by Henry Alford
I still have miles to go here. It took me two years of doing contact regularly to be able to engage in any kind of eye contact whatsoever with my partners; even now my headlights remain intermittent, blinky. I’m also trying to initiate more cheek-to-cheek dancing. Contrary to expectations, cheek-to-cheek dancing in the contact scene is, despite the close attention that the idiom pays to bodily collision, rare, and retains the vivid quality of its intimacy, particularly for the less unbuttoned of spirit. (Intriguingly, the only two people who, among the group of sixty or so regulars to the jam, initiate cheek-to-cheek with any regularity are both straight men in their twenties. Which says something good about that generation.)
The second task I’ve worked on is related to newcomers. New York’s Saturday jam has a reputation for being less friendly to newcomers than other jams because it draws so many professional dancers. Among the regulars—all folks I’ve danced with now—are dancers who’ve been in The Lion King on Broadway and in Off Broadway’s Sleep No More, who’ve danced for Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, Risa Jaroslow, and Bill T. Jones. Some professionals are reluctant to dance with the less seasoned because they fear injury, or because they want to challenge themselves or enjoy the coziness of dancing with a friend. This insiderism and its resultant chill can, to some newcomers, be amplified by the laissez-faire nature of the jam itself: although, yes, the jam ends at four fifteen with the moderator having everyone sit in a circle and say his or her name and make any dance-related announcements, the preceding three hours are—as they are at almost all jams—unguided. No one takes your $5 from you when you arrive (you just leave it on the desk), and if you’re a newcomer you’ll probably need to initiate most of your dances. This can be a mountain. I felt, as alluded to earlier, staggeringly self-conscious at the first four jams I went to, until I saw one dude arrive, lie down on the floor and sleep for fifteen minutes, then get up and leave—at which point I concluded, So it’s that kind of party.
Thus my mission here, particularly before I threw my back out the third time and became more cautious, has been to try to dance with newcomers as often as possible, particularly if they look shy. Typically this goes well, and, in an ideal world, a third person ultimately joins us, and then I can winkle off into the crowd, knowing that the newcomer now has two familiar faces in the room. I told one newcomer, “If you want someone to dance with, hit me up. I’m advanced-beginner, but with delusions of grandeur.” I told one regular who has a nice sense of noblesse oblige, “I’m a self-designated slut. I’ll dance with anyone.” She responded, “Don’t take my job away from me.”
* * *
One day early on in my jam-going I was down on the floor with a partner, emerging from a slo-mo backwards somersault, only to find myself staring into the face of a guy I’d hooked up with fifteen years prior, when I was single. Hello. This was the sly shavehead Paul Fischer, a fellow writer who has been doing contact for more than twenty-five years, ever since going to college at the dance form’s cradle, Oberlin. We started dancing together and have continued to do so. Because I am happily coupled, and because Paul had recently started a new relationship when I ran into him at the jam, I sensed that “private dancing” was unlikely to lie in our future; nevertheless, early on in our new friendship, I found myself saying in his presence, primarily for my own ears, “I dance the dance of sublimation.” Cards, table.
Looking over our e-mails from the past two years (Paul lives in Tel Aviv during part of the winter and summer, so e-mail is a good way to keep in touch), I see this theme borne out again and again.
What distinguishes Paul as a dancer, besides killer partnering skills that make him much sought after at the jam, is that he is the chattiest person on the dance floor. To dance with Paul is to catch up with each other’s news from the past week—and, if possible, to cover some new facet of our mutual preoccupation, baked goods. This is big fun. Indeed, our new friendship really kicked off the Saturday I told him that I needed to travel a birthday cake that I’d made out to Brooklyn, probably on the subway, but that I didn’t have a cake caddy. So Paul invited me over to his apartment to borrow his cake caddy, joking that, when I returned same, it would not be inappropriate to include within its domed sanctuary “a thank-you cake.”
Two days later, I left the borrowed item with Paul’s doorman. Less than an hour after the drop-off, Paul sent me a message on Facebook: “Thanks for the container. But where’s my cake?!”
ME: I know. The pathos of the empty cake caddy. It’s like we lost our firstborn.
