by Henry Alford
The Emotion and Release function can be fraught. The trick for us dancers is knowing when to jiggle and how much to jiggle. Crossing this line can bring accusations of arrogance or wantonness. The Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, for instance, took some heat in 2015 and 2016 for popularizing a dance move called dabbing. Devised originally by Atlanta-based rap group Migos, dabbing is a slightly more stylized version of sneezing into your armpit, but without the sneeze. As TweetBoogie, my hip-hop teacher at Alvin Ailey, explained to my class when she put dabbing into a routine she had choreographed for us in January 2017, “Dabbing is like an exclamation point. It’s like”—here she raised her fist in the air sideways, not straight-on like a Black Power fist—“ ‘Yeah!’ ”
Newton popularized the move in October 2015 when his team was on a winning streak and he started doing it as part of his post-touchdown dancing in the end zone. The craze swept the Carolinas and trickled into other parts of the country, with elderly folks at retirement homes and young women at baby showers joining in on the faux-sneezy fun.
But some people saw Newton’s dabbing as unsportsmanlike. Including a concerned mother who wrote to the Charlotte Observer on November 17, 2015: “I don’t know about your family life, Mr. Newton, but I think I’m safe in saying thousands of kids watch you every week. You have amazing talent and an incredible platform to be a role model for them. Unfortunately, what you modeled for them today was egotism, arrogance and poor sportsmanship.”
Come the next season, Newton, asked whether he would be dabbing again, replied, “I have to put that aside.”
By that September, he’d already devised a new routine for celebrations: a rhythmic dusting-off of his hands, followed by a Superman pose.
* * *
I have the opposite of Newton’s problem: I need to jiggle more. Why can I do stuff on the dance floor—particularly if I’m high or drunk—that I could never do off it?
Some background. I’ve always been able to say things to my cat that I’m too emotionally constipated to say to Greg. “I love you so much,” I’ll tell Linda. “I wish I could take you on the plane with me. When I get home, we will spend many hours lying on the couch and nuzzling.”
It’s not that I’m unable to say this stuff to Greg. It’s simply that I don’t. Or that I do it once every two years. I suppose I’m more apt to be baldly emotional and needy with Linda because she is mute and non-responding; she can’t reflect back my candor and longing to scale, and thus I’m free of potential embarrassment. Linda’s typical response to such endearments is to extend one of her paws toward me as if my face were a touch screen.
I bring this up because, given the details of my formative years that I’ve relayed so far, it occurs to me that you may be wondering if I have a substance abuse problem, or if I’m unable to attend social events without a minder, or if I have a strangled relationship with my sexuality.
No to all of these. However, I’m more or less emotionally closed off. I’m generally unable or unwilling to tell others that I love them; and, outside of hugging family and close friends and family hello and goodbye, I’m a confirmed non-toucher.
“You’re a WASP, yes?” I hear you ask. Indeed.
But the armchair psychologist in me sees most of these traits as more nuanced. Though, yes, anchored in my upbringing. If the person who’s bankrolling your fancy education is homophobic, as my grandmother gave every indication of being, you learn to steel your more lavender impulses. Then, in eighth grade, when you’re sent away to boarding school and you’re intimidated by the experience, your steeliness only helps to shut out the unpredictable world of emotions. You put your nose to the grindstone. Surrounded by competitive and sometimes envious boys, you learn to downplay your achievements.
I remember another hip-hop class that I took from the young, fiery, and sarcastic TweetBoogie. I had grown curious about Tweetie, as she’s called, because I’d seen her teaching in one of the clean, glassy, state-of-the-art Alvin Ailey studios while wearing her Timberland boots. A largish, metallic nameplate on her baseball cap read “BRONX.” I knew she’d be fierce.
Indeed, at the first class I took with her, she mentioned five times the importance of emotion in dance. At one point she told us, “You don’t have to look like a dead doll.” When she saw me smiling at this comment, she asked me, “What is that look on your face?” She walked over to me—this was a biggish class, with about forty students—and told me to hold on to her while we did the routine together. I put my hand on her shoulder. “No, like you’re my peoples,” she said. I put my arm around her waist. We did the routine together, after which she nodded at me with slight resignation, as if to say “That did not cause me to vomit,” and then reminded the class, “If you don’t put any emotions behind the moves, people are gonna look at you like, Whaaaaaaaa?”
