by Henry Alford
Never have I felt so gloriously empty.
DANCE AS HEALING
1.
LOS ANGELES, FIVE YEARS AGO. After thirty or so folks had left a literary salon that my friends Sandra and Frier had held in their living room, my two hosts and I moved all that room’s chairs and other furniture aside, put on some Motown, and danced for an hour or so à trois. We stomped from room to room, transforming a Craftsman bungalow into an impromptu Bouncy Castle; we swung and punched our arms like a group of ebullient monkeys. At a certain point in the proceedings, Sandra unearthed a hip-length white mink coat from a closet, and then the three of us took turns wearing it while dancing. The kitteny lushness of fur against your skin could render you either a Saudi potentate embarked on an extravagant, cocaine-fueled shopping spree, or a Detroit pimp strutting through a trash-strewn barrio. The choice was yours.
Three years later I visited Sandra and Frier again. This time their union was fraught. They argued so much during dinner that on taking the last bite of food from my plate, I uncharacteristically stood, walked into the kitchen, and started doing the dishes while they continued eating and arguing. I had to escape the wall of bickering.
Fifteen minutes later, Sandra emerged from her office bearing a dance mixtape, and minutes later the three of us were grooving and shaking again in the living room and den, this time to the Commodores’ funk classic “Brick House.” Frier started doing a move so catchy that Sandra and I copied him: with your palm up, you extend your arm out in front of you invitingly, and then, while slowly pulling your opened palm back to your mid-side, you take five small quick steps backward, as if drawing a curtain to unveil the future.
We all started laughing.
And Sandra and Frier’s bickering: gone.
* * *
Healing is one of dance’s more promising and vibrant functions. Given that dance is so commonly a locus of social trauma in one’s childhood and adolescence, it makes sense in a hair-of-the-dog way that boogying would be an effective form of therapy in adulthood. Moreover, of the nine functions that we’ve discussed, Healing is the one that most stands to give dance its proper due among the arts: humans being humans, we admire results, and I’m going to hazard that the medical and psychological advances that dance can bring are much more tangible to the world at large than, say, the latest choreographer-of-the-moment’s danceography.
If we take the long view, dance’s use as a form of healing probably goes back to archaic Greece. The classicist Walter Burkert has written about orpheotelestae, itinerant charismatics, who, as early as the fifth century BCE, traveled around Greece offering to cure both physical and mental illnesses by dancing a circle around the unwell person.
Such acts of magicking no doubt still occur in the modern world, albeit on a very limited scale. In a world wised up to the glories of penicillin and sanitation and surgery, the use of dance as a form of therapy is much more likely to be found in cases of stress or trauma or Parkinson’s. In the 1990s in Christian Uganda, for instance, some of the children who were experiencing trauma as a result of having been involuntarily conscripted into the brutal guerrilla movement the Lord’s Resistance Army were rehabilitated through dancing.
In the United States, dancing has been used to treat a host of conditions. Indeed, many luminaries of the dance world originally came to the art in order to overcome shyness, or to recover strength after having an illness. The shyness group includes Arthur Murray and 1930s and ’40’s film star and hoofer Eleanor Powell, who some consider to be rivaled in dancing talent only by Fred Astaire (unlike many tap dancers in film, including Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain and Ginger Rogers in all hers, Powell dubbed all her own taps). The folks who’ve gravitated to dance as a form of convalescence include Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon star Cyd Charisse (polio), Jacob’s Pillow founder Ted Shawn (diphtheria), tap dancer Ann Miller (rickets), and Joffrey Ballet founder Robert Joffrey (asthma). Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company, developed the idiom known as Gaga as a way to treat a back injury.
When the wounds that a dancer carries are psychological as opposed to medical, the rigors of choreographed movement are an especially powerful haven. In her history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, Jennifer Homans says of Lucia Chase, “After her husband’s sudden death and in a state of intense grief and mourning, she took refuge in the discipline of ballet.” Chase formed the company that would become American Ballet Theatre.
