A Day of Dance
June 9, 2024
Yesterday was a day of dance.
My mom, my partner Noah, and I formed a trio, and headed to visit our 93-year-old friend named Gil. We were saying goodbye. He was dying.
When our trio joined the room, the somber, yet kind faces of his family said welcome as we entered. Note no one said a word. But we knew they said “welcome.”
Gil’s wife, Joyce, guided me over to Gil’s hospital bed, an unusual prop for this house, but conjured and used for this special occasion. She told me Gil would like to hold my hand. As I sat next to my friend who had taught me to swing dance so many years ago, I clasped his hand, like I had so many years before, and imagined the jazz music swell as I danced with my friend one last time.
This time, our bodies didn’t bounce and shake with movements Gil had brought to me from South Side Chicago. I like to think that Gil’s quivering hand and eyes which fluttered open occasionally let me know that he felt the jazz music I was imagining too. Noah and Mom positioned themselves behind me, flanking me in my duet with Gil. And Gil’s family circled around us, forming a loose ring of love, the bodies and voices in our vast and intricate formation shared stories of dancing with Gil. We talked about his swing dancing group that I had been part of, “The Carolina Hellbenders.”
One of the most important lessons Gil taught us about swing dancing was inspired by great boxing: your movements should be “not fast, but quick.” Gil explained that bulky things like trains might move fast. But we needed to be quick, which involved finesse, precision, sparkle. We couldn’t dance lumbering through the movements. Only that crisp precision would honor this South Side Chicago tradition, and make us dance like great boxers could: “not fast, but quick.” Those words, along with a graphic of a Carolina Hellbender, wrapped around the sides of the T-shirts we wore. Gil designed them, and told us the words and Hellbender had to wrap around our sides so that people could only read it while we were spinning in our dance, arms aloft. “Not fast, but quick” might be a metaphor to apply beyond dancing or boxing; if it is, I haven’t figured it out yet. And that’s really not the point of this dance, so I’ll leave you with that dance lesson, from Gil, to you. May your swing dancing and boxing improve markedly with his words and wisdom.
Like good dancers know to do, we incorporated variety in this dance. While we shared high-energy, funny stories of Gil and the dancing we’d done with him, our hearts sank low in grief and reverence, full of love and gratitude and longing. In my years of modern dance training, when I was dancing low to the ground, I was often encouraged by teachers to use the low level to ground with and connect to the Earth. To feel her supporting me. And to use the energy of support to propel my movements, and to give me strength and trust. Make daring choices. If you fall, the Earth is there to catch you.
Though death is a normal part of life – or maybe life is because of death – I felt Gil, and Joyce, and each person in that room making brave and daring choices; knowing that the Earth was there to catch us. When the hospice nurse asked Gil to open his mouth to take morphine, he rallied his tired muscles to crack his mouth ajar. A daring choice – he had refused the morphine last time she asked. And in that tiny movement of his mouth, he had let us all know he had heard us. Heard our stories. Felt our love. Been actively dancing with the rest of us.
It was time for the dance to shift. I left Gil’s side as one of his children took his hand. My final duet with Gil was over as I joined the ring of support encircling the bed.
Knowing this dance needed to end without us, Mom, Noah, and I clustered near the door, not brave enough to step off the stage, unsure of these movements we needed to make. Joyce knew the movements, graciously guiding us. She came to thank us for coming, and shared a hug, tiny duets with each of us, and we left so that Gil and his family could dance this song’s final crescendo.
—
From here, Mom broke off from our trio. Noah and I traveled about 15 minutes down the road to visit many more people: Sarah and August, more dear friends, were getting married. The dancing for the day was far from over.
—
Stepping into a dance of such different tempo was dizzying at first. My eyes, already puffy and red, were out of step here, as the water-works part of the choreography wasn’t set to begin until the ceremony. My heart, dancing to a heavy beat, mismatched (or…complemented?) the hearts around mine, which were dancing to the celebratory rhythms of newly committed love. The rhythm of my heart danced with the rhythms of the hearts around me. Celebrating Gil and celebrating Sarah and August was advanced choreography, holding such different tempos of love at once.