When you erect a protective barrier between yourself and the messy intrusions of others, you start to hear the whaaaaaaaas. Statements made to me over the years by friends and lovers have included “You’re half Spock,” “I only know you on the page,” “Try to be a little more effusive than usual,” and “I’m your boyfriend but I’ve never felt like you rely on me for anything.”
2.
Over coffee with my friend Robin one day, I told her that I’d been home-dancing two or three times a week for the past year. She asked me, “Have you done 5Rhythms?” I had not, nor had I heard of it.
5Rhythms, a kind of ecstatic dancing, is a “movement meditation practice” that was created by Gabrielle Roth in the late 1970s. Obsessed as a child with Jesus and the saints, Roth at age seven begged her parents to send her to Catholic school, which they did. In college, she got pregnant the first time she made love; a subsequent abortion left her feeling ashamed and betrayed by her unsupportive boyfriend. Since adolescence, she’d loved the way that dancing in her bedroom to rock and roll had boosted her confidence and helped her escape the duties and obligations of being obedient; but now, according to her memoir, Sweat Your Prayers, “in my dance I began to forgive myself for a sin I couldn’t name or remember committing.” The more she danced, the more she came to believe that “thousands of years ago, some men got together and, in the name of God, separated all matters having to do with the spirit from the flesh. Flesh was denigrated and the body became the enemy.”
How this worldview shakes out for us practitioners is as follows. You enter the studio, which is usually lit with candles or a string of white Christmas lights lying on the floor. Simmering, mood-heavy, instrumental music is percolating—maybe a swirl of synthesizer is eddying around your ankles, or, off in the mid-distance, a scrum of pan flutes waxes increasingly breathy and pre-orgasmic. As you start to stretch out, a teacher’s voice starts softly intoning over the PA system, urging you to relax, maybe addressing specific body parts. This gentle urging continues over the two hours, as the music starts to mirror the five essential rhythms that Roth—who passed away in 2012—thought we operate in: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. (Three adjectives and two nouns: you don’t come to ecstatic dancing for the grammar.) Though 5Rhythms teachers occasionally call a partnered dance and offer specific tasks (“Say hello to your partner with your hips”), there’s otherwise little to no specific choreography. The point is to listen to the music, and to keep breathing and moving.
Initially, I was besotted by the spaces that most of the 5Rhythms classes I go to are held in—one a largish studio at Joffrey Ballet that overlooks the handsome red brick, Venetian Gothic bell tower of a women’s-prison-turned-library, the other a gorgeous and vast eleventh-floor space in the West Village that used to be Merce Cunningham’s studio and now belongs to the Martha Graham School. When I walked into the latter—it’s about the size of two tennis courts, and has sixteen-foot ceilings and lots of nine-foot-tall windows on two sides of the room that look majestically out over the city—the dramatically enflamed narrator who lives inside my head announced to me, “This is where I’ll do my best work.” To have
this much space, let alone the fact that it’s space drenched in dance history, is to want to move in a way as beautiful as the surroundings. On nights when I am the first dancer on the glossy, dove-gray floor at the Martha Graham space, I feel like a gold medal–winning figure skater for whom the entire world has been personally Zambonied. It would almost be impossible for me to act or be casual hereon; I have to match the exaltedness of the setting.
The people-watching at 5Rhythms events is fairly great, too, especially at the Tuesday night session at Joffrey, which can draw as many as a hundred dancers, thus rendering the dance floor much more like a nightclub than a yoga class on wheels. Here is a tall Caribbean man who, bending at the waist and stagger-walking forward, is dragging his dreadlocks across the floor as if to demonstrate a time-consuming new way to apply floor wax; here is a poignant-looking, possibly Levantine woman in her thirties who, no matter what else she does on the dance floor, will for two hours slowly swirl her clutch purse from its strap in perfect, gentle circles.