PAUL: Sure, rub it in. Though, technically, our firstborn should be a teenager by now.
ME: [Coughs. Stares at floor.]
PAUL: Is that where the kid ended up?
We started getting in the habit of occasionally checking in with each other the day before, or the morning of, the jam. One Friday I wrote him, “No jam for me tomorrow, alas—we have ballet tickets.” Paul wrote back, “Listen, Twinkle Toes, you better remember where your loyalties lie. With me on the floor!”
A few months later, Paul had gone back to Tel Aviv. I went to go see Anomalisa one day, and remembering that Charlie Kaufman is one of Paul’s favorite filmmakers, sent Paul an e-mail saying, “Saw the Charlie Kaufman puppet movie without you. I am trying to hurt you.”
PAUL: Now you owe me two cakes.
A couple of weeks later, on an unseasonably warm March day, I wrote him, “75 today. You can come home now.” I’d recently seen a picture of his still-newish boyfriend on Facebook, and so found myself adding, “Your dude is cute. Is that going well (I hope)?” Paul wrote back, “Yep, everything’s going well. He’ll be coming with me to NYC for two weeks so maybe I’ll lure him to the jam.”
ME: That’s so cool—congrats, sir! I will try to dial down my passive-aggressive campaign of ambiguous affection, except in instances of a certain postmodern dance idiom so excellent at sublimating undefined longing into choreo-somatic splendor.
PAUL: You don’t have to dial anything down.
We kept dancing together. Because we live near each other, we often walk home together after the jam; during these walks we’ve stopped for coffee with other dancers, run errands together, bought shoes. Sometimes when you’re walking with Paul and he wants to cross the street, he will simply lean into you, gently pushing you in the right direction: contact improvisers, takin’ it to the streets.
I got a laugh out of Paul the day I told him that, during my ballet training, I’d thrown my back out while sexing. An hour later, walking home from the jam, I found myself referencing something we’d both just overheard: “That contact workshop that they were just talking about in the closing circle? Its title is ‘The Nuance of the Pelvic Bowl.’ ”
“Nice.”
“But is the pelvic bowl actually nuanced? I feel like most of them work in big, broad strokes.”
“Well, yours.”
Another time, after a dance floor conversation about the calm and Zen that I get from doing needlepoint and that Paul gets from baking, I said, “Maybe your tahini cookies want to meet my needlepoint sometime,” which is about as Mae West as I ever get. The next week Paul came over to Greg’s and my apartment for a tea party à deux that I’d billed in an e-mail as “Cookies and Wool: An Interfaith Symposium.”
Two nights after “Cookies and Wool,” Greg, who had not mentioned Paul’s visit—they’d overlapped in the apartment for less than a minute, and were meeting for more or less the first time—now brought him up.
“Your friend Paul. Is that his name?”
“Yes,” I said, caution seeping into my voice.
“He’s really charismatic and sexy.”
Boom. I raced to Facebook and stared at pictures of Paul. Yes, foxy. I felt a lightness in my chest, like a bodily smile. Then my heart started pounding. I thought, Why haven’t I tried to have an affair with him?
A few days later, after the jam, I found myself at Paul’s apartment. I asked him, “Is there a cuddling option here?”
; “Kosher cuddling?”
Kosher cuddling. We sat on the couch. I leaned my back against him. It felt consoling, reassuring. It did not feel sexual. It was just like when you’re doing contact with someone, and, bodies entwined, you both pause for ninety seconds as if having pulled into a scenic rest stop on the highway. It’s sensual, but not leading-to-sex sensual. Sensual like you’re nuzzling a beloved pet.
Ten minutes later, a friend of Paul’s having showed up to pick up a houseplant, I was walking home, my mind a welter of thought. First thought: Why wasn’t our time on the couch more erotically charged? Had we reflexively gone into dance mode? Additional thought: Friends should probably cuddle more. This would dramatically reduce the rates of alcoholism and karaoke. Final thought: If it’s your boyfriend’s enthusiasm for your dance partner that makes you see your dance partner in a different light, then maybe it’s your boyfriend’s enthusiasm that you’re really turned on by?