If you’re not scrutinizing the phenomenon, you might think that being an audience member is a largely passive activity, with only punctuations of active participation: a laugh, an applause, perhaps a standing ovation. I think this gets the relationship all wrong. Performer and audience is much like the relationship between speaker and listener. Contributing well to an audience requires presence and bravery. You have to let the performance change you, like rock carved by the river. And in turn, the small flecks of rock change the river, giving part of herself to the ground below the river, joining more deeply with the river. The rock and the river’s give and take, push and pull, listen and speak, is a dance. And on this day of dance, we danced with Sarah and August, while they performed their duet, exchanging vows with one another, promising to be each other’s rock and river.
After dinner (itself a dance between taste, friendship, community, hungry bodies, and the land) came the first literal dancing of the day. For the dancing at their wedding, Sarah and August brilliantly opted for contra dancing. Contra dancing is a community folk dance, descending from English and French country dancing. I cheekily describe it as “square dancing for hippies.” There is plenty to quibble with in that irreverent definition, but I think it transmits the vibe well enough to be useful – and quick.
So much was “right” about a contra dance at this wedding. Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, with a live fiddler, guitarist, and banjo player, the traditional folk dance paid homage to the community’s roots. It also created a magical atmosphere: strangers across generations were able to safely hold hands, switch dance partners, and make new friends within this special form of dance. People shouted to punctuate moments in the music, cheered for one another as couples galloped through aisles of friends, and got great exercise together, breathing heavily, laughing, and sweating, bare footed in their fancy dresses and slacks in the grass. People asked strangers to dance, making bold choices, knowing that the Earth and the dance were there to catch them.
I caught myself dancing for Gil and with Gil amidst the crowd.
Oh, Gil would laugh at this funny French phrase the caller asked us to shout as we danced.
Ha! Gil would love this saucy choreography.
The night ended in a dance with fireflies. Sarah and August led most of the wedding guests on a slow moonlit walk, audience members to the fireflies’ grand production, their blinks like lightning against the dark clouds of the dense trees behind them. River and rock.
—
I’m now exhausted. Dancing with friends and family and strangers and death and long-committed love, and newly committed love, all at the same time, requires more endurance and presence than I’m used to. But Gil gave me the gift of dance, even on his way to death. August and Sarah gave me the gift of dance in celebration of newly committed love. Holding these two life events next to one another, and looking at them through the lens of dance, makes me wonder if maybe every day of life is a dance. And if maybe life itself is a dance.
—
I have been a dancer my whole life. My parents “officially” put me in dance classes as a three-year-old. In contrast, I only became a writer in high school, in large part thanks to Sarah’s dad, Mr. Bobbe. Words and language are wonderful, but I find them to be a much clunkier form of expression than movement, dance, my first language.
My senior year of high school, Mr. Bobbe asked my English class to write “This I Believe” essays to read aloud to each other and our families as a finale to our time in high school. The “This I Believe” essay genre began in the 1950s – during the Cold War – on a radio show with Edward R. Murrow, perhaps as a way to help fellow humans see each other as fellow humans during a turbulent, scary, era.
My “This I Believe” essay is entitled “The Dance of Her Humanity.” To this day, it is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written. So as I deepen my understanding of my relationship to dance, I hope you will join me in dancing with 18-year-old Lauren as well. In a lot of ways, she is a better dancer and writer than the Lauren of 2024. After all, she doesn’t have a grafted ACL in her right knee, nor the “metrics” brain of a goodie-two-shoes college student trained in economics at an institution of higher learning which “trained me for the labor force” of industrial civilization. I overanalyze. She writes with few headings, no bullet points, clear and vivid imagery, and feeling. I’ll excerpt pieces from her “This I Believe” essay, and use the 9 intervening years (almost to the day!) to layer new perspective on 18-year-old Lauren’s understanding. And perhaps past and present Lauren might learn something new about dance together.
