by Henry Alford
“Oh, definitely,” she said. “As all dancers would.”
I told her, “I’m trying to get some of the Astaire buoyancy and lightness into my Zumba work.” She smiled at me indulgently, as if I had told her that there were tiny people living inside my mailbox.
Unlike some of my other instructors, who use war and combat metaphors (“Punch it!,” “Kick it out here!”) to fire up a class, Puckett proved to be all unicorns and rainbows; she trilled “Bee-you-tea-full” to us no less than five times during the hour. I wafted home on a cloud of lavender Tofutti.
I hurt myself only once. Hoping to up my game, I took a class one Sunday morning at Ailey, where I had heard the crowd was younger, and the workout fiercer. My instructor, Ben Byrd, a puckish redhead in his twenties wearing a navy do-rag, complimented my speed walking in place during one song, which led me to think, I’m in. But some five minutes later, my cloddishness about touching the floor with my hands while crouched in a frog stance caused him to yell at me, “Get lower!” I complied, whereupon he smiled, grabbed one of his own buttocks diagnostically and gave me a sign of encouragement. I didn’t know how this translated to dance professionals, but to this amateur it meant: Ben was as concerned about my keister as I am.
The dancing ramped up in fiery intensity, which was thrilling. I hurled my will into the air and hoped my body would follow. At hour’s end, Ben led us through fifteen additional minutes: seventy-five jumping jacks, seventy-five push-ups, and seventy-five sit-ups, of which I completed one-fifth. The next day my body was a lake of fire. I looked like the Baryshnikov chapter in a public library’s copy of Gelsey Kirkland’s memoir. I got three massages in five days; I swore off the Z for almost a week.
When, post-Ailey, I returned to the relative oasis of the Chinatown Y, it was with some of the hauteur of the Broadway veteran who has been asked to perform Chekhov monologues at a Cracker Barrel. Suddenly I was Mr. Juilliard. When I started to slide in a puddle in the locker room, I thought, Where is this facility’s toe chalk?
Soon enough, my inflamed ego cooled, and I returned to an effort to improve my 50 to 60 percent mastery.
After three months, I noticed that I could touch my toes, an improvement of an inch or so. I’d lost seven pounds. Stretch and drop.
DANCE AS RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
1.
I WAS HAVING LUNCH WITH a radiantly warm dancer in her forties named Wendy Heagy. Wendy is a Christian praise dancer—yes, she dances for the Lord in churches, but more often she does it in shelters, halfway houses, and prisons.
We were both tucking into our bowls of curry at a Thai restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, near where Wendy and her husband and son live, when a question occurred to me.
“Do you think God accounts for technique?” I asked her. “Like, if you do a grand jeté, is that more of a commitment to Him than if you just do a tiny little pas de bourrée?”
“No,” Wendy said smilingly. “But I’m very honest with my students. Some of them may have seen a video, or seen some dance performed, but they can’t pull off what they’ve seen. So I say, “If you want to do those long, beautiful movements, you need to take a ballet class, you need to take a jazz class. If you want to articulate His word, you need to have the technique. I mean, I want to give God the grand jeté.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “He’s the ultimate authority. He’s the ultimate stern old Russian lady who uses her metal-tipped cane to whack at ankles.”
“Hello. Madame Darvash.”
* * *
You can’t describe the relationship between dance and religion as “larky.”
If you go to a wedding, you might dance. But if that wedding takes place anywhere in the Western world, the odds are that you’ll be dancing at the wedding’s reception, and not during the service. This is because the Judeo-Christian tradition, unlike most non-Western traditions, makes a distinction between the sacred and the secular. This distinction has, over the course of time, made life a whole lot more complicated for us dancers at the proverbial party. There ain’t no Shiva at the shiva.
In many respects, the Religion function of dance overlaps with the other functions. This kind of dancing might, especially if it takes the form of ecstatic dancing, be an effort to elicit Emotion and Release; it might be a kind of Healing; it might, in its appeals to God, be the ultimate form of Social Entrée.