* * *
Came the day I sustained my serious back injury, the one I got at the jam trying to lift someone. That evening I e-mailed Paul, “Thanks for the dance, hon, that was lovely. Sorry I boogied abruptly, but I was feeling my back.”
PAUL: Indeed that was a lovely one. You feeling better today?
ME: Yep. I bought a hot water bottle at the drugstore. The only one they had also doubles as an enema and douche—so I guess I know where MY evening is headed . . .
PAUL: You can heal your back and then throw it out again.
Over the next six weeks—my Salad Tongs Days—I wondered if I’d ever do contact again. It felt like a bridge too far. I wondered if I had replaced the traditional medium of the male midlife crisis, a red Corvette, with a series of sweat-soaked, blue American Apparel V-necks. This hugely depressed me. I’d never before dwelled on the fact that most of the people at the jam were ten or twenty or even thirty years younger than me, but now, in my decrepitude, it was all I could think of. Granted, there are some (but very few) people who go to jams and never engage in contact’s mandate, weight-sharing, preferring instead to freestyle it, which would be much less stress on my back; and granted, the three or four episodes of sublimity I’ve experienced at jams have fallen into this looser kind of dancing. So I hadn’t totally injured my future away. Yet nevertheless, there was something deeply humiliating about having rendered myself unable to perform the idiom in question. My mind fixated on two messages: I am old. And I do not know my limits. Was I the office drunk?
Slightly hunched over for weeks, I starting walking to the office I rent by a different route, hoping not to run into Paul. Or, if I was within a couple blocks of his apartment, I’d direct my line of vision at the sidewalk.
Five weeks in, I contemplated showing up at the jam and just standing on the sidelines, but I knew I’d feel weird, or that I’d get sucked into the fun.
So I think you’ll understand me when I tell you that one line in the next e-mail from Paul made me cry. Not “Missed you at the jam today. Hope your back is okay and just that you were busy.” But this: “I ended up sleeping on the floor for most of the jam. I was zonked.”
In the year and a half that I’d been dancing with him, I’d never once seen Paul sit on the floor during the dancing, let alone lie on it. He’s a dance-through-er. I thought, He’s made this up to make me feel less like a loser.
All I could see was: Come back, you don’t have to be Atlas, we miss you.
* * *
What does feeling like a member of a group bring you? In my case, confidence. If, during a duet at the jam now, I’m saddled with a desire to do something off-road like make a tiny starburst with my fingers and say “Shrponk,” I feel comfortable enough to make a tiny starburst with my fingers and say “Shrponk.” I’m not going to be mistaken for a Kardashian anytime soon, but increasingly I can be private in public. Sometimes the more acrobatic moves in contact prompt or require you to whisper to your partner something along the lines of “Is this okay?” or “I can’t sustain this [hold] very long.” I’ve started to import this form of voice-over narration into my personal life. The other night over dinner in a restaurant, an acquaintance-but-not-quite-a-friend told me a heartbreaking story, and I had a strong desire to respond by laying the palm of my hand on her head, but I wasn’t sure if it would be weird. So I said, “I’m going to put my hand on your head now,” and then did so, and it felt right.
Hobbies are hope. Knowing that, on any given Saturday, five or six of the people I really love to dance with will be at the jam makes even a grueling workweek bearable. On Wednesday, I start to feel a tingle of interest; by Friday, I’m anxiously checking Facebook and thinking about who I hope will show up the next day; by Saturday morning, I’m fairly vibrating with anticipation, and anxiously deciding which three of my twelve blue American Apparel V-necks are the right blue American Apparel V-necks.
I’m loath to use the word “crush” here because I know that all crushes are narcissistic, but the attachment I have toward some of the other dancers is nothing if not crush-like. Two days after I’ve danced with G, I’m trying to remember how I ended up standing eight inches off the floor with my right foot on the wall and my left foot on his upper thigh; the minute H flounces off to dance with another partner, I’m wondering if I should change back into my street clothes because there’s no way I’m going to top the jagged swirl of tipsy-boulevardiers-in-the-Bois-de-Boulogne that she and I just concocted.
