by Henry Alford
In the first instance, I bought a ticket for a Beginner’s Ballet class which was to be taught by a New York City Ballet dancer. On hying myself to the appropriate part of Lincoln Center for the class—a floor above the School of American Ballet—I found lots of little girls tottering around the hallways in tulle, but no dressing rooms. So I went into a stall in the men’s bathroom and slipped into my tights and ballet slippers, which felt a little like I was an aspiring superhero with a terrible, dark secret.
Out in the hallway, I presented myself to the young woman at the registration desk, who was poring over a list of names. She gave me a faint look of horror. I said, “Hi. Alford. A-L-F—” She stopped me: “Um, this is a children’s class. The adult class is in a few months.” I gasped, and apologized. Then I walk-sprinted back to the bathroom, where the stall now seemed like an echo chamber of shame.
The second instance: Though I don’t normally wear jewelry, when I went to the swing dancing weekend in Austin, I decided to wear a ring on my wedding finger to reduce some of my potentially perceived creepiness. While standing in the lobby of the Fed on Day 2, I grew hot, and removed first my jacket and then my turtleneck sweater. This second item, when peeled from my body, clung slightly, so I yanked it—which dislodged the ring from my finger, causing it to shoot across the lobby and hit a twenty-something female dancer in her stomach. She popped her eyes in surprise, then looked down at the ring on the floor, then looked at me. Fluttering over toward her to retrieve the ring, I gushed, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!”—flapping my arms and trying to sound as homosexual and flummoxed as possible.
The other kind of peril that intimate dancing sometimes traffics in, of course, is infidelity. One day on the street last fall, I ran into a friend I’ll call Samantha, whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. I asked Samantha how her husband of three years, whom I’ll call Tim, was. Samantha’s eyes grew saucer-like and pained; she told me that Tim had started taking dance classes on his own. “Tango lessons,” she said, “and they have these things called milongas?”
Milongas are tango parties, usually held weekly, and often preceded by a lesson. Typically at milongas, several songs are played in a row (this is called a tanda), followed by a musical break (a cortina) so that people can change partners.
Well, at the milonga Tim had been frequenting, he’d met someone.
I told Samantha that I was sorry, and said that I hoped she and Tim figured it out.
Samantha and I made a plan to get together for a drink the following Friday. But when I asked if Tim might like to join us, she said, “Nah, he’ll be off fucking Suzy Milonga that night.”
* * *
The intimacy struggle can be particularly acute for dance partners who compete or dance at exhibitions or get paying gigs together. Swing dancer Ryan Martin told me, “In this community, there are a lot of married couples who are also partners, but there aren’t a lot of married-couple partners who’ve been doing it for a long time.” Ryan’s colleague Jenn Lee, the Balboa dancer, explained, “A dance partnership is almost more complex than a spousal relationship or a boyfriend. You travel together, you’re often housed together in the same room. You’re giving each other feedback, sometimes during competitions, which are already high-pressure. There are a lot of different, crazy situations that on a day-to-day basis you probably wouldn’t have with your best friend or partner. Sometimes you spend more time with your dance partner than you do your regular partner. It’s intense.”
I got off lucky, I guess. In 1995, when I competed twice as a ballroom dancer, I was partnered with my dancing instructor, a warm, wonderful woman named Reba Perez. Not only did Reba and I genuinely like each other, but the specific nature of our relationship flooded it with deference—I was a shaky beginner, eager to let my follower be the covert leader; she was not getting paid for competing with me, but was hoping that I had enough of a good time that I would come buy more lessons.
This outing was a writing assignment. Ballroom dancing had just been granted provisional status as an Olympic sport, and a men’s magazine had asked me to write about taking ballroom lessons and then competing.
