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09-08-2006 10:26 PM
I must admit, I absolutely love to dance. When I was a little girl, I was in ballet and tap and hated it. I had no idea what to do. I couldn't remember choreography or sequence or foot placement or any of that. (Music theory still escapes me to this day.) I wanted to my own thing--dance to music the way I wanted. Needless to say, I begged my mom to let me out. I never went to another dance lesson (well, at least not professionally). My next encounter with the art was in musicals. I had a childhood friend who was in a musical twice a year. I also hated musicals. I hated everything about them: the cheesy characters, the predictable plot, the random and unrealistic bursts into song and dance. There was always one scene in which the girls who had stuck with ballet longer than I had trotted out and did a can-can. EVERY musical. It was sickening. Still, I would see pictures of bent-foot ballerinas and tappers with swinging dreds in newspapers and wish I could do what they did. I longed to take advantage of the physical freedom of expression.
I learned how to swing dance when I was fifteen. It was at my childhood friend's 16th birthday bash. This was the same childhood friend in those awful musicals. ALL of the people there were from those musicals--but their dance of choice was the East Coast Swing. I had seen West Coast on TV, but I liked the East Coast cuz it was much easier to learn, consisting of a three step that was fairly flexible and could allow any improvisation to be infused with it. My signature dances in junior high and high school were the twist and the skank. My skank would evolve into a scat and a swing or shoemaking, depending on the rhythm and tempo of the song. It was free, flexible and fun. Anyone, even the rhythmically challenged such as myself, can skank--it doesn't matter.
--But swing! Swing quickly became my favorite. I loved to watch it. It was wild and loose with traces of the classic ballroom era from whence it came. There is really nothing like it to this day. I still enjoy all forms of jazz dance--Charleston, Jitterbug, Lindy Hop, Swing--that whole first half of the 20th century was absolutely golden. Their predecessors at grand balls and highbrow parties could not compare. They were the punctuated equilibrium in dance evolution. All of a sudden, colored folks were tossing the music sheets and cutting it cold, but so hot! And the fever spread all across the whole nation until even white people were doing the Mess Around. From then on, ska came on the scene, introducing the skank by the time it hit London. Back in the U.S., the boys were playing surf by the shore and doing the twist with their girls. We took a cue from that rascal Elvis and found that joints in our pelvis could move to the beat. America had caught a disease that would take ages to shake.
My swing skills quickly went to seed, as I never had the chance to exercise them. Our homecoming dance sophomore year was 80s themed (isn't our ASB so creative?) and needless to say, the 80s did not hold any great hallmark besides Thriller. The bobbing-while-gossiping dance of the Molly Ringwald era never really did it for me. Sure it was fun, but it was forgettable. My eyes were opened to the world of dancing the middle of sophomore year when I went to Blitzfest at my church. Blitzfest is the biggest outreach program at our church, maybe even the biggest youth outreach in LA County. I made the mistake of going with my boyfriend before exposing him to the glorious auditory orgy that was Repeat Repeat, our local pride and joy. The band had come from La Serna, its vocalist, bass, and lead guitar coming from our high school youth group. My boyfriend wasn't a dancer. He liked music that people smoked pot to in the 70s. I did to, but you can't move to that stuff unless you're on an acid trip. I admit, I didn't know how to move to Repeat Repeat's sound either, but I was going to find out. All I knew after the second song was that I wished I was up by the stage instead of by my boyfriend and our equally clueless classmates. The sound was like nothing I had heard before. Shows I had attended were all what we called Emo and Hardcore or hXc. Dancing at those shows was either classified as standing and looking bored or trying to kill one another. Repeat Repeat was like nothing I had ever heard before. Instead of melding together, each instrument had its own unique, namable voice. The four conversed together in a melodic chatter that carried the presiding voice of Brandon whose songs defied all reason, all normalcy, all convention. The sound was audacious, scandalous, and beautiful. Most bands aiming for uniqueness fail at composition or composure, but this one--this one was the example to set for them all. Who knows how many influences these boys had! There was too much there to swallow at once. It had to be chewed, mulled over, ruminated, and digested. This process was done by dancing. If one moved, she could make sense of the noise, like how if she kicked and lashed out, she would understand Hardcore. Music was made for motion. Or was motion made for music?
