Adventures In Social Dancing
Several years ago, as an anniversary gift, I bought my wife a series social dance lessons. She had taken dance lessons as a child, not ballroom but ballet, and never went back to it. But it was obviously something that she missed. One summer, on a lark, we attended a dance at our local town hall and she never stopped talking about it, even though neither of us knew what we were doing. She remembered that night as the best amusement park ride she had ever been on.
Today’s social dance or ballroom dancing is something of a curious phenomenon. It’s enjoying a moment of popularity despite having acquired all the sexual political baggage embraced by our culture since it’s last bump in popularity post WWII. I tagged along thinking it might be useful at weddings but that expectation proved misplaced. The generation currently tying the knot has no idea what traditional ballroom dancing is; the few weddings that I’ve been to they play rap or hip-hop while the friends of the bride and groom stand in a circle like a column of mating fish, darting in and out, clinking their long neck beers with one hand while recording the entire bizarre rapture with the other and then rushing to see who can post it first to social media. I have it on good authority that dance studios still do a brisk “first dance” wedding business but I have yet to see it practiced in person. Popular entertainment such as Dancing with the Stars has helped create a glitzy buzz about what social dance can be but it’s as far from everyday foxtrot and rumba as rap and hip-hop. Given the amount of time that’s passed since the era of big bands and the night that Lady Gaga closed the Roseland, it’s understandable that many folks don’t have any idea what the attraction is to ballroom dancing.
Until recently, boomers never really took up ballroom and dancing in public became more of an individualistic expression, occasionally executed by couples but without any shared sense movement and choreography. Like so many other things, social dance became a victim of sexual politics where the notion that one gender provides a lead while the other follows was not only passe but offensive, an ugly relic of a by gone era not to be entertained by the enlighten class, a notion fondly and forever memorialized by Elaine Benis and the Jimmy Leg. So one could be forgiven for ridiculing ballroom dance for its traditional gender-based conventions. After all, ballroom dance still has all the ritualized, chaperoned pantomime of sex without the clumsy silences, embarrassing vulnerabilities and the always awkward “who’s gonna clean this mess up”.
This was never more obvious than when one of my instructors while teaching west coast swing briefly veered into the philosophical protocols of social dancing. He simply said that every social dance begins with a request to dance. Doesn’t matter by whom. But in order to initiate the activity someone has to propose it and the other party has to consent. Interesting choice of words. Not accept. Not agree. But consent.
In today’s society, consent is a loaded concept, since the mere act of looking at a women requires that you contact her lawyer to obtain a pre-glance approval agreement, even though women still seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and money in anticipation of being looked at, a kind of inverted pay-for-view, the perverse onlyfans of ordinary life. Requesting consent implies that something more than mere familiarity is about to ensue, something that involves an intimacy beyond those allowed by our public personas.
My instructor went on to explain that consent is required because dance is a form of tactile communication, subtle expressions of momentum and inertia suggested by music but expressed through physical touch. Not just the pressure applied and sensed by the each party’s hands but through their posture and poise, rises and falls, bodies and balance. The more practiced you become the more subtle and exciting social dancing becomes until it achieves a plane not unlike tantric yoga, an exhilarating isometric exertion that leaves you writhing in exhaustion wondering “who’s gonna clean this mess up”.
Which brings us to an interesting conundrum: if the promise of social dance is so exciting and exhilarating, why do men in heterosexual relationships often abandon it, leaving their partners to pursue it on their own or, conventional sexual politics aside, with other surrogates as well as