—
If every day of life is a dance, if life itself is a dance, then perhaps each stage of life can teach us something important about dance. Stages of life are the best analogy I have found to examine dance, and to start to uncover what dance means to me. 18-year-old Lauren didn’t know this, but “The Dance of Her Humanity” tracks the stages of life from infancy to adolescence. She leaves off at adolescence, where her expertise ends.
Prenatal / infancy
I’ve always known that movement feels good. Not like the taste of chocolate fondue good -- thick, warm, heavenly, then sickening. Good more like the first stretch of a Saturday morning with birds twittering their “good mornings” to me in my bed-nest; it’s a natural, freeing, rejuvenating “good.”
What past Lauren identifies, here, is the sensuality of movement. It is innate in us. Movement feels good. We are animals. Our bodies are meant to move and stretch and sleep and feel and roll and spin. The sensuality of movement is luxurious and true. Dance, in this form, is basic, raw, deep, and sincere. This is the dancing we all do without thought. But most of us have forgotten what this feels like. Think: the tapping of your toe at a concert, before you realize you’re tapping; or the urge to clap to the beat of the music as a crowd slowly starts to lumber toward that collective expression. This sensuality and desire for dance exists in each of our bodies. And though neither of the Laurens remember what her atoms embodied previously, both of our souls know that all of the beings we helped compose before must have understood the sensuality of movement as well. How else can I explain the exultation every atom in me feels when I move, and stretch, and spin?
Early childhood
My barely-balancing baby body used to bob and twirl for hours, grasping a kitchen chair for stability -- a sort of baby ballet barre.
Motor skills. Emotion. Expression. Starting to put them together. The foundations of art. The foundations of expression. Learning to stand and walk. Linking the sensuality of movement to agency. Understanding joy, anger, envy. Linking the primacy of emotion to events and beings in your life. Dance in this form is bold, trial and much error. This is the era where we learn that we can impact our world in important ways: if we pull our sister’s hair, she will cry; if we step on a spider, he will die. We learn of our power and agency and feel glimmers of justice, and see streaks of injustice. In dance, this might look like trying something basic yet new without fear. It’s challenging to capture how this feeling might show up in our adult lives. I think I felt this way when I first started learning to snowboard. How is it that I could hardly stand up for more than a few seconds with a board binding both of my feet while my partner whizzed down the mountain, launching off of piles of snow, and landing with ease, all before coming to offer a hand to help me up, tears in my eyes? The frustration of learning the basics when we watch others do it with ease. I still feel this sometimes when I’m in the same room as a very spectacular dancer. They do a quadruple pirouette, on their non-dominant side with ease, while I am proud to land a clean triple on my dominant side. They leap 3x higher into the air than I do. I really feel like a 3-year-old gazing at the “big girls” in dance class, their skill far outpacing mine, but nonetheless, feeling proud of my foundational wins, exhilarated to see what’s possible, and frustrated to feel so far away. We aren’t ashamed to fail. In this era, in this world, everybody fails. We must. For how else can we learn?
Kiddo
Dance technique is like learning an advanced sentence structure, or how to use a semicolon. It helps me more clearly express myself, but it doesn’t necessarily bolster the emotion. I can get emotion out in an all-caps, grammatically monstrous jumble just as effectively, if not more, as I can in a well thought-out essay.
The kiddo stage of life is where we start getting good at experimentation, self-expression, and pick up some fancy techniques to aid us along the way. Mingling with these skills is a more-and-more real sense of self. We have dreams and fears. And we are often unashamed of them. We have only started to taste self-consciousness, and are often confident enough to be bold. We have the skills to articulate many of the feelings and movements we wanted to express. Dance in this form captures the sentiment “dance like nobody's watching.” In other words, feel a thing, do the thing. I think kiddo era is the last time most of us were easily able to access doing anything like nobody’s watching. Except back then, it didn’t matter if someone was watching. We didn’t need privacy to be ourselves.