Maybe what I’m getting at here is the power of metaphor: when two dancers really give themselves over to the metaphorical approach to romance that a duet provides, the duet, like any successful piece of art, seems realer than real. While the other 166 hours of my week more or less happen to me, and are the product of millions of unseen workers and wires, the two hours I spend in a silent, all-white dance studio on a Saturday feel purely willed—which, ironically, has the effect of subjugating me all the more. This nothing can feel like everything—which might account for my bursts of emotion (the blushing, the rapture) on this particular dance floor.
My favorite-ever moment from a dance class occurred at a contact class at Gibney. Our teacher, Tim O’Donnell, divided us into groups of threes. My two partners stood on either side of me. They were each to use both hands to press down firmly on my adjacent hip bone. You’d think this would render me immobile or veal me into confinement, but the overriding sensation was just the opposite—my upper torso was buoyant like a kickboard or a pool noodle that’s been pressed down in the water; it seemed to pop up from the resistance. I felt wonderfully floaty. Then Tim told all us hipbone-conjoined trios to start moving across the room. The floatiness could travel! The dirigible had been untethered from the loading dock. My arms went all Swan Lake. Then Tim told those of us in the middle of the triads to lean back slightly and look up at the ceiling: whoa, the tethers were flapping in the wind below me now, I was somewhere between the roof of the building and the asteroid belt.
Then Tim offered his last prompt: “Do what you can’t do alone!”
* * *
Now and again I wonder if I’ve stuck with contact improv because it causes me to interact with other movers in a way that I’ve never interacted with other people before. Most kinds of dance make me feel like I’m happily swimming across a pool or lake, but contact makes me feel like my partner and I are conjoined and swimming underwater in unison. About a year ago, I nerdishly asked myself which of the other seven functions of dance that I’ve written about in this book—besides Emotional Release and Intimacy, as I’ve just discussed—apply to contact. Certainly, Pure Physicality and, post-injury, Healing (which I’ll write about in the next chapter). I suppose all the touching, not to mention the same-sex dancing, could fall under either Politics or Rebellion, as could the fact that I’m engaging in an activity that my medical doctor would prefer I didn’t. Social Entrée, I guess, is covered by my having danced with some of the pros in the room. And maybe the jam’s 1960s-ish hippie be-in vibe—shades of my beloved Hair—falls under Nostalgia.
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But I couldn’t quite place contact in the context of Religion and Spirituality. That is, until I started appreciating the beauty of the group conglomerations that tend to happen in the last ten or fifteen minutes of the jam. These are traffic jams of ten or fifteen bodies in an area suitable for six, human pileups that look like luggage retrieval gone awry, a Brueghel painting in stretch fabric. When I lift my right arm, it will cause Hector’s left arm to lift, too, which will cause the right side of his torso to shift downward, where it will brush against Martha, who’s balancing on Luisa, who’s a Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Kwame and Colette. Why does this make me so profoundly happy? You spend your waking life figuring out how to interact successfully with others, and here is compelling evidence that you might not be terrible at it. You spend almost all of your working life trying to pinpoint how you feel or what you think about stuff—the phoneme shared by the three words “Why I write,” Joan Didion once pointed out, is I, I, I—but here in a tangle of bodies, none of that matters. If my fifty-five years on the planet have led me to believe anything, it’s that we’re usually drawn to specific people or activities because they have a lesson to teach us, but it’s never the lesson we thought it was going to be. You’d think a group conglomeration would flood you with a sense of interconnectedness, or make you realize how you can support other people, or how you differ slightly from all the other participants, or how you can ward off the people you don’t trust by blanketing yourself with the people that you do, or why anthropologists are always saying that the human brain is hardwired for living in small groups and knowing every group member’s name. But wedged in close in a crowd of bodies, the feeling of astonishing calm I have doesn’t result from having defined myself in relation to others, but rather from the fact that, for one of the first times in my life, I’m not even part of the equation. I don’t have to think about whether I’m supporting others’ weight or whether some newcomer is standing by bashfully waiting to be removed from his or her isolation or whether someone is going to reject me: these things are givens. Because these things exist, and because I know they exist, I don’t have to pay them heed.