But it is also the function of the art form that has most caused dance to be beaten about the head.
“Judging from the volume of condemnations from on high,” Barbara Ehrenreich has written, “the custom of dancing in churches was thoroughly entrenched in the Middle Ages and apparently tolerated—if not actually enjoyed—even by many parish priests.” That said, the Church had begun prohibiting dancing in churches in the middle of the fourth century; this censure would reach its apogee from 1200 to 1500. From the Renaissance onward, dance in Western societies has tended to be a purely secular pursuit.
Praise dancing took off in the 1980s, perhaps aided by the increased number of women in leadership roles in the church, and by the increased use of video and contemporary music during services to raise attendance. It’s particularly popular with Pentecostal congregations, who have a tradition of being literally moved by the Spirit.
Throughout its long history of ambivalence on the topic, the Church would sometimes differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate kinds of dancing. Dance history is full of examples of similarly unaccommodating people drawing lines in the sand—Plato, for instance, approved of educated men dancing in order to keep their bodies ready for battle, but he hated the jumping and leaping thing; one eighteenth-century choreographer thought that arms raised above shoulder height suggested loss of control or an SOS signal. Some naysayers even take action: in the 1830s, Christian missionaries in Hawaii insisted that hula dancing be performed in high-necked robes with sleeves.
That dance is sacred in some cultures but profane in others is perhaps only to be expected, but it’s fascinating when it’s both things in a single culture. In the nineteenth century, whenever the Zezuru tribe in southern Africa was about to be attacked by marauders, the Zezuru would send out a chorus line of topless tribeswomen, who would distract the hostiles with a lascivious shaking of their breasts. Yet the Zezuru, like most Africans, decried Western-style touch dancing as vulgar.
Or look at modern-day Christian evangelicals in the U.S. Fifty or sixty years ago, evangelicals linked dances like the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug to miscegenation and truancy and other forms of wildness. But today, in a world that’s host to much wilder forms of movement like twerking and krumping, some of these Christian parents who were forbidden in their own youth to dance now urge their kids to take up the old-timey steps.
* * *
We should not overlook the fact that, outside the confines of mainstream religion, we in the United States have a long tradition of ecstatic dancing. The Shakers used dance as a way to worship God; after marching around a room in a procession and then swaying and turning in unison, the men on one side of the room and the women on the other, the Shakers would then form an oblong circle and wait to see if any dancer had received a “gift” or inspiration to move. This gift typically expressed itself with closed-eyed twirling, as if you were at a Grateful Dead or Phish show.
Or it might get a little more wiggy. One observer of an 1850 Shaker service wrote, “They fall a groaning trembling, and every one acts alone for himself; one will fall prostrate on the floor, another on his knees and his head in his hands; another will be muttering over articulate sounds, which neither they nor anybody else understand. Some will be singing, some will be dancing; others will be agonizing, as though they were in great pain; others jumping up and down; others fluttering over somebody, and talking to them; others will be shooing and hissing evil spirits out of the house, til the different tunes, groaning, jumping, dancing, drumming, laughing, talking and fluttering, shooing and hissing, makes a perfect bedlam.”
Native American culture, too, has long included collective exaltation via movement as one of its ways to contact the forces that rule the world. In the Ghost Dance, which arose in the 1860s, dancers paint their bodies and then stand in a circle with their arms around one another, an effort to reunite the living with the spirits of the dead, and to get these spirits to protect the mortals and to promote unity. The Hopi’s rain-bringing ritual called the Snake Dance honors the creatures seen as brothers to the weather spirits. Dancers carry live snakes—including rattlers—in their hands and mouths, while chanting about the need for precipitation. At ceremony’s end, the snakes are returned to the earth (and not, as white men would probably favor, stuffed with a savory ricotta and eaten).
* * *
Before I went out for Thai food with praise dancer Wendy Heagy, I saw her perform—or, as she puts it, minister—at the Bowery Mission, which, since 1879, has offered food, shelter, and medical care for New York City’s homeless. Wendy ministers in the mission’s chapel every second Sunday of the month.