When Mikhail Baryshnikov was twelve, his mother hung herself, after which Baryshnikov, who’d enrolled himself in ballet school three years earlier, threw himself ever more assiduously into his work. Baryshnikov’s teacher Juris Kapralis told writer Joan Acocella that, during breaks in classes, the other dancers would go into the corners of the studio and play, but “Not Misha. He is still working, practicing steps till he gets them right. Very serious boy.” As Acocella put it, “He was filling, with something beautiful, the void this beautiful woman left in his life.”
But the most vivid example of ballet-as-recovery is probably that of Michaela DePrince, a soloist for the Dutch National Ballet who danced in the “Hope” sequence of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Born in war-torn Sierra Leone in 1995, DePrince lost both her parents at age three: rebels killed her father at the diamond mine where he worked, and her mother died shortly thereafter of starvation and disease. Thought by her uncle to be a “devil child” because she had the skin depigmentation disease known as vitiligo, DePrince was sold to an orphanage, where she was abused and starved and referred to as “Number 27.” When the orphanage was bombed, DePrince and some of the other orphans escaped to a refugee camp in nearby Guinea, but not before trekking past “hundreds of dead bodies . . . sprawled on the ground with their eyes and mouths open in terror.” At age four, DePrince and her best friend were adopted by an American couple from New Jersey. Just before leaving for the States, DePrince found a picture of a ballerina on the cover of Dance Magazine; this picture became her lodestar, one of the only things “that reminded me I was alive.”
She trained at the Rock School in Philadelphia and at American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Before getting hired by the Dance Theatre of Harlem, she was the subject of a lot of discrimination: At age eight, she was told she couldn’t be Marie in The Nutcracker because “America’s not ready for a black girl ballerina.” A year later, a teacher told her mother that black ballet dancers weren’t worth investing in.
As DePrince puts it in First Position, the 2011 documentary about aspiring ballerinas, “It’s a miracle I’m even here.”
* * *
If the aforementioned prompt to all my own recent dancing—reducing work-related stress—feels, in comparison with these other examples, to be weak tea, I’d use stronger words to describe all this motion’s combined benefit. When Greg started joining me in my living room dancing, I knew that I was a truly lucky individual in having a partner who not only indulged me in my strange new pastime, but wanted to join along. (Two summers ago we took two salsa classes together, given outdoors on a local pier, but we’ve found that our own living room is a better fit for us.)
Greg and I, unlike most couples, don’t fight, or even bicker. We prefer to internalize and then to passively aggress; it makes for a very rich silence.
You can imagine how, as I fell under the spell of contact improv, and kept coming home with bulletins from the land of spaceship travel and the Nuance of the Pelvic Bowl, many spouses would have felt threatened. But Greg took it in stride, sometimes even incorporating into our living room shakings some of the moves I described to him. It says everything to me that, after having taken scores of classes and been to hundreds of jams and other dances, my all-time favorite move is something Greg devised: standing behind me, he puts his two palms on the small of my back, which allows me to lean backwards at a fifteen-degree angle while I dance. Just as I’m about to topple, he catches me.
You need to make frequent ef
forts to keep a fourteen-year-long relationship from becoming routinized or predictable, yet dancing never feels like effort. While the large majority of Greg’s and my boogying is done in partial darkness and without responding to, or looking too much at, each other, it’s the moments when we take each other in our arms, or lean slightly on each other, that I’ll realize, This is my first sensual act of the day.
2.
I don’t have the performing bug. I don’t mind being watched dancing, and occasionally I even enjoy it a little, but it’s not what gets my fanny into the proverbial leotard. It’s no surprise that I’m a writer: I want to be the center of attention, but I’d rather not be in the room while it’s happening.