Adolescence
Years of dance classes have taught me the MLA format, past participles, and annoying conjugations of dance, but I haven’t forgotten the power of raw, unrefined movement.
In this era, a piece of ourselves is always judging the rest. Working to understand whether the real human under our own cold, scrutinizing gaze is cool enough, talented enough, pretty enough, smart enough, self-disciplined enough to be worthy. (But worthy of what…?) We want friends and we want to fit in. We want to be accepted and loved. We want community. We want to express ourselves. But there appears to be a narrow band of acceptable expression. For instance, people socialized as girls can be opinionated. But they can’t show it in any form except through hesitancy, self-deprecation, and softness, or else they will be called “Bossy Pants” or “intimidating.” A move like that would lose you friends and social status. And so we get stuck, in a fight between who we are and the person we think we are supposed to be. We negotiate between the parts of our true selves who we know are in there, and the technique, formatting, or styles we’ve been taught are “correct.” When it comes to dance, I think a lot of us get stuck here. When we try to dance freely, even when actually nobody is watching, we can’t. We are watching ourselves, and we can’t live with seeing a real human that doesn’t live up to the vague or unfair or unhealthy or downright impossible expectations we have for ourselves. In the most successful stories here, we may be able to find a niche in those narrow bands of acceptable expression that feel close enough to “true to ourselves.” Or we convince ourselves of that. We find the one pair of jeans that makes us feel really confident. We develop a signature dance move to conjure laughter if we are a “class clown” or praise if we are the “basketball star.” For some of us, our signature move might be heading straight to the punch bowl with a clever excuse for why we can’t dance this song, or the next one, or the next. In all the niche-creation and signature dance move development, we start to lose the dancer in ourselves and begin to take on traits of a choreographer. But we don’t become the kind of choreographer that facilitates the expression of an idea or group. Rather, we become obsessive choreographers of the self.
Young Adult
Unfortunately, from here on out, you’re mostly stuck with just Lauren from 2024. 18-year-old Lauren wisely stopped writing when her experience could no longer guide her.
Young adulthood strikes me as a time where our signature dance moves have been perfected and our go-to forms of expression feel like solid parts of identity. Many of us “come to peace” with the parts of ourselves we have decided will never be what we wish they were, and we start owning static views of those parts of ourselves: “I am bad at math,” “my belly is soft and that makes me ugly,” “I’m not good at telling jokes,” “I don’t dance.” And in “accepting” those parts of ourselves, we pack them away in a box, and put them in the basement of our identities – buried in the foundation of ourselves. “I have accepted it and I don’t have to examine it anymore.” In doing so, we’re really freezing those things we find shameful about ourselves in time. (Of course the spoiler alert here is that those statements of shame about ourselves are often untrue. And even if they are true, they need not be shameful, even if they are static. But often those parts of us are dynamic anyway. We can grow and change and learn to dance.)
To bring in the literal, here, dance in this form is often somewhat refined. Mature, but safe. We reach a plateau. I’ll have you know that in my dance life, I’m probably stuck in this phase right now. There are things that I am good at: leaping, turning, emoting. There are things that “I am bad at”: learning choreography quickly; crisp, small jumps; and lifting my leg high into the air without it being a “kick” (in ballet world, this movement I struggle with is called a “développé”). It’s not that fun to push past this plateau, so I often don’t try. I often stick to what I know. If I get a wild hair, I might take a dance class I have no or very little background in just to mix it up: ballroom, hip hop, zouk. In the same way, I might go to a nightclub with one of my friends just for the cultural experience. But if I fail miserably in those new pursuits, I don’t have to tell myself I am “bad at them” and accept it. I am just trying a new thing for the sake of it. It doesn’t need to be part of my identity because I already have an identity.
