by Henry Alford
“That’s fine,” Drake said. “Not everyone has to do every move.”
Ah.
When anything goes, anything goes.
* * *
I knew that, of all the dancers, I was the one who most needed the precious extra practice time that Friday’s optional tech rehearsal would offer. Yet, bewildered by the somewhat loosey-goosey approach to the whole proceedings, not to mention Drake’s having saved the most technically challenging move for the last seven minutes of rehearsal, I now decided to abstain from the tech rehearsal. As a political act. As a vote of no confidence in myself. Granted, this was hardly the stuff of Nureyev defecting from the Motherland, nor of a Rockette announcing that she didn’t want to dance at the Trump inauguration. And yet. Also: since Drake had thrown a bunch of new moves at us in the last rehearsal, who knew that he wouldn’t do it again at the tech?
My decision spelled my demise. Because, had I gone to the tech rehearsal, which was held at the strange hour of 10 p.m., I’m quite sure that the next morning I would have woken up groggy and out of sorts, as I do whenever I’m up past midnight.
But instead, on the morning of the performance, I woke up at my usual 7 a.m. and, registering the fact that it was a sunny Saturday morning, acted on my feelings of amorousness by rolling over onto Greg and proceeding to make love to him.
At which point I threw my back out again.
* * *
An hour later, I wrote a plaintive e-mail to Wildish’s assistant explaining that I was hunched over and radiating with pain and wouldn’t be able to make the performances. I asked, “Will this keep one of the women from being able to perform? If so, I’d love to buy that person flowers.” The assistant wrote back promptly, saying, “No need to worry, everyone will go on, no need for flowers.”
That night I hobbled over to Peridance. A fifteen-minute walk took me forty-five minutes. On arrival at the school, I was brimming with shame—not because of how I’d thrown my back out, but that I’d done it all, and that I’d seen fit to do so twelve hours before curtain. This Uncle Drosselmeyer had no Christmas gifts to dispense because he was using the nutcracker as his walker.
In Peridance’s lobby, I noticed one of my pas classmates walk by, whereupon I instinctively ducked around a corner so she wouldn’t see me. I stood at the back of the theater to watch the show (sitting was hugely uncomfortable, as it would be for three weeks). But then I got nervous that Wildish might notice me and maybe even acknowledge me in front of the crowd, so, for the pas presentation (which was lovely, if much looser than the other classes’ offerings), I sat. I scooted out immediately after the show, opting to send my congratulations to Wildish via e-mail.
The next three weeks were a slightly challenging and self-questioning time for me. I felt like I’d broken a contract. All creative endeavors that you take on with other people, dance included, are bets that require a leap of faith: I’ll believe that you can muster up some innovative choreography if you believe that I can artfully configure my person into that choreography’s demands. But as soon as one of you calls the other’s bluff, you endanger the implied contract, and you hold it up to the harsh sunlight and start fixating on the fine print. In no way did I feel like Drake or Wildish were responsible for my back. But I’d foundered on the brink of my grasp exceeding my reach.
It took three weeks for me to be able fully to sit without soreness or pain. I stopped going to any dance classes. I visited a chiropractor, an accupuncturist, two massage therapists. I spent a lot of time lying in bed or, even better, on the floor. I developed three ugly blisters from hot compresses. Once I could swim again, I swam many, many laps with a delicacy befitting bomb-dismantling.
It took six weeks for me to start going back to Wildish’s Absolute Beginners class. Two weeks into my reentry, I was having lunch one day with my friend Jenny, who asked me how my ballet dancing was going. Alluding to the varying types of ballet dancers—from danseur noble to demi-caractère, all the way down to grotesque—I mused, “I’m not a danseur noble anymore. My noble has left the building.” Jenny clucked sympathetically. And then I uttered the statement that older dancers throughout the centuries, while peering over elegant, porcelain demitasses, have unbosomed to their confidantes: “I’m trying to go a little more demi-caractère with my barre work.”
With time, I got back up to speed. When I ran into an acquaintance on the street one day, I told her that over the summer I’d started taking ballet but had thrown my back out. She asked what ballet move I’d been doing when it had happened.
