And Then We Danced

by Henry Alford

  For Jackson, the violence came earlier on in his life, and was less metaphorical: in the 2003 TV special Living with Michael Jackson, the song-and-dance phenom said that his father sat in a chair with a belt in his hands while the Jackson Five rehearsed, and that “if you didn’t do it the right way, he would tear you up, really get you.” Cue every dance memoir’s early-on scene in which a dyspeptic, Eastern European ballet mistress wields her metal-tipped cane to discipline and abuse innocent young ankles.

  Or look at Kevin Bacon’s unintentionally hilarious “angry dance” in Footloose. Bacon, while inhaling a beer and cigarette, irritatedly pulls his car into an abandoned warehouse and, after hurling the beer bottle against a wall and then pounding on the car’s hood, launches into a number that lies exactly midpoint on the continuum between a gymnastics routine and a hissy fit. He vaults over a wall like it’s a pommel horse, he zooms through the air on a high-placed rope swing, he spins over a high bar and we see his dismount in slow motion seven times. He’s that angry. This kind of cheese makes Jackson’s Thriller  video or the rumble in West Side Story look like documentary.

  Read a biography of Gene Kelly, and his fabulous dancing and utter charm and political convictions aside, what comes across is what a hothead he was. The young Kelly is described by one of his biographers as “a tough Irish bantam of a fighter in the Pittsburgh tradition.” Kelly told another biographer, “Because I was small, I felt I always had to prove myself and the best way to do this was with my fists.”

  Kelly’s inherent pugnaciousness suited him well for the scorn that his interest in dance would bring him. “My mother sent my brother and me to dancing school in those Buster Brown collars, and we had a minimum of three fights every week walking between our house and the school. The funny thing is that nobody called us sissies when we served Mass in these collars, only when we went to dancing school.” In the late 1920s, while a student at Penn State, Kelly and his brother were dancing at a club and got called fags by a heckler, so Kelly pulled the heckler off his bar stool and knocked him down. Around the same time, Kelly’s agent one day asked for his 10 percent commission to be paid on the spot, so Kelly punched him in the face. The agent collapsed onto the floor and Kelly wound up with broken fingers.

  Kelly turned down his first two Broadway offers (he thought one role was too small and that the other one didn’t pay enough). When Louis B. Mayer reneged on his promise that Kelly wouldn’t have to do a screen test for Pal Joey, a role Kelly had played on Broadway, Kelly wrote Mayer an angry letter that ended, “I’d rather dance in a saloon!” Shortly thereafter, when David O. Selznick said that he wanted to put Kelly under contract without a screen test, Kelly told him about Mayer and said, “I hope I can trust you. You sons of bitches are all alike.” Years later, when Kelly was shooting 1948’s The Three Musketeers, during one scene Kelly pushed costar Lana Turner so forcefully that she fell onto the floor and broke her elbow.

  Women get in on the violence, too. One early example is mythological: maenads, the intoxicated and wildly dancing female followers of Dionysus, were said to rip apart the bodies of animals they found in the woods, and then devour them. But ladies in the meatspace have their moments, too. Martha Graham once pushed the legs of one of her dancers as far apart as possible and said, “One day a man will do this to you.” In Jerome Robbins’s ballet The Cage, female “insects” treat male intruders with similar high dudgeon, by putting the male dancers’ necks between their kneecaps and crushing them.

  Some sensitive souls have seen fit to object. In 1984, while watching a performance of Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs, which features a thrilling dance set to “That’s Life” in which a female dancer is pushed around by a man before ultimately jumping fully onto him, Mark Morris stood up in the audience, yelled “No more rape!” and walked out of the theater.

  If all these examples of aggression were confined to acts of physical violence, I’d understand: dance relies on the full spectrum of bodily movement, the more dramatic and vivid of which is sometimes based in aggression.

  But it’s the emotional violence that I wasn’t expecting.

  * * *

  I’m not an angry person and thus have no need to channel fury into a fiery display of scissor-sharp cabrioles and pelvic pops. However, sometimes when I’m dancing with a straight dude in his twenties or thirties at an ecstatic dancing or contact improv event, I unleash a rowdy boy from inside me, a rowdy boy who rarely shows up off the dance floor: to emphasize sportiness over sensuality is to put these partners at ease. But it also feels great to have adrenaline course through my body: no salmon can outswim this bear.