The next show they had, I did not waste. I went out and danced with gal friends, with guy friends, with the air around me. I changed my step, my movement, my groove as often as I pleased, because there were no rules. No law governed here. It was all in perception. Truth was relative. It was as if this space between bodies and the stage was frozen in time, isolated from reality. It was a realm that provided the direst of all bliss. Nothing could compare to the feeling of closing my eyes and stomping and waving and swinging. When I opened my eyes, there was everyone else, lost in the soma of Repeat Repeat. The air was frantic, hot, and heavy. Shoulders heaved in all directions. I sang along. I knew this language. I danced back to back with my friends; we rubbed our shoulders and shimmied as low as we could go. I grabbed my guy friend and danced face to face with him, both of us expressing what the music said to us. So what if we didn't match? There was passion and there was space, what else was necessary? With every mention of the lyric "let me see you shake it in you red dress", I felt my body become new, full of pulsing seizures and fluxes.
It seemed I had found the solution to my dancing problem--Repeat Repeat. Oh, but it didn't end there. I went to a mewithoutYou show and felt my world anew. There is no dance for their music, or maybe you don't dance to their music. Maybe you close your eyes and let the imagery grasp you, let it coat the insides of your eyelids, let it choke you. I yelled the lyrics back to the singer, Aaron. I closed my eyes and forgot the world. Aaron's notoriously beautiful lyrics pervaded my soul, took hold of me. "He made the world a grassy road before our bare, wandering feet and crushed the stones into the softest sand between our toes, but were wondering where to sleep." I could see scenes of my life go past my mind's eye in altered motion. It was as if this music spoke to my heart, telling it to recall those sights, sounds, and feelings--all the things I was mad about, all the things that made my happy, all that gave me relief. I can't even describe to you how I danced. I moved how the music told me to, as I had always done, and this music said purge yourself and so I did. It was as easy and free and careless as falling asleep. Unlike the atmosphere of Repeat Repeat, mewithoutYou was not suspended in time, no, it seemed to take me on a journey that was many hours, even days long so that when it ended, I was surprised that the sky was still dark, that my cell phone only said 11:45. Nor was my mind focused on physical frenzy. My body responded to the torment or repose within my heart instead, jerking around wherever my heart commanded.
It is only recently that I have gotten back into the groove learning to dance. Through the pain of my lack of flexibility, the frustration of not understanding counts, and the confusion of foot placement, I am now as much as ever seriously convinced of the human's need for music. People who don't like music either never grew up around it or have no soul. Everyone likes the sound of steel drums or piano or violin. It's fundamental. And it's natural to start tapping a foot to the rhythm or bobbing one's head, or feel the urge to clap with the snare. It's fun. It's that simple.
What is utterly and indescribably fascinating about dancing is how consumptive it can become: you do whatever you want just because you can. Everyone has forgotten they have a name or a personality. You become one in it. You become another person, able to do more than usual, able to push boundaries. The woman consumed by music says "I can and will dance with whoever I damn-well please". The woman at school and at home is much more reserved. But on the floor, surrounded by a sea of bodies, sweating and pulsing, she is wild; she is home. Maybe this is the way we are meant to be. Perhaps it is this reduction to the almost animalistic world that is closest to our natural being. We were made for movement. By God's holiest order of design, we were made to interpret sound into motion. This is why we have joints in all these untapped areas. We become animals. Men guide their partner across the floor in a ritualistic fashion. Girls rub every inch of themselves on her lucky partner who just tries to remember his rhythm. Or, I will grab my friend's waist, an she my thigh or neck and we will stare into each other as we move, communicating nothing more than the joy of moving. Or he will smile, and I will become like putty.