Adult
At 27-years-old today, I like to think I’m just entering this phase of life. So I won’t try to say much here as I feel like I’m only starting to understand the lay of the land. But my sense so far is: I don’t care as much about that narrow band of “acceptable expression.” I’m kinda in the mood to just be me and tell everyone else to fuck off if they have a problem with it. Embracing that attitude is taking practice, but it’s an urge that keeps bubbling up over and over again. My identity is in flux again as I start to realize that probably just being a human animal is enough to be worthy of love and acceptance. I’m redefining myself around things that I actually do care about – things that do matter – rather than around things that can be neatly packaged into a college application essay or a LinkedIn bio. I’m starting to take those dusty boxes of shame out of the basement and ask myself “ARE these things true? DO I have to accept them? CAN I change them? Was shame EVER a reasonable reaction to this thing?” In dance, I think this is what it takes to “level up”: I have to throw myself at things. I have to be true to myself. If I want to get better at a thing, I have to do the thing. And do it again. And do it again. And maybe learn a new technique – or learn about a new muscle group. And then do it again. But I only have to change if I want to. And it strikes me, now, that 18-year-old Lauren may have said something wise beyond her years:
I have, over time, learned to take the parts of dance grammar I find useful -- that I find meaningful -- to express myself. Movement is my first language.
She was reconnecting to the raw, sensuality of movement while using the technique that resonated. Perhaps adulthood is about constantly revisiting: is this meaningful, or have I been told it’s meaningful? Is this me, or have I been taught that it’s me? I think past Lauren was right. She just didn’t know how iterative this process would be.
Elder
Here, I keep coming back to my last dance with Gil. He showed me what dancing bravely and beautifully into death can look like. I saw that even in his last moments, we were both able to show up for each other, and for dance: my heart and intention matching his dwindling physical capacity. As an elder, he taught me so many lessons, imbuing each lesson with the fingerprint of his spirit. I can feel all the ways he shaped me, and yet, I can’t know how it felt on his end. I don’t know for myself what it is like to be an elder, and what shapes dance takes on in this stage of life. In “A Tale of Seven Ladies,” my dance teacher, friend, and mentor, Fleming Lomax, shares beautifully her relationship with dance as she starts to glimpse elderhood on her dance horizon. (At the time of the recording, she was only 40, but dance elderhood seems to come earlier than elderhood in other areas of life.) I hope you will listen to her story. My favorite line from her monologue goes, “But now, what I’m left with is a May-December romance because dance is timeless, but I am not.” (Her voice starts around 17:20.) As I see more and more elders taking the stage in my life, I seek to discover the movements, alongside them, that might help dance remain robust and vibrant, even as our aging bodies all slowly lose the capacity to express in the ways we once knew.
And here the music shifts as I turn to you, hoping to dance with those of you who count yourself among our elders. What does dance look and feel like in this stage of life?
I want to learn from 18-year-old Lauren by stopping when my experience can no longer guide me. And in the spirit of learning from all stages of life, I’d love to have 18-year-old Lauren close us out. Maybe I’d quibble with some of her details now. But maybe I’ve been taught to quibble. For now, I’ll just let past Lauren dance, and accept and love who she is and was, and appreciate how she shaped me into who I am today.
Some of my fondest memories include shimmying vigorously alongside my wackily gyrating friends. Those memories are so dear to me because I find an unabashed dance to be a sliver of humanity: the poetic juice of a person comes out in movement in such a sincere, colorful, flavorful series of twistings and flailings and side-steppings that I can’t help but learn something intimate and unique through observation. And there is no wrong way of dancing. All dance is emotion. And every emotion is valid.
For every person to feel free to dance would make my romantic heart content, for appreciating something as intimate as dance seems to be a great lesson in acceptance and understanding. Imagine that quiet, bespectacled, befreckled girl you know expressing herself through dance; and imagine everyone appreciating her fingerprint movement. I believe in her movement. Maybe if she felt her movement accepted and valued, there would come a day when she would feel her thoughts and dreams are important and equal to the thoughts and dreams of everyone else -- and that they are worth and worthy of sharing. Maybe then there would come a day when she would feel free to speak, dress, be...like everyone was watching, understanding, appreciating her for who she is and the distinct, quirky, awkward, beautiful dance of her humanity.