  That said, I hate the idea, pantywaist liberal that I am, that dance has a strong relationship to aggression, even if the dynamic is primarily one of sublimation. I take succor in the idea that, in my age and in my country—I’m absenting from this discussion voguing and twerking incidents, which seem largely tongue-in-cheek, as well as a 2013 incident in Moscow in which the artistic director of the Bolshoi, having made some unpopular casting decisions, had a jar of sulfuric acid thrown in his face—dance’s relationship to fighting would seem mostly to have had a gentler cast to it.

  Take, for instance, hip-hop battles. In the Bronx and other urban areas in the 1970s and early 1980s, hip-hop dancers taunted and tried to outdo one another with flashy moves—e.g., popping and locking, or freezing—that sublimated violence. In the summer of 1978, Tee of the High Times Crew told the Village Voice, “When you get mad at someone, instead of saying ‘Hey man, you want to fight?’ you’d say ‘Hey man, you want to rock?’ ”

  Chillin’ like a villain.

  Two years later, members of the High Times Crew were arrested for “fighting” in a subway station in Washington Heights. The dancers explained to the police that they weren’t brawling, they were having a dance-off. The police asked for proof, whereupon the Crew came up with a list of dance moves, one of which had the very, very intimidating name “the baby.” The cops called what they thought was the dancers’ bluff, and asked them each to dance right there and then. The dancers went into their awesome stylin’, the legend goes, whereupon the charges were dropped.

  * * *

  While changing out of my boxer shorts in the Joffrey dressing room one night—my typical 5Rhythms getup is a T-shirt and then a pair of boxer shorts worn over a pair of briefs—I fell into conversation with another dancer. He started evangelizing about contact improv, illustrating same by standing and smooshing the side of his body against mine.

  “Ooh, that’s personal,” I said.

  “Deeply personal.”

  I’d heard of contact improv at that point, but had never seen it performed. I liked the idea that it was, like 5Rhythms and living room dancing, free-form. But its insistence on weight-sharing and partnering made it seem like a step up, or like just enough of an added challenge to keep me on edge. I proceeded to take more than forty contact improv classes, to learn technique.

  Contact improv was officially started in 1972, when former gymnast Steve Paxton wed his interest in aikido to the knowledge he’d gained dancing for Merce Cunningham and José Limón. The idiom lists among its early practitioners choreographers Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, and Yvonne Rainer. Based in gravity and trust, contact is mostly an improvised duet form in which dancers share their weight with each other, collapsing onto each other, lifting each other up in the air on their backs or shoulders, colliding their bodies.

  Because it’s not often performed for audiences, contact doesn’t have the renown or cred that it probably deserves—but it’s been taught at Juilliard and Yale, and a group of Dartmouth students who started messing around with a version of it in the early seventies became the not-so-obscure modern troupe Pilobolus. (“I realized that I couldn’t teach them as I would teach dancers, so I started teaching them improvisation and choreography instead,” Alison Becker Chase has said of the three men who, in 1971, showed up without any dance experience for her Dance C
omposition class at Dartmouth. Chase and two of the students, joined by three others, including Martha Clarke, would form Pilobolus, which has been seen contorting and shape-shifting at the Oscars and in Super Bowl commercials, and which won an Emmy in 1997 for its televised performance at the Kennedy Center.)

  Outside of traveling to a country whose language I don’t speak, or swimming in the ocean at night, I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything that feels as adventurous as contact improv. My first contact class was the aforementioned attempt to jump into other dancers’ arms. In my second class, I removed my partner’s feet from my chest—she was doing a handstand and leaning against me—and, holding her ankles, proceeded to rapturously twirl her in the air 540 degrees around me. By my fifth class, another partner somehow put my left hip on top of his left shoulder and then carried me across the floor like an exciting, possibly flambéed, entrée.