“It wasn’t during a class,” I said. “It was while I was doing something very intimate to my boyfriend.”
Her eyes widened, and she started to gasp.
I reacted instinctively. “Not a blow job!” I said with a huff. “I wasn’t giving a blow job!”
You see, I may not be the best refrigerator salesman in town. I may exhibit tentative pliés, an impressionistic grasp of choreography, and the stamina of a six-week-old infant with the flu.
But I have my pride.
DANCE AS REBELLION
1.
IN HIGH SCHOOL—THIS IS around the same time as I went to the Gold and Silver and to Studio 54—I finally started enjoying going to school dances. The ones I’d been to previous to this, when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, had been a squeamish agony. The pain of trying to look like I was enjoying myself on the dance floor was second only to the fear that my classmates would think I was lonely if I stood too much on the sidelines. I remember once, while lurking on the edge of the cafeteria at a school dance in sixth grade, anxiously removing my shoe and shaking it as if there were a pebble in it, simply to look busy.
But at boarding school a few years later, where we’d bop around to the Rolling Stones and KC and the Sunshine Band, I was glad to pierce the awkward sexual tension of adolescence and to dull the daily throb of homesickness with aerobic activity. Yes, the anxiety I’d felt about looking lonely still persisted here in high school, but the venue for this discomfort had changed from the dance floor to the dining room. Lest I look like a loner when I walked into the dining hall for dinner at Hotchkiss, I’d started lurking outside the door of the hall and then glomming onto any group that entered; or I’d enter the hall at the very end of the allotted dining hours, when most people had already eaten and cleared out; or I’d just skip dinner altogether. Hotchkiss didn’t have a prom, but I was able to harness all of the anxieties that such an event might foster, and then to wallpaper these anxieties over the course of an entire school year, solely through the medium of dining hall arrival.
But at Hotchkiss dances, the lonely/popular axis seemed easier to negotiate than it had at middle school because the crowds were larger and the lights dimmer. Also, there was, compared to the folks who’d showed up to my earlier dances, a higher incidence of nonconformists to rally around. I always tried to dance with my classmate Heidi, a particularly free spirit on the dance floor; in motion, her hair looked like the Static Electricity Ball photo in a science museum brochure. I longed to be as uninhibited as her, both on the dance floor and off.
When I went off to New York University in 1981, my opportunities to dance, usually at discos or in bars, doubled or even tripled. To a quavering young person who was trying to smother his homosexual impulses because he thought to do so would make his life easier, what I saw in New York’s discos and bars was both ammunition and incoming gunfire.
On the negative side: beholding a sinuous dancer sinuously and unabashedly boogying with his or her sinuous same-sex partner could, depending on my mood, strike me as hedonistic or wanton. I’d been kicked out of boarding school my junior year for smoking pot and drinking, and now felt burned by my fun-seeking ways. I certainly hadn’t, as a result of my expulsion, turned prudish about partying or getting my freak on, but I was keen to find examples of alternative culture that were orderly and unthreatening. There’s a particular disco move that made me uncomfortable: closing your eyes and rocking your head with an
opened O-mouth, you rub your hands up and down the sides of your head as if trying to force the nut butters stored in your cheeks to ooze out of your ears. The look is one of pure abandon, and it struck me as overripe—a dog with worms who rubs his anal glands against unsuspecting surfaces.
But there was a positive side, too. If the motivator that goes by the name “keep the party going on” is an excuse to engage in a lot of numbing, ultimately unhelpful behavior, this same movement toward uninhibitedness can open your eyes to things you heretofore hadn’t appreciated. Sometimes when I walked down the street in New York, good-looking dudes would stare at me. I’d look down at the sidewalk. I knew that these stares were invitations, and/but they unsettled me.
But at discos, in the half-light, my internal monologue got drowned out by the eddies of movement and sound, and my body became host to a free-floating sneer of delight. The dance floor clearly wasn’t the real world, and thus my actions thereon would bear no consequences. One night at the disco Xenon, having closed my eyes for twenty seconds while boogying, I opened them and noticed that a handsome male dancer ten feet away was staring in my direction. He smiled at me.