In Christian schooling, there is this hush-hush, wink-wink about dancing. Most conservatives are still convinced that dancing leads to sex--that it practically is intercourse.
I totally agree. Dancing is just like sex. It is a pinnacle of intimacy that can be felt by many people at one time. No matter how lonely, frustrated, sad, or run-down they felt when stepping onto the dance floor, once there, they share that world, that intimate, secret world. Dance is just as communicative as sex too, if not more so. Dance can plead for rain, praise God, honor a dignitary, express desire. It is an intimate, personal thing. I long to learn the Rumba and Tango and Marenge, those sexy Latin dances where the couple moves as one just as in intercourse, they are one. It is a communication of mindlessness, of forgetfulness, of defiance.
When I have danced in such a setting, stepping with a man in such a fashion that my back rubs across his chest, and his hands shield me from everything else while my eyes can take in all of the mad, hot existence, I have rarely felt more alive. It is this intimate outpouring, this purging of mindless, rootless emotion that makes us feel so capable and real. Or when swinging with a man, hands clasped, it is to know no other motion besides the swing of my hips, the feeling of his hands, the smile on our faces, the look in his eyes. To have my hand on his shoulder and to feel the muscle pull and flex, it is to know strength. Or to have him close enough to my height that we can feel each other's breath on our cheeks, it is to know humanity. Or to have her right next to me, our hearts separated by a layer of fabric and a layer of skin, it is to know nature. To sweat, to see it trickle down his face, brow in half-relaxed concentration, to feel the meaning of the hips, it is to know beauty. This language of body against body can be communicated no other way. I can tell everyone in my vicinity that I love them, that I want them, that I need them, because it is in the eyes, the twist of lips, the twirl of hips. It is my hand in his, Cha-Cha dancing to the Latin beat that makes us closer, that speaks to the heart of the earth. Music, dance--the universal language of passion!
I must admit, I absolutely love to dance. When I was a little girl, I was in ballet and tap and hated it. I had no idea what to do. I couldn't remember choreography or sequence or foot placement or any of that. (Music theory still escapes me to this day.) I wanted to my own thing--dance to music the way I wanted. Needless to say, I begged my mom to let me out. I never went to another dance lesson (well, at least not professionally). My next encounter with the art was in musicals. I had a childhood friend who was in a musical twice a year. I also hated musicals. I hated everything about them: the cheesy characters, the predictable plot, the random and unrealistic bursts into song and dance. There was always one scene in which the girls who had stuck with ballet longer than I had trotted out and did a can-can. EVERY musical. It was sickening. Still, I would see pictures of bent-foot ballerinas and tappers with swinging dreds in newspapers and wish I could do what they did. I longed to take advantage of the physical freedom of expression.
I learned how to swing dance when I was fifteen. It was at my childhood friend's 16th birthday bash. This was the same childhood friend in those awful musicals. ALL of the people there were from those musicals--but their dance of choice was the East Coast Swing. I had seen West Coast on TV, but I liked the East Coast cuz it was much easier to learn, consisting of a three step that was fairly flexible and could allow any improvisation to be infused with it. My signature dances in junior high and high school were the twist and the skank. My skank would evolve into a scat and a swing or shoemaking, depending on the rhythm and tempo of the song. It was free, flexible and fun. Anyone, even the rhythmically challenged such as myself, can skank--it doesn't matter.
--But swing! Swing quickly became my favorite. I loved to watch it. It was wild and loose with traces of the classic ballroom era from whence it came. There is really nothing like it to this day. I still enjoy all forms of jazz dance--Charleston, Jitterbug, Lindy Hop, Swing--that whole first half of the 20th century was absolutely golden. Their predecessors at grand balls and highbrow parties could not compare. They were the punctuated equilibrium in dance evolution. All of a sudden, colored folks were tossing the music sheets and cutting it cold, but so hot! And the fever spread all across the whole nation until even white people were doing the Mess Around. From then on, ska came on the scene, introducing the skank by the time it hit London. Back in the U.S., the boys were playing surf by the shore and doing the twist with their girls. We took a cue from that rascal Elvis and found that joints in our pelvis could move to the beat. America had caught a disease that would take ages to shake.