  One of your first acts as a contact dancer is to buy kneepads. Though the first-ever piece of contact improv, a dance called Magnesium that Steve Paxton and others performed on the Oberlin campus in Ohio in 1972, was done on wrestling mats, we contemporary bearers of the flame are not so lucky. When my lumpy, white kneepads come back from being washed at the Laundromat, they look like melted but unbrowned pieces of mozzarella; the first time this happened, I thought, Why is there lasagna in my laundry?

  But kneepads weren’t enough to quell some of my initial contact-specific anxieties. In one of my early-on classes at Gibney, my teacher Bradley Ellis asked me to do an exercise that foiled me. My partner was on her hands and knees with her back flattened, in the position known as “table.” I was meant to gracefully lower my sacrum onto hers, giving her all my weight, and then, while bending my head backwards onto the floor, slowly to lift my legs straight up into the air one at a time in a graceful, slow-motion backwards somersault.

  I couldn’t do it. Bradley asked what was holding me back. I wasn’t sure. He put forth the possibility that I was afraid of falling backward. I readily copped to this diagnosis—I mean, who isn’t? Bradley had an intriguing suggestion: I should go to a swimming pool, put a lot of kickboards and floaties under me, and then practice floating on my back. A few days later I hied myself to the NYU pool, where forty-five minutes of experimentation led to a helpful realization. Namely, if I closed my eyes during a difficult move, as I had been doing in class, I could psyche myself into all sorts of fear: during one eight-minute-long stretch of self-inflicted darkness in the pool, I imagined that my body was spinning, and I thought I heard sirens. But if I kept my eyes open: totally fine.

  It was this kind of realization, along with practice, practice, practice, that helped me to build up the confidence needed to start going to contact improv jams—the open-to-the-public dances which are held weekly all over the world. As with jumping into people’s arms or backwards-somersaulting over their sacrum, initiating dances with total strangers was daunting for me at first. I remember once trundling down to the studio in SoHo where the Saturday jam is held, full of nervous excitement. New York had just been whomped by a huge snowstorm. As I walked, I thought, This will be amazing—only the true diehards will show up, and together we will honor the dark forces of meteorology, bursting into a joyous ring dance called Man vs. Nature!

  Indeed, only nine or so of us showed up. But of the five people I felt qualified to dance with, two were sealed off in the cocoon of a duet, and two of the others flitted off seconds after I tried to initiate dances with them (I usually do this by putting my hand on your shoulder). I left the jam after half an hour, and as I trudged home in the snow, I found myself welling up with tears over the failed connection. At this point in my contact improv career, being spurned by other dancers, or being given corrections, felt like a bee sting. I would briefly wallow in the sentiment “I’m a bad dancer” before bottoming out into a mud hole of masochism labeled “I’m not good-looking enough for you.” This latter mindset was particularly galling, for all the reasons that we learn in childhood: If someone lets me know that I’ve made an idiotic comment, or that I am behaving idiotically, then a part of me knows that I can always self-correct if I agree with that person’s assessment. But if someone suggests that my looks are idiotic, there’s a lot less that I can do about it. And thus, this kind of rejection or scorn can, with a masochist’s love and nurturing, leave an uglier bruise. (The organizers of Ecstatic Dance NYC events smartly reduce this kind of trauma by announcing that dancers should try to dance with each of the other dancers, but that if for any reason you don’t want to dance with someone who’s moved near you, you should simply make the steepled-fingers wai gesture.)

  But I kept going back to the jam because the highs were so high. On the edges of the dance floor, the gymnastics and the weight-sharing sometimes take second place to a looser and more fanciful kind of movement, and it was herein that I started to experience moments that I can only call sublime. One fairly elaborate pageant of swirly sumo-wrestlers-at-the-Ice-Capades staggering and ice-waltzing that a young woman and I laid down caused me to shed a tear of joy upon its completion. I had the impulse to thank her but quashed it, certain that if I opened my mouth the only thing that would come out would be birdsong.

  Another time, the sheer romance of a (heterosexual male) partner’s and my synchronicity—his anticipation of my every move seemed almost freakish to me—caused me to blush bright red. As anyone who’s done a fair bit of social dancing knows: a good dance is better than sex. But if this burst of sensual intensity happens while you’re moving with someone you would otherwise have no interest in, it can feel like you’ve been roofied.