When I entered the chapel one blustery Sunday afternoon in January, I saw about eighty people sitting in the pews, almost all of them men. Because most of them had come in off the street, all but two of them were wearing their winter coats and hats. Some of these men were canted at a thirty-degree angle, asleep. Many had brought their worldly possessions in rollaway luggage. When a Mission employee caught me staring at a six-by-six-foot luggage storage area at the back of the chapel, he told me, “We call that LGA, or LaGuardia.”
Noon. Time for Wendy to dance. I expected to see her up on the stage, but instead she was down in the aisle. Dressed in a red T-shirt, black dancewear, and sneakers, Wendy waited for her music—a Christian ballad called “This Place,” sung by LaShun Pace—to come over the PA system. Then she launched into one of the more emotionally fraught and interactive dances I’ve ever seen. Her self-devised choreography incorporates a lot of American Sign Language and mime—when the lyrics mentioned “a terrible place,” Wendy looked pained and fashioned her fingers into cat claws; when the lyrics ran “I ask these questions many a time,” Wendy counted on her fingers from one to eight.
Then, after some lovely arm extensions and a nice blast of pirouettes, Wendy started moving down the aisle and interacting with the men, touching them, staring and smiling at them. The first man she moved on was a bedraggled gentleman in his seventies who, when Wendy clasped his face in her hands (lyric: “You’re my peace”), rolled his eyeballs ever so slightly. But when, ninety seconds later, at the song’s conclusion, Wendy came back and touched this gentleman’s shoulder, he pointed at his heart, smiled, and then pointed at Wendy.
After her dance, Wendy sat in a pew and listened to the pastor’s sermon. Then she joined the pastor in the aisle for the altar call, the opportunity for the men to talk to the officiants and to receive God. A few walked up to her, but mostly she wandered amid the pews.
Some fifteen minutes later, once the altar call had dissipated and a singing group had assembled on the stage, I introduced myself to Wendy, who was still standing in the aisle. “We had a healing today!” she said. One of the men she’d walked over to during the altar call had said he was having trouble breathing. “I lay one hand on his back and one on his chest. He started to stand and I felt this release, and he started breathing much better.”
“Amen!” two bystanders chimed in. One of them added, “Good for you, Wendy.”
Wendy shook her head.
“That’s all Daddy,” she said. “All Daddy.”
* * *
Wendy drove me out to Queens for lunch. Once at the Thai restaurant, she unspooled her life story for me. She’d grown up Catholic in Montreal. She wasn’t devout, but she loved church, even though she knew that some of the priests looked down at her for being black. An alcoholic by the age of sixteen (who would lose her sister to drug addiction some years later), she tried to pour her energies into her dance classes at Montreal’s Dance Factory, one of whose teachers recognized Wendy’s chops and encouraged her to go to New York. Once in New York, Wendy got a scholarship from the Broadway Dance Center. She graduated from BDC and then launched a successful career that included dancing on Broadway and touring with both the O’Jays and Kurtis Blow.
She was saved in 1996 during the run of an Off-Off-Broadway gospel musical called Promises of Gold.
“At my callback,” she told me, “the first thing they did was stand in a circle and pray. I was like, Seriously? I had this whole thing in my head about Christians, how they can be really hardcore and Bible-thumping. But these people were phenomenal, both as performers and people. Over the course of the show, my heart was endeared.”
Cut to the final week of the show, being done at the Lamb’s Theatre in the Theater District. Wendy was backstage when she felt a tingling sensation all over her body. “I fell to my knees. It was like a surrender.” The cast gathered around her, and prayed with her. Shortly thereafter, while standing in her living room one day, she heard the voice of God.
Putting my spoon down next to my bowl of curry, I said, “I read somewhere that when God spoke to you, he told you, ‘I’m going to take you out of the dance world for a while, but then I’m going to put you back in it.’ ”
“Right,” she said, nodding.