Up at DanceSport, a studio on the Upper West Side where Al Pacino had learned to dance the tango for Scent of a Woman, an administrator told me that competitors needed to have a working knowledge of five “smooth” dances (waltz, fox-trot, quickstep, tango, and Viennese waltz) and five Latin dances (cha-cha, rhumba, samba, paso doble, and jive). This administrator paired me with Reba, who, over several months, painstakingly tried to morph my stolid mass of flesh into something more fleet and jaunty. I had a fairly good frame—the chest-up, shoulders-back, arms-outstretched carriage that ballroom wants—but my feet were dogs looking for a fight. The Latin dances required the right shoulder/left hip and left shoulder/right hip opposition that goes by the name “Cuban motion,” and my efforts on this front bring to mind the statement a Native American made to Agnes de Mille when de Mille visited his reservation in Zuni, Colorado, one summer: “You’re white. Bad for the dance.”
After fifteen lessons with Reba, six group lessons, and two social dances at DanceSport, Reba and I proceeded to two competitions. The first was held at the Kismet Shriners Temple in New Hyde Park on Long Island, where we spent a lot of time schmoozing with students and teachers from the other twelve competing studios—a group united by their shared passion for the immovable hairdo. In our Newcomers category, we took second place in waltz and third place (out of three couples) in tango. Two months later, after lots more classes, we hit the Sheraton in Stamford, Connecticut, for the Constitution State Challenge, where we took a first (out of two couples) in rumba.
When, twenty years after the fact, I sat down and tried to read the account of our competing that I’d written, I could barely make it through the piece, so full was it of snoot and cheap shots at ballroom. I’d spent a lot of time during lessons trying to access my “inner Eduardo.” I’d shown Reba a flimsy, red sequin cummerbund that I was intending to wear, and she’d more or less slapped it out of my hand. I’d asked Reba if, when competing, she ever wore “face jewelry.”
So I now decided to track down Reba, who, wholly due to passivity and attrition, I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years. After running her own studio for many years, she has retired as a dancer and instructor, gotten married and moved to the suburbs and had two kids, and become a life coach. Dance-wise, our trajectories, I realized, were opposite, and I had happened to luck into the moment at which they’d crossed.
We met up at a bakery in Queens. Reba’s lovely brown hair is now threaded with salt and pepper. She still has the heartwarming grin and the infectious energy that I remembered. Reba has always had a Ginger Rogers duality to me—when you talk to her, she’s vivacious and slightly goofy, and as film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Rogers, “Maybe it’s her greatest asset that she always seems to have a wad of gum in her mouth.” But as soon as Reba starts dancing: total elegance.
“I wanted to apologize to you,” I told her. “When I reread the article, all I could think was, What a wiseass. The tone was so snotty.”
She smiled and said, “No need at all. But thank you. I had assumed the story would be humorous and that you’d be using your ironical, outside eye.”
“Well, twenty years later, I now realize that I should never write these sorts of first-person stories unless it’s about something that I would do in my real life, something that I actually want to do. Which, at the time, ballroom wasn’t.”
She nodded sympathetically. We talked for about an hour. When she told me that she had married an Orthodox Jew, I asked what ramifications this would have if she wanted to dance again.
“I’m allowed to dance,” she told me. “But I’m not supposed to touch a man.”
I choked on my tea.
“I hugged you hello,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m so sorry!”
“It’s okay. I do it. As many people as there are, there are versions of Orthodox Jews. It’d be hard to teach social dan
cing and be Orthodox: not a good fit. I mean, I could maybe do it, but . . .”
We kept talking. I decided to revisit with her the main plots of the article as I remembered them, to see if she had any memories to add.
“So, we tried ten dances,” I started, “but you choreographed routines for us in three—rumba, waltz, tango.”
“I probably did that because I would base some choreography on a box step and optimize what you were learning. You didn’t have endless lessons.”
True dat. I recounted how we practiced a lot over four months’ time, at which point I bought more lessons. “And then, shortly before the first competition, you simplified the choreography significantly.”
Reba laughed. She said, “I just thought that that would highlight your talent.”
“I know, dear. And I love you for that,” I said. “Then, at the class before our first outing, you said to me, ‘There are only two things I want to see at the competition. Good posture. And don’t get in my way.’ ”
“I remember that. I’m stuck with it.”