I will confess to tuning out, for the most part, the suggestions that come over the PA, difficult as they are to hear over the wash of world music and the occasional pop tune. Sometimes the teachers’ directives are wonderfully on-point and helpful (“Dance faster than you can think,” “Turn your body into a shape that mirrors your current emotional state,” “Be aware of your impulse, but then don’t necessarily act on that impulse”), but other times they go a little fortune cookie on you (“Find your movement medicine,” “Let the mystery into your guesthouse,” “Give permission to your armpits: ‘This is who I am now’ ”). Fortunately, the most frequently spoken directive at 5Rhythms classes is the one that I probably need to hear the most: “Soften.” But the instructors sometimes exhibit a tendency for creating word salads—a tendency that reached its acme for me at Joffrey one night when I heard over the speakers this bizarre directive: “Unreliable spine! Unreliable spine!” The young man dancing next to me straightened with a look of faint alarm, as if in receipt of an unanticipated bowel movement.
It’s not uninteresting to see what becomes of people when they unbuckle themselves, as happens throughout the evening, particularly during the fast, noisome chaos songs. I’ve seen dancers take off their shirts and dance hungrily at their images in the studios’ mirrors; I even had to witness one couple’s tumbling to the ground and starting to finger each other. One night, a bearded, raw-boned, red-haired man with a Northern Europe accent howled and screamed into the dark corner of the Graham studio for several minutes: Vincent van Gogh with a gut wound. I tend to bust out a vaulting or helix-style move, as if planting a flag on a South Pacific island from which the emperor’s troops have made a hasty withdrawal. Or I go all slo-mo, repeatedly opening my mouth in slo-mo, too, as if to slo-scream, “The bommmmmmmb is in the suuuuuuuuuuuuitcase!”
* * *
Early on in my 5Rhythms foray, I fell into conversation one night with a fellow dancer, an academic who teaches at a local university. She told me that each week she comes to class she tries to “bring a problem, and then dance the problem.” On another occasion, I asked a young hippieish-looking dude if he was okay: he’d been lying on the floor and sobbing.
“I’m trying to dance through something,” he told me.
“Does that work?”
“Totally.”
Sold. In 2000, when I broke up with my then boyfriend of ten years, it took me a year to right myself emotionally. What helped the most was swimming; as I’ve put it to friends over the years, I “left my divorce” on the bottom of the NYU pool. Given this, I saw no reason why I couldn’t effect a similar outcome via ecstatic dancing. So, on a couple occasions when I’ve been pissed off or hurt for some reason, I’ve brought this pain to 5Rhythms and thrashed it out. The smaller my hurt, the better it works. I can demonstrably thrash into oblivion an unthoughtful comment that a colleague made to me earlier in the day, but I’m less successful at altering a simmering, weeklong malaise.
In the same way that a blocked or preoccupied actor can be unlocked by being given a piece of “business” like ironing clothes or unloading groceries, so, too, can my internal monologue be drowned by a jumble of spins and leaps. “Movement never lies,” Martha Graham famously exaggerated, overlooking the comic mugging and robot-dancing that we all do in high school or office settings, not to mention the splash-fabulous but heartless gyrations that professional dancers do when they start phoning it in. But in other instances, Graham is dead-on: the body is often pure subtext.
It’s during the fast chaos songs that you’re most likely to shake off a mood. When 5Rhythms dancers get going to this music, it looks like a dance floor freak-out. People are releasing their neck and letting their cranium wobble as if they’ve been semi-beheaded. Your arms might resemble lightning. Your hips might move to South America. During such paroxysms, it’s simply impossible to obsess over a tiny matter such as your best friend’s having not returned your e-mail in four days (which may explain why I’m able to put emotion into improvised dance but not into set choreography: choreography, for me, is an e-mail that takes me four days to respond to).