“So my first question is, Does God sound like Morgan Freeman?”
“No. Noooo. It’s my own voice. It’s more like he’s informing my mind.”
My second question was, What did he say?
He said he wanted her to teach others to dance in his name.
* * *
Wendy chuckled and looked down at the floor next to the café table we were sitting at. She said, “In my mind? My finite mind? I thought God was going to send me all these Broadway dancers. But when I saw the people he was sending me, I was like, Are you kidding me? Never danced in their lives. Older. They could move, but no technique.”
Wendy founded her Raise Him Up Praise Dance School and Ministry in 2003. She started by holing up in a dance studio in Jackson Heights, coming up with choreography. Many praise dance ministries incorporate ASL, the dancers signing out scripture during songs; not knowing ASL, Wendy cooked up some of her own signing, but later also looked online at an ASL website. She knew that the ASL and miming would make dancing easier for her dancers, by providing them specific moves and technique. She also teaches her team members—unlike her solo piece at the Bowery Mission, she prefers to perform with three or four other dancers—to interact with the audience, because all her dances include a section where the dancers wander among the onlookers and touch them.
“I’ve met a lot of really shy dancers,” I told her. “Do you ever get a student or team member who can do all the dance moves but who’s shy about the physical contact stuff?”
“I make it very clear to people when they come to my classes. We start in prayer. I ask them to share testimony—‘I helped my mother when she was ill,’ etc. No testimony is too small. And I tell them, mine is not a praise and worship team. Praise and worship teams are the ones with all the costumes and the flags; the dancers are mostly looking upward. That’s not the kind of team I have. We’re evangelists. There’s outreach. I’m a minister, not a performer. And it works because dance is a universal language.”
“Yes, dance is a universal language,” I said. “But many people, particularly men, are made hugely uncomfortable by it. That’s why your ministering this afternoon struck me as so brave—you touched those men’s faces! So many men—even if deep down they crave that kind of physical contact—are scared of it.”
“But I’m not Wendy when I do that. It’s the Lord summoning me. It’s a spirit touching a spirit. It’s not just Wendy coming up to them, and them thinking, She’s cute! It’s literally the touch of God coming through that person.”
I also wondered if she’d met with resistance from the church itself. I said, “Joe Dell Hutcherson, who founded the dance ministry at Bethel Gospel in Harlem, has said that the fir
st time she ministered through dance, all twelve people in the room walked out. Has anything like that happened to you?”
“No. She was a pioneer. When she started, the church was like, Really? Seriously? She told me that they made a dance studio for her, but when she started teaching they said, ‘We can’t get with this.’ ”
I said, “Other world religions don’t separate the religious from the secular as Christianity does. So that’s part of the problem. But then there’s also this idea that Christianity doesn’t see the body as holy in and of itself.”
“Once the pastors see our work and see who we are, they invite us. I could see the apprehension on their faces because they’re thinking VH-1 or the person down at the club. I asked the Lord, you tell me what’s appropriate for your altar. In the Bible, it talks about how to dance appropriately. But it also talks about Jezebel. I mean, I’m not going to pick a Beyoncé song. I have nothing against Miss Beyoncé but that’s not for church.”
We talked for a while about some of the practicalities of having a team. Wendy told me that prior to ministering in a new location, she’ll call the location and find out what “the issues” are there, so she can pick or tailor a song to those specific needs.
I asked Wendy about her favorite success story, and she told me about traveling to a small foreign country seven years earlier, and ministering to a young prostitute who saw Wendy and a team dance in a town square. Wendy told me, “I saw a lot of pain in her. So I prayed for her. Remember when Sylvester ran into Tweetie, who was acting like Frankenstein? It was like that. The scales were falling off her as I prayed for her. About three years later I get an e-mail from her: she’s an interpreter at the United Nations now. She said, ‘After you prayed for me, God took me, sent me to school, and brought me to the United Nations, where I met my new husband. Here is a video of my wedding.’ ”