“Then, at the competition, we gazed for a while at something called the Connelly Charm Trophy. We were in one heat where we were the only couple, so I told you, ‘I’m gunning strictly for the Connelly this time,’ and then you made your bombshell response.”
“Which was?”
“You told me, ‘Start exuding.’ ”
“I was so funny.”
“ ‘Start exuding’—It’s a direction and a threat.”
“I was so funny.”
If you ever do some googling on the topic of Dirty Dancing, you can see Jennifer Grey trying to learn the iconic “angel lift” that is the film’s climax. Though she’d taken some classes, Grey wasn’t a professional dancer when she was cast in the film as Baby. Baby’s anxieties and struggles about learning the lift were also Grey’s. Thus, the film’s moment of triumph is doubly sweet.
I felt a little bit of this doubled sweetness from talking to Reba. We’d had a really good time dancing together, but, nevertheless, over two decades, I’d harbored doubts. So it was hugely relieving to have her tell me that my trespasses had been taken in the right spirit.
After we’d paid our check, we headed out to the sidewalk to say goodbye. We did not hug in parting, but the hug was wholly implied.
3.
Dancing is almost always a narrative about physical intimacy—the politics and consolations thereof—and on this front, contact improv is an industry leader. I have rested my cheek on other contact improvisers’ cheeks, butt, armpits, feet. I have laid my entire body, from ankles to forehead, on top of the body of a heterosexual economics professor whose name I think is Arnold. I have held my body against someone else’s long enough for the patch of sweat on her T-shirt to transfer to my T-shirt.
As with gynecology and football tackles, contact improv is, on its surface, so seemingly sexual that you can’t acknowledge it as such, or the whole enterprise would implode. In a class one day, I reached out to my tallish female partner’s upper arm to twirl her, but instead got a healthy handful of side-boob and a smaller portion of boob-boob. So we both snort-laughed and proceeded as if nothing had happened. Another time, at a jam, a muscular twenty-something professional dancer on whose back I was frontally spread-eagled decided to back up to a wall and pin me against it with his shoulders such that my feet were five inches off the floor. Once he let go of me, we, too, snort-laughed, whereupon I offered the wildly articulate “Wow!” and he responded, “Yeah, I just thought I should put you up against the wall”—a statement which, strangely, did not make me feel like we were minor players in the hot tub scene of Hannah Does Her Sisters.
In the face of all this intimacy, I devote, before jams and classes, what nevertheless seems an eccentric amount of time to finding the right underarm deodorant. I started out wearing the Tom’s no-aluminum, Mountain Spring–scented deodorant that Greg stocks our medicine cabinet with, but found that it petered out mid-dance, like a foreigner who has run out of possible combinations of the fifty-six words and phrases at his command. Then I had a brief and disastrous turn with Gillette High Performance gel, a viscous, transparent goo whose ammoniated vapors caused my eyes to smart each time I put it on. Then I had dalliances with Malin+Goetz’s eucalyptus deodorant (lovely, but as fleeting as a sunset), Old Spice Classic Antiperspirant and Deodorant stick (pungent on arrival, but exhibiting a vinegary afterglow reminiscent of longshoremen scurrying to complete tasks before a holiday weekend), and finally Mitchum Advanced Gel (no).
I’ve settled on the wonderful Dove Secret. Although it is, like the Gillette, an extruded crème, one which looks like it wants to adorn cinnamon buns more than human bodies, Dove Secret surrounds my person with a nimbus of powder-smelling inoffense and fantasy. Gone is the rank, slightly salty tang of my underarms and their desperate need to hand out business cards to all within their environs; welcoming is the soft, talcum cloud of my muffled under-boudoir.
But no amount of propylene glycol would have prepared me for the experience that dancer Barry Hynum had in 1988. Hynum went to the annual jam held in Harbin Hot Springs, California, where he and a group of dancers spontaneously started doing contact improv in the buff. As Hynum described it in the contact improv newsletter Contact Quarterly, “It was like Velcro and silk. Initially I felt glued to my partner like Velcro. This permits some unusual perches and unexpected locks. Then the perspiration set in and I slide around like sliding the length of the high school shower on my butt. It wasn’t that bad but I never knew when I would stick or slip. I perspire heavily so I became concerned over others slipping on my slicks so I stopped, but not before rocking back on my back for a long slide across the floor. My dances with men were shorter than usual and I had some inner reservations like those I went through when I first started dancing with my community brothers long ago.”