My swing skills quickly went to seed, as I never had the chance to exercise them. Our homecoming dance sophomore year was 80s themed (isn't our ASB so creative?) and needless to say, the 80s did not hold any great hallmark besides Thriller. The bobbing-while-gossiping dance of the Molly Ringwald era never really did it for me. Sure it was fun, but it was forgettable. My eyes were opened to the world of dancing the middle of sophomore year when I went to Blitzfest at my church. Blitzfest is the biggest outreach program at our church, maybe even the biggest youth outreach in LA County. I made the mistake of going with my boyfriend before exposing him to the glorious auditory orgy that was Repeat Repeat, our local pride and joy. The band had come from La Serna, its vocalist, bass, and lead guitar coming from our high school youth group. My boyfriend wasn't a dancer. He liked music that people smoked pot to in the 70s. I did to, but you can't move to that stuff unless you're on an acid trip. I admit, I didn't know how to move to Repeat Repeat's sound either, but I was going to find out. All I knew after the second song was that I wished I was up by the stage instead of by my boyfriend and our equally clueless classmates. The sound was like nothing I had heard before. Shows I had attended were all what we called Emo and Hardcore or hXc. Dancing at those shows was either classified as standing and looking bored or trying to kill one another. Repeat Repeat was like nothing I had ever heard before. Instead of melding together, each instrument had its own unique, namable voice. The four conversed together in a melodic chatter that carried the presiding voice of Brandon whose songs defied all reason, all normalcy, all convention. The sound was audacious, scandalous, and beautiful. Most bands aiming for uniqueness fail at composition or composure, but this one--this one was the example to set for them all. Who knows how many influences these boys had! There was too much there to swallow at once. It had to be chewed, mulled over, ruminated, and digested. This process was done by dancing. If one moved, she could make sense of the noise, like how if she kicked and lashed out, she would understand Hardcore. Music was made for motion. Or was motion made for music?
The next show they had, I did not waste. I went out and danced with gal friends, with guy friends, with the air around me. I changed my step, my movement, my groove as often as I pleased, because there were no rules. No law governed here. It was all in perception. Truth was relative. It was as if this space between bodies and the stage was frozen in time, isolated from reality. It was a realm that provided the direst of all bliss. Nothing could compare to the feeling of closing my eyes and stomping and waving and swinging. When I opened my eyes, there was everyone else, lost in the soma of Repeat Repeat. The air was frantic, hot, and heavy. Shoulders heaved in all directions. I sang along. I knew this language. I danced back to back with my friends; we rubbed our shoulders and shimmied as low as we could go. I grabbed my guy friend and danced face to face with him, both of us expressing what the music said to us. So what if we didn't match? There was passion and there was space, what else was necessary? With every mention of the lyric "let me see you shake it in you red dress", I felt my body become new, full of pulsing seizures and fluxes.
It seemed I had found the solution to my dancing problem--Repeat Repeat. Oh, but it didn't end there. I went to a mewithoutYou show and felt my world anew. There is no dance for their music, or maybe you don't dance to their music. Maybe you close your eyes and let the imagery grasp you, let it coat the insides of your eyelids, let it choke you. I yelled the lyrics back to the singer, Aaron. I closed my eyes and forgot the world. Aaron's notoriously beautiful lyrics pervaded my soul, took hold of me. "He made the world a grassy road before our bare, wandering feet and crushed the stones into the softest sand between our toes, but were wondering where to sleep." I could see scenes of my life go past my mind's eye in altered motion. It was as if this music spoke to my heart, telling it to recall those sights, sounds, and feelings--all the things I was mad about, all the things that made my happy, all that gave me relief. I can't even describe to you how I danced. I moved how the music told me to, as I had always done, and this music said purge yourself and so I did. It was as easy and free and careless as falling asleep. Unlike the atmosphere of Repeat Repeat, mewithoutYou was not suspended in time, no, it seemed to take me on a journey that was many hours, even days long so that when it ended, I was surprised that the sky was still dark, that my cell phone only said 11:45. Nor was my mind focused on physical frenzy. My body responded to the torment or repose within my heart instead, jerking around wherever my heart commanded.