By 1982, I had started frequenting a large, beer-smelling gay bar in the East Village called Boy Bar, where I liked to dance. I met Mark, one of my first serious boyfriends, there. I met a magazine editor to whom I sold my first article.
I had started to smile back.
2.
Because the use of dance as a mechanism of rebellion is an act of defiance, the Rebellion function shares a lot of similarities with the Political one. However, this rebelliousness may or may not have a mandate or desired outcome—it may simply be a spontaneous reaction that bears no message or intent. In many instances, the vividness and wildness of dance-as-rebellion is possibly rooted in the fact that so many of us experience body shame early in our lives, and later find ourselves casting off this taint via bodily thrashing: there’s nothing subtle about twerking or the Electric Daisy Carnival and its three hundred thousand arm-pumping party makers.
Indeed, neither I nor twerkers nor Electric Daisy–goers—nor Rosie Perez ferociously popping and shadowboxing to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” in the opening credits of Do the Right Thing—were the first young twentieth-century Americans to deploy social dancing as a mechanism of rebellion. Consider, for instance, teens in the teens.
“During the pre-war Ragtime Era,” Richard Powers, the Stanford dance historian, has written, “many young Americans had been chastised by their elders for a number of violations against decency, including using slang, dancing low-class dances, and enjoying syncopated music with African-American influences. Progressive women were especially criticized, for abandoning the corset, wearing shorter skirts that exposed their ankles, cutting their hair short, and leaving the ‘separate sphere’ of their domestic domain to be socially and politically active in the public arena.”
So, in the 1920s, young people responded to these criticisms by upping their ante with even wilder dancing and slang, not to mention shorter hair and clothing. They started dancing the shimmy, the bunny hug, the black bottom. But the dance most associated with flappers, of course, was the Charleston, which gained huge popularity when it was performed to James P. Johnson’s song “The Charleston” in the 1923 Broadway musical Runnin’ Wild.
That a woman who dances the Charleston engages in a lot of provocative flashing of her bare knees says a lot about women at that moment in American history. In 1918, World War I had ended, leaving in its wake a lot of widows and women inured to waiting for the men to return. That same year, the country was invaded by the Spanish flu epidemic. These twin engines of mortality impressed upon many women the idea that life is short. Two years later, women had won the right to vote, giving credence to the long-burgeoning belief that the fairer sex should be able to behave just as freely as the menfolk did. Women started initiating dates with men in greater numbers. Stir into this pot many young women’s contempt for Prohibition and the temperance movement, as well as fashion’s response to the economic boom (the increase in leisure activities like golf and tennis required looser clothing), et voilà: who wouldn’t want to stoop slightly at the waist in order to dazzle with her patellae?
“But the peak of rebellion in social dancing was really amongst American teens of the 1950s,” Powers told me. “That was one of the few times when a whole generation of adults has presented a unified condemnation of a youth culture.”
It is the defining hallmark of the teenager to feel both marginalized and choked by rules. But for 1950s teenagers such feelings were particularly acute. The threat of nuclear war and the Communist menace had inspired in the older generation an almost parodic interest in the virtues of raising families in calm, orderly environments, which in turn prompted them to draft a lot of rules about hair length and appropriate language. At the time, there were no TV or radio shows addressed specifically to teens, so when teens started to hear music about young love and moonlight and fatal car crashes, it was like the hand of God descending from the sky.
Most of the dancing that American teens did in the 1950s was swing-based. Each community or region would develop its own variation or style—both because it was fun to play with the form, and because kids didn’t want to dance the way that their parents did. In one high school the dancing might be low and smooth, Powers told me, and in another it might be angular and wild. The demise of this micro-artisinalism was spelled, though, on August 5, 1957, when Dick Clark convinced ABC to broadcast American Bandstand nationally, at which point young dancers across the country started taking their cues from the same source.