That said, sometimes performing can be a helpful measuring stick, a barometer of ground gained. So when two young filmmakers in their twenties named Luke Smithers and Derek Johnson walked up to me at the Saturday contact improv jam one day and told me—without knowing that I write for several big-deal publications—they liked the way I moved and were interested in having me do contact improv in the four-minute art film they were making, a bell went off. Here was an opportunity to avenge my flameout on the morning of the pas de deux presentation at Peridance.
I could have stopped at the mere invitation. That two discerning, style-obsessed creative types would watch some forty-five or so people dancing and then pick me (and two others) from the crowd was wildly flattering and consoling; it was the psychological equivalent of being handed a check covering every dance class and Pilates session and massage I’d ever paid for. I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an asshole, so I’ll just say it: the month directly following being asked to be in the movie was Endorphin City for me. It was like having three glasses of wine at lunch and realizing THAT IT WAS GOING TO BE AN ALL-CAPS KIND OF AFTERNOON.
Once home from the jam, I went on Luke’s and Derek’s websites and checked out their work, which included sleek and accomplished videos made for up-and-coming fashion designers, models.com, Fiasco magazine, and the Zaha Hadid Foundation. More than one of their short films featured gorgeous, biracial anorectics writhing on expensive furniture. Most memorable and beautiful to behold was The Body’s Witness, a seven-minute short in which a naked young man in his twenties emerges from darkness and encounters a naked man in his early seventies.
Did I tell Luke and Derek that I have an occasionally iffy back? I did not: I was trying to get (or keep) the (unpaid) gig. But, in the month between meeting these guys and our filming, I took every precaution: I swam a lot and went to Pilates weekly, but went to no dance classes and only one jam.
The film was to be titled Fragile Machines, and would be shot in suburban Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a small, darkish Airbnb house that Luke and Derek rented for the weekend. Pre-shoot, Luke kept us cast members (me and three other contact dancers, four or five young fashion models, the naked actor in his early seventies) updated by e-mail. “This piece is collaborative and will mirror a contact improvisation dance jam,” he wrote early on. “We will transform the house into a world unto itself. Displaced objects (e.g., a mirror submerged in sand, an ode to earthwork artist Robert Smithson’s Leaning Mirror) will occupy corners of the various rooms of the house that we will ask you to engage with. Over the past few weeks, Derek & I have collected prompts from the field of physical theater that will guide us on our exploration of our bodies and this alien space. From these surreal tableaus we hope to generate ruptures in the quotidian. Attached below is our moodboard, informed by the aesthetic of Matthew Barney’s works and the concepts underlying Roy Andersson’s films. Tony Hoagland’s poem ‘America,’ which you can read here, is a rattling distillation of our thinking.”
I admired the seriousness on display. Ruptures in the quotidian, I heard myself thinking: hell yeah!
The moodboard—a collage of images that fashion designers create for inspiration—was composed of five menacing photographs, including someone walking into a dark wood and a woman drowned in her living room. Between Luke’s e-mail and the photos, you could tell exactly the kind of David Lynch-y noir that he and Derek were aiming for—which may help explain my utter lack of nervousness about the filming. In the weeks before the shoot, I kept scanning my body and consciousness for pools of anxiety or even the slightest tremor of uncertainty or regret, but found only excitement. Indeed, even once I’d showed up at the house for Day One of the shoot and learned that, though all the young models were being gussied up by Hair and Makeup, me and the other fifty-plus male contact dancer would receive merely a little rouge on our cheeks (I think because we were meant to look mysterious or slightly ghoulish-looking?), I didn’t care. In their e-mails and conversation, Luke and Derek had been so respectful of contact improv that I wanted to help them and to meet them more than halfway. As I’d explained to a friend the day before the shoot, “I’m open to anything except a genital cuff.”
Luke and Derek sometimes identify themselves as fashion filmmakers, so the wardrobe for the shoot, some of it bearing the name Yves Saint Laurent, was fairly fabulous. For one dance the costumer put me in a backless, quilted fencer’s shirt (it’s called a lamé) over low-slung, cream-colored, wool palazzo pants. For another dance I wore mid-calf black wrestling boots, a heavy wool military-green trench coat, and underpants but no shirt or trousers: after-hours SS officer.
