed themselves with knives and potsherds. The people of the Middle Ages had the dance of death, and the slower-paced basse danse. The sixteenth century brought in the galliard, the pavane, the courante, and the volta, whose turns were so violent the lady was sometimes lifted off her feet. The volta was considered impolite until Queen Elizabeth I herself danced it. Dance and indecency go hand in hand. Look at go-go, exotic, and belly dancers. Dancing is both self-exhibition and self-exploration.

Until the twist came along in 1960, it was hard to see your female partner. She was a piece of waved hair, a bare shoulder, a foreshortened upper lip. In the jitterbug, she flew past—and in my high school the boys who could jitterbug were so few the girls jitterbugged with each other. When the twist came along, I was determined not to be left out, and wasn’t. Around eleven o’clock on a Saturday night, the Chubby Checker and Fats Domino records were put on the turntable and our suburban dinner parties shucked their small talk and revealed their Dionysian side. The twist was, for women, one of the most ungainly dances ever devised, and yet they did it, as if knowing that in a year or two it would yield to the frug, at which they could show themselves to subtler advantage. In all of the myriad non-contactual dances that have followed rock-and-roll on its proliferating course, the woman becomes alone with her bliss. When happy, little boys jump and start hitting things with sticks; little girls do a dance.

In the West Indies, the black women wrapped their bodies snug around the mambo, its chickenish head-motions and mincing steps, and the steel drums pealed on and on. In New England, in our ethnically mixed little mill town, the young housewives learned the steps to join in at Greek dances, and affected a Melina Mercouri–esque hauteur as they slid along in the braid of moving feet and interlocked hands. In swinging London, in 1969, the dollies in their minis cavorted by the light of a stroboscopic flash, stamping each pose onto the blackness of my retina like a letter of the Egyptian alphabet. In the Shillington (Pennsylvania) Recreation Hall, in 1943 or ’4, “Mairsy Doats” and Artie Shaw’s slippery “Begin the Beguine” were the records I tried to learn to fox-trot to, not very successfully, though my partner kept murmuring encouragement in my ear. We were eleven, or twelve. My mother, sensing something amiss in my preparations for life, sent me to take dancing lessons in a nearby city, with a plump woman shorter than I though more than twice as old. We strode around her empty studio for an hour each Saturday morning, but it didn’t give me twinkling feet.

I have always been excessively afraid of stepping on women’s toes. They do get stepped on, but it is not the issue, just as—as Norman Mailer once told me—bloody noses cease to be the issue once you put on gloves and begin to box in earnest. I haven’t taken up boxing, and my dancing days are stumbling down to a precious few. This is a sadness to my wife, who took ballet as a tiny girl and loved her Connecticut cotillions. Well, I tell her, life is more than a two-step. But in my heart I fear it is not; we are born (step one) and then we die (step two), and between-times the drumbeat of the pulse demands that we act out its rhythm.

In my lovingly preserved images of women dancing they are sweaty and self-forgetful—hopping up and down to, say, the sixth hoarse chorus of Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” or being cradled in the dreamy last clarinet run of “Stardust,” while the overhead mirror-ball slows. Dancing should be a vacation the body takes from consciousness. I have seen Martha Graham and Margot Fonteyn dance, on the far edge of their long primes, but performance dancing however exquisite has always afflicted me with a slight anxiety—that the shoe will squeak, that the male dancer with his bulging legs and buttocks will drop his quivering burden of ballerina, that some small earthly happenstance will mar the attempted otherworldly perfection. It is the supporting ensemble, in their multiple tutus and undulant anonymity, that override anxiety, and relax the spectacle. Dance should transcend its form. Dance should not be a worry, but worry’s cancellation. If women have more worries than men, by compensation they seem to arrive more readily at shedding them.

Once, in Africa, I watched the staging of a so-called native dance. The most conspicuous item of clothing for the females was a set of colorful flat necklaces bounced up and down in picturesque tribal synchrony. Some of the women were young girls, and as I watched I reflected that, this being modern Kenya, they were probably, otherwise dressed, receiving sound neo-colonial educations and preparing for progressive careers in engineering or civil service. One of the girls, one of the bounciest, caught my eye and seemed to read the mind of this elderly mzungu; her smile, already broad, broadened further, while her necklaces didn’t miss a prehistorical beat. “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Well, we can’t, and that is the beauty of it.

— John Updike

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