  Is a good partnership one where you “talk” 50 percent and “listen” 50 percent, or is it one where the percentages get thrown out the window altogether? I wasn’t sure. But I knew one thing: if listening to radio is often more involving than watching television because a radio listener has to work harder, so, too, with contact improv—it’s usually done without music, and almost never to music. The groove is deeper because it’s of your own making. (When, in the late seventies, choreographer Trisha Brown was asked why she’d finally started incorporating music into her pieces, she said, “I got fed up with listening to all the goddamn coughing.”) On some occasions I’ve simply marveled, slack-jawed, at the Pina Bausch–like kookiness of what a partner and I are doing, and felt as if I’ve just gotten gas at my dentist’s: my need to laugh is so all-consuming and enormous that I am incapable of producing sound. Like the time I danced with the young male cellist who told me he was learning contact improv because he hoped one day to dance it while, yes, his cello was strapped to his body. Ten minutes into our dancing, I found myself staring at the ceiling, my feet up on the wall at shoulder level and my upper torso held in the semi-crouched cellist’s arms about fifteen inches off the floor. Just as I was forming the thought, “This is an interesting way to spend a Saturday afternoon,” a young woman who’d been standing idly by the wall grabbed my feet by the ankles, whereupon the cellist lowered my torso onto the floor and then flitted off to another partner. Then the woman, still holding my ankles, started doing a series of arabesques, putting her leg high up in the air behind her like some inexorable insect, all the while murmuring and semi-grunting like she was trying to decide whether to devour me now or to cover me with a preservative mouth spit.

  She went a third way. Still in arabesque, she started gracefully but forcefully pushing and pulling me across the floor in short bursts.

  The insect was vacuuming.

  DANCE AS PURE PHYSICALITY

  1.

  CERTAIN KINDS OF DANCING CAN seem like pure physicality to me. The tap classes I took at Alvin Ailey in 2016 and 2017, for instance, felt less like dancing than like drumming with the feet.

  Throughout the class, we would stand in place mimicking our teacher Marshall Davis, Jr.’s eight-count beats, never moving our tap shoes across the room. The warm and avuncular Davis, who has collaborated a lot with Savion Glover, looks like a scruffy Eddie Murphy. He loved
to have us do cramp rolls (go up on right toe and stay, go up on left toe and stay, then come down on right heel, then down on left heel), first on a leisurely 1-2-3-4 beat, then on a peppier 1 and a-2 and a-3 and a-4 beat, then in a crashing waterfall, 1234. Then he’d switch up the order of foot placement: we’d start with our left heel, say. Or he’d drop a bombshell like, “This time, the 3 isn’t on the 3, it’s before the 3”—a statement which caused my universe instantaneously to seem a lot larger. There are beats between the beats? Dude.

  Davis’s point here—a point also stressed by virtuosic tapper Steve Condos, with whom Davis studied—is that all tap routines are made up of a combination of a handful of fundamental steps, so let’s get these fundamentals down pat before we add music or start traveling around the room. On the rare occasion that Davis mentioned the upper body, it was to remind us to bend our knees slightly and lean forward lest we topple backwards when we stood on our heels—as Davis himself did during the Broadway production of Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk when he encountered a patch of water on the stage. (Davis told us his recovery strategy was to regain his balance and then make a fast and decisive X with his hands like a baseball umpire saying “Safe!”)

  But there was something else that constricted my worldview to my feet and their ability to make sound. Davis wanted us to take our choreographic cues from him aurally not visually. One night he told us that he was going to stand behind us while he tapped out combinations, so that we could hear him but not see him, and we’d have to guess what he was doing. Looking around the room, I saw a few eyeballs roll heavenward as we students prepared for this big task.

  But all six of us found that our ear was better than our eye.

  In another class, Davis talked about dancing “on the two,” the habit of dancing on the “off” beat rather than the “on” beat, as practiced by many of the more sophisticated Latin and swing dancers. After teaching us four students a routine on a beat of six, he had us stand in a circle. He said the first person was to do the routine on the one, the second person on the two, the third on the three, etc.