Shall We
Dance?
I confess I was prejudiced against ballroom dancing. In my
mind it came under the scope of that that very useful British adjective naff:
faded, dated and slightly cheesy, lacking any proper postmodern self-consciousness, any
irony. The overgroomed men; the women loaded down with tulle and costume jewelry; those
rigid cabin-attendant smiles... No, not something any self-respecting boomer would want to
be associated with-- much more Paula Jones than Hillary Clinton.
I think what got, and held, my attention was the unexpected difficulty of it. My wife and
I had done a three week crash course in preparation for the Petroushka Ball, an annual
charity affair given by the New York Russian community. In the event, our three weeks of
application left us with only minimal skills. Much more often than not we didn't even know
which step we should be doing. The only thing I felt sure of in this area was that a waltz
goes boom-cha-cha; but a dismaying number of other tunes seemed to go boom-cha-cha,
yet we found we couldn't waltz to them.
And there were some real dancers in the Plaza hotel that night. They were older types,
mostly-- children of Russian aristocrats who had fled the Bolsheviks. Nobody of our own
generation seemed to know how to dance; but these elderly Tsarists were flying round the
floor in a way that was undeniably impressive. You couldn't help thinking-- we could see
our coevals thinking-- Hey, I wish I could do that.
We went back to our local studio and signed up for a full course of instruction. For the
private lessons we were back in the hands of Charlie Wood, who had coached us for the
ball. Charlie soon proved a gifted and imaginative teacher, with a stock of jokes,
anecdotes, mnemonics, props and tricks that make every lesson an entertainment as well as
a workout. Under Charlie's unblinking eye we have tackled ballroom in earnest: the gravity
of the waltz, the cheery insouciance of the foxtrot, the campy flamboyance of the tango,
the odd erotic sparkle of the merengue. Each dance has its own personality, its own
particular appeal to the spirit.
And none of them is merely a matter of steps. Ballroom is a whole-body activity, and is
judged as such. In competitive dancing, when several couples are on a small floor-- as at
our first competition last weekend-- the judges may not even be able to see your feet.
They mark on concepts like "form", "frame" and "connection".
Charlie hammers away relentlessly at these abstractions, striving to make the intangible
real. For "connection" he has us facing each other across a broomstick, holding
it with our hands, trying to keep it still as we move. At times the skills he is imparting
seem to have a metaphysical quality, as if part of some oriental religious discipline.
"Arms firm, head up, shoulders back, knees slightly bent. Good: now get ready to move
your center of gravity. Five, six, seven AND..."
Ballroom dancing is, in fact, quite cerebral. Probably the best attribute a dancer can
have-- other than an appetite for endless repetitive practice-- is a keen intuitive grasp
of Newtonian mechanics: how objects move in space under the action of forces. Our Charlie
is something of a specialist here, and is not shy of using terms like "vector"
and "angular momentum" when describing a movement. After six months of this, I
was not very surprised to find that a chance acquaintance in the competitors' changing
room last weekend was the professor of theoretical physics at Stony Brook University. He
danced a mean samba.
The presence of that professor points up another aspect of ballroom that confounded my
prejudices: its social inclusiveness. George Smith, the franchisee of our local studio--
it is licensed by the Arthur Murray organization-- had a distinguished career in the
corporate world before returning to ballroom dancing, his first love (he comes from a
family of ballroom champions, and was a teenage champion himself). The racial composition
of ballroom is more puzzling. Black faces are rare at the studio; yet there are plenty in
the congregation of my church, three blocks away. Even odder is the absence of Hispanics,
though there is a large community nearby, and half the dances we learn have South or
Central American origins.
George told me this last year has been the studio's best ever. The Wednesday beginner's
class is so crowded there is hardly room to do a box step. The most obvious explanation is
the one offered by George himself: interest aroused by the inclusion of ballroom dancing
in the 2000 Olympics (with a boost, I would like to think, from Masayuki Suo's beautiful
movie Shall We Dance). I believe there is something else going on, though.
To me, as to most who came of age in the sixties and seventies, "dancing" meant
aimless solitary jiggling-- the physiodynamic equivalent of free verse. ("Free
verse?" muttered G.K. Chesterton. "You may as well call sleeping in a ditch
'free architecture'.") Such incoherence cannot satisfy the human spirit for long.
There is, I think, a growing hunger for form and formality, for difficulty, for
discipline, for structure. Similarly, I think a generation that grew up watching videos or
hunched over computer screens feels a pull toward the leisured company of their fellow
men. Such company must always be centered on some common activity-- dining, drinking,
gambling. Of all the available possibilities, dancing is the most healthful, the most fun
to watch, and the most conducive to cheerful socializing and the mingling of the sexes. It
is no accident that half the key scenes in the great nineteenth-century social novels,
from Jane Austen to Tolstoy, are set in ballrooms.
Whether ballroom dancing is really coming back for good, I do not know; but if it does
not, a great many people will have missed out on a great deal of harmless fun, and
civilization will have lost another small battle to barbarism. |