Sometimes Luke or Derek would give us prompts (“Slightly robotic, like your arms are moving of their own will”), but mostly they would put me and another dancer in front of the camera with a prop or set-piece, like an antique surgery chair or a mid-century, bungee-like chest expander, and tell us to respond to each other or to the prop.
Outside of boogying-in-the-rain-and-then-swimming-under-a-waterfall at my friend’s wedding, or waxing rhapsodic during my early days as a contact dancer, I can’t remember enjoying myself more while dancing. Indeed, even when it became clear, on Day Two, that my pale pale body and its waist-level bumpers would, in one scene, be shown to disadvantage in nothing but white wrestling boots, a vintage wrestling helmet, and my underpants, I didn’t blanch. I thought, Move so well that no one focuses on my flaws.
But I wasn’t pure pedal to the metal. A week later, Luke would write me and ask me—in a sweet and non-pushy way—if, for the second day of shooting, I’d feel comfortable doing nudity. I thought about it and thought about it, and finally demurred. If I were in my seventies or eighties, I would have done it in a heartbeat: everyone would have thought me so brave. But nudity at fifty-five is more likely to elicit the reaction “Get a hobby.”
Was I being intransigent? Was I putting too much emphasis on receiving credit for my actions? I couldn’t tell. All I knew was, everything else that Luke and Derek had thrown at me had struck me as nutty and delightful and slightly subversive, but the nudity proposition had set off a lot of introspection. Everything I’d learned from dancing seemed to be anti-introspection. I thought back on my Twyla misstep, when I’d filmed Savannah Lowery doing my eleven seconds of The One Hundreds. I concluded, No. Cease and desist.
But I’ve buried the lead. I haven’t told you about the part of the filming where I surprised myself, the part that helped re-colonize the part of my brain which, ever since the pas presentation at Peridance, had fixated on the thought, “I am a flight risk.”
On the first day of shooting, after I’d filmed two dances with two other movers, Derek turned to me and gave a direction that we had not discussed: he told me to stand in the middle of the living room where we’d been shooting and do a solo.
If, five years ago, you’d asked me to stand in front of a group of new acquaintances and their movie camera, and then to improvise a dance of three or four minutes’ duration, I would have become giggly or schticky, and maybe then, after self-effacing or self-abnegating for a bit, coughed up something tame and minimalist.
But instead, I walked to the center of the living room—I was in the after-hours SS officer wardrobe at this point, which helped—where I took a deep breath and th
en launched into what I would later describe to a friend as “a modern dance shitstorm.” I outstretched my arms as far as possible to my sides, relevéed on my left foot, lifted my crooked right leg just above my navel, and held it like a dancey Jesus. I collapsed onto the floor and dragged myself forward using the palms of my hands, like I’d been abandoned in a desert and was in desperate search of nourishment. I landed two credible arabesques. I did three floor-based backwards somersaults. I leaned the crown of my head against the wall and then spun 360 degrees while helicoptering my arms and keeping my head wall-bound. I lay on my side on the floor and, using my right deltoid as an anchor, frantically ran 360 degrees. I relevéed on both feet and Christ-the-Redeemered my arms again. I sunk to my knees and then heartlessly cascaded my face to the floor, breaking my fall with the palm of my hands at the last possible moment, and then did it two more times.
The room got very quiet. Even the Hair and Makeup folks, sitting on a couch some thirty feet away, were staring. I kept thrashing about, but soon, sensing that I should draw to a close, I remembered reading that in her dotage Martha Graham could still lock her knees together and then manically skitter backwards, so I did that, and followed it up with some collapsing and more somersaulting.
Soon Derek was whispering, “That’s great,” signaling the segment’s end.
I stopped. I was drenched in sweat.
The cameraman, big-eyed, said, “That was felt.”