The inevitable tangent to entering into this kind of physical maelstrom, of course, is its opposite: I started to become increasingly interested in stillness and hesitation. Shortly into my 5Rhythms dancing, Greg and I re-watched The Gay Divorcee, whose “Night and Day” number is a fairly spectacular portrayal of reluctance. While the besotted Astaire sings the intro to the song (“Like the beat-beat-beat of the tom-tom”) in a hotel room overlooking the sea, Rogers walks away from him (she’s in the midst of trying to divorce her geologist husband), so he runs ahead of her and blocks her. They do this a few times, cat and mouse, cat and mouse. Finally, she walks away, only this time he spins backwards before grabbing her hand. She turns to him. He lets go of her hand, and does a few steps and a spin on his own. Then he grabs her hand and pulls her in close. They launch into a beautiful duet, all centrifugal force and airborne chiffon ruffles, at the conclusion of which he seats her on a couch and asks “Cigarette?” But Ginger—who, at age sixteen, had famously uttered the line “Cigarette me, big boy” in her first film—shakes her head no, I couldn’t possibly. What’s brilliant here is that, over the course of the song, the nature of her reluctance has changed: she declines the ciggie not because she doesn’t want her heart broken, but because she’s too swooned-out from dancing.
* * *
Expressing emotion through dance requires neither speed nor big movements. Sometimes the most interesting 5Rhythms dancers to behold are the ones who stand perfectly still except for, say, their right index finger, which might be making a slow, one-inch rotation as if tracing the anal perimeter of an invisible donkey. Which, as it turns out, puts me in mind of the dank worldliness of Bob Fosse’s work. We associate this choreography legend with a lot of flashy, angular moves—my favorites include the one where you put a palm on your forehead and then extend the fingers of this hand outward while tilting your head backward, or the one where you lean back slightly and dangle your arms behind you in order to decisively snaaaap your fingers. (I once tried this latter move at a 5Rhythms session and felt like a gay camp counselor who struggles daily with autism.)
Less expectedly, what defines Fosse just as much as his vamping gestures—and what helps make his work still feel subversive and dirty more than forty years after it debuted—is stillness. Look at the Kit Kat Klub dancers’ weirdly canted, mangled arabesque legs when the dancers are standing on their chairs in “Mein Herr.” Or look at the terrifying stasis of the knock-kneed dancehall girls in Sweet Charity’s “Hey, Big Spender.” (“He pushed us, like puppets, into these broken doll positions,” one of the dancers told Fosse biographer Martin Gottfried.)
By isolating the movement on offer to a single gesture, Fosse could infuse that gesture with a vividness and a terror. Susan Stroman, who danced in the national tour of Chicago before going on to much acclaim as a Broadway choreographer, has said that at the point
Chicago’s dancers drag their palms back and forth over the floor, “Fosse always told us to make believe we had blood on our hands and like we were trying to wipe it off on a wall, kind of how the Manson family did.”
Indeed, of all the research I did for this book, the most surprising find to me was dance’s relationship to violence. It started when I read that in 1983, the day after the anniversary special Motown 25 aired on TV, showcasing Michael Jackson performing the Moonwalk for his first-ever time, Fred Astaire telephoned Jackson to congratulate him.
“Man, you really put them on their asses last night,” Astaire told him. “You’re an angry dancer. I’m the same way.”
Fred Astaire, angry? Granted, in Top Hat, during “No Strings (I’m Fancy Free)” he taps so hard he unmoors a tile from Ginger’s ceiling, and during “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” he uses his cane to machine-gun a chorus line. In The Sky’s the Limit, he drunkenly smashes three stacks of glasses and a barroom mirror, and in The Band Wagon’s faux noir “Girl Hunt Ballet,” he slams a male dancer’s cigar down his throat and then elbows him in the face.
But . . . angry? This was odd to me. However, Brian Seibert writes in What the Eye Hears that Astaire “liked to think of himself as a gangster, and a violent streak runs through his outlaw style, an urge to startle underneath the formal attire and good manners. In Top Hat it’s a plot point and a character trait, this impulse to disturb the peace as an American in stuffy London. But across Astaire’s career, whenever he’s tapping, the violence is there, the suspense of it and the satisfaction.”