I’ve yet to see anyone in his starkers. But I did have a wonderfully fraught moment with my friend Lucy. Forthright and intense, the pigtailed, sixty-something Lucy first danced with me in a class wherein one partner danced a solo while the other partner tried to follow the first dancer’s feet as closely as possible with his or her own. This was fairly mirth-making. After the exercise, all seven of us in the class huddled, and our instructor asked us what we thought. Lucy, the first to speak, gushed, “Delicious!” The dancer sitting next to her—a ruggedly handsome, fifty-something male choreographer—concurred, saying how fun it was to let your feet “run all over the room, looking for meals.”
A week later, I ran into Lucy at the same class. For one exercise, the teacher idly suggested that we find a partner whose feet were somehow different from our own; Lucy walked over to me and said, “Feet are how we met.”
“Uh-huh,” I said self-consciously, looking across the room as if in search of a dog to pet.
Fifteen minutes later, Lucy and I were rolling over each other log-like when our teacher mentioned that some contact improvisers like to think of the floor as a duet’s third partner. The teacher added that he’d just read something interesting in Contact Quarterly: dancer Martin Keogh had written that he sometimes finds it helpful to give this third partner a name.
The teacher suggested that all six of us dancers name the floor. So, while Lucy started to bodysurf over me, stretching her arms out over her head so as to reduce her impact on those of my body parts less blanketed with adipose tissue, she glanced at the slats of wood beneath us and said “Mud,” drawing it out slightly so it sounded more like “Muuuud.”
My turn. I gazed at the dull, weathered floorboards and went with “Denise.”
At which point Lucy put her lips up against my right ear and whispered earnestly, “Is that your mother?”
* * *
It’s probably unwise to put anything that you love under a microscope. I’ve considered contact improv my home in the dance world for the past three years and thus am not in a hurry to pathologize my attraction to it. That said, it occurs to me that marriages or co
uples usually owe their longevity less to shared interests or physical compatibility than to the two people’s having a mutual task or question that they’re addressing together: you think you’ve been married to John for twelve years because he has chocolaty, understanding eyes and takes care of the bills, but more likely it’s because you both lost your fathers the summer before you met, or that now you have two children.
Hindsight suggests to me that two “problems,” both of them related to the theme of public vs. private, kept me coming back to the jam week after week. The first of these led to a counterintuitive conclusion. In my initial contact dances, I used mostly my hands and lower back to support my partners’ body weight, as this felt practical, safe. I also like merely touching fingertips while moving around the room—a move that contact luminary Nancy Stark Smith dubbed “finger ouija” but that I think of as E.T.-ing. Then I started using my feet. Now I use my head and chest a lot—I’ll put my forehead in between your shoulder blades, prompting you to lean back slightly onto me, and then I’ll slide my forehead down to your sacrum; or I’ll press my breastbone into your sacrum or chest (unless you have enormous breastesses) so that you can collapse or lean thereon. Alternatively I like to hold your forehead in the palm of my hand.
What emerges from all this is the realization that when it comes to making searingly intimate body configurations with others, the more you commit, the less weird it feels. If my placing my forehead on your back causes you to lean away from me or respond tentatively, then you’ve turned down my invitation and welcomed your difficult teenager, the floor-staring and anxious Scrutinella, into the room. Whereas, if you give me your weight, we’re a-sail. Similarly, if you try to initiate a dance by gently brushing your fingertips against my triceps, then I’m not sure what you’re after, and a small amount of uncertainty or weirdness will bloom. Whereas if you jam your butt into my crotch with vigor, I know exactly what to do: flop over onto your spine like an octopus being dried on an overturned boat on Santorini.