It is only recently that I have gotten back into the groove learning to dance. Through the pain of my lack of flexibility, the frustration of not understanding counts, and the confusion of foot placement, I am now as much as ever seriously convinced of the human's need for music. People who don't like music either never grew up around it or have no soul. Everyone likes the sound of steel drums or piano or violin. It's fundamental. And it's natural to start tapping a foot to the rhythm or bobbing one's head, or feel the urge to clap with the snare. It's fun. It's that simple.
What is utterly and indescribably fascinating about dancing is how consumptive it can become: you do whatever you want just because you can. Everyone has forgotten they have a name or a personality. You become one in it. You become another person, able to do more than usual, able to push boundaries. The woman consumed by music says "I can and will dance with whoever I damn-well please". The woman at school and at home is much more reserved. But on the floor, surrounded by a sea of bodies, sweating and pulsing, she is wild; she is home. Maybe this is the way we are meant to be. Perhaps it is this reduction to the almost animalistic world that is closest to our natural being. We were made for movement. By God's holiest order of design, we were made to interpret sound into motion. This is why we have joints in all these untapped areas. We become animals. Men guide their partner across the floor in a ritualistic fashion. Girls rub every inch of themselves on her lucky partner who just tries to remember his rhythm. Or, I will grab my friend's waist, an she my thigh or neck and we will stare into each other as we move, communicating nothing more than the joy of moving. Or he will smile, and I will become like putty.
In Christian schooling, there is this hush-hush, wink-wink about dancing. Most conservatives are still convinced that dancing leads to sex--that it practically is intercourse.
I totally agree. Dancing is just like sex. It is a pinnacle of intimacy that can be felt by many people at one time. No matter how lonely, frustrated, sad, or run-down they felt when stepping onto the dance floor, once there, they share that world, that intimate, secret world. Dance is just as communicative as sex too, if not more so. Dance can plead for rain, praise God, honor a dignitary, express desire. It is an intimate, personal thing. I long to learn the Rumba and Tango and Marenge, those sexy Latin dances where the couple moves as one just as in intercourse, they are one. It is a communication of mindlessness, of forgetfulness, of defiance.
When I have danced in such a setting, stepping with a man in such a fashion that my back rubs across his chest, and his hands shield me from everything else while my eyes can take in all of the mad, hot existence, I have rarely felt more alive. It is this intimate outpouring, this purging of mindless, rootless emotion that makes us feel so capable and real. Or when swinging with a man, hands clasped, it is to know no other motion besides the swing of my hips, the feeling of his hands, the smile on our faces, the look in his eyes. To have my hand on his shoulder and to feel the muscle pull and flex, it is to know strength. Or to have him close enough to my height that we can feel each other's breath on our cheeks, it is to know humanity. Or to have her right next to me, our hearts separated by a layer of fabric and a layer of skin, it is to know nature. To sweat, to see it trickle down his face, brow in half-relaxed concentration, to feel the meaning of the hips, it is to know beauty. This language of body against body can be communicated no other way. I can tell everyone in my vicinity that I love them, that I want them, that I need them, because it is in the eyes, the twist of lips, the twirl of hips. It is my hand in his, Cha-Cha dancing to the Latin beat that makes us closer, that speaks to the heart of the earth. Music, dance--the universal language of passion!
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