When the older generation saw how galvanizing all this music and dancing was to teens, they lashed back, particularly when the source of the swinging was African-derived. Rock-and-roll records were banned, students were kicked out of schools, dances were shut down.
Perhaps you’ve seen the chilling documentary Hairspray.
3.
With social dancing, the catalyst for rebellion would seem always to be repression. Against a backdrop of police brutality toward black citizens in the 2010s, other young dancers launched into the crotch-thrusting Whip and the Nae Nae; faced with the economic recession of the 1970s, some bold young folk rose from their bar stools and hurled themselves into the punk idioms of pogo dancing and moshing (come 2017, though, some punk bands, in response to requests from women and minorities, started abandoning mosh pits at their shows and introducing “safe spaces” instead: angry but sensitive!).
With concert dancing, a certain amount of repression is an effective catalyst of rebellion, too. But my research suggests that it might also help to have a name like Isadora, Martha, or Twyla.
* * *
To most contemporary minds, the name Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) conjures up two things—long, flowy movement enhanced by long, flowy garments; and a long, flowy garment (her hand-painted silk scarf) getting inextricably caught in the spokes of a car wheel. (It was an Amilcar, not a Bugatti as is commonly thought.) But the woman who made bare feet the symbol of modern dance was a whole lot more.
In the nineteenth century, female dancers had been occasionally idolized and almost always suspected of loose morals, but Duncan, who rejected the tight-fitting clothing of her day, helped smash those stereotypes by inventing her own way of moving and pronouncing herself a full-blown artist. Identifying herself as “an Enemy of the Ballet,” she tackled the artistic establishment and did so without credentials or institutional backing or family money. Indeed, she even had the audacity to lecture the wealthy about the evils of money while hitting them up for donations.
Born in San Francisco, she dropped out of school at age ten because she found traditional education stifling. She would go on to endure much personal tragedy in her life—in 1913, when she was thirty-six, her two young children would drown when their runaway car plunged into the Seine, and she’d lose a third child in childbirth a year later—but she emerged resolute and mission-bound.
Scorning scenery and costumes and popular music, she was the first dancer, or among the first, to dance to “important” music that had not been written expressly for dancing (e.g., Chopin, Beethoven), which shocked the art world. She vowed never to marry (this didn’t quite pan out) and had hundreds of lovers. She danced while pregnant and unwed. When she moved to Moscow in 1921—she was passionate about the tumult that led to the creation of the Soviet Union, and wanted to start a school there—she choreographed dances full of fury at social injustice, and declared, “Yes, I am a revolutionist. All true artists are revolutionists.”
Her own dancing was polarizing. She danced barefoot during a time, the Belle Epoque, when piano legs were often covered so they wouldn’t excite men. She did not have a dancer’s body (all the drinking couldn’t have helped: her nickname was Isadorable Drunken). Balanchine thought she looked like “a drunk fat woman who for hours was rolling around like a pig.” But for a more nuanced view, here’s what choreographer Frederick Ashton told TV interviewer Dick Cavett about seeing Duncan perform in London around 1920: “There was a lot of galumphing, and she was getting quite stout in a way, but nevertheless there was some extraordinary force of personality, and a system of dancing which was to me absolutely fascinating. She had a wonderful sense of repose and stillness which was, you know, incredible, and I mean, really, she’d stand still for a very long time, and you thought, ‘Well, when on earth is she going to move?’ and suddenly she would just put out a hand and it was magic.”
Though she may not have been as free-spirited as her reputation suggests—the writer Peter Kurth has pointed out that she took lessons when she was a dance hall performer, and that she was a “chaste nymph” until twenty-five—she nevertheless emerges an avatar of free will. An atheist and a bisexual and a Communist sympathizer who had all three of her children out of wedlock, she was not afraid, even in the middle of performances, to weigh in on the topics of the day. Her thoughts about dance were particularly fiery: she thought ballet called for a “deformed skeleton” and “sterile movements.” She thought the Charleston looked like a series of “tottering, ape-like convulsions,” and that jazz rhythm should remain the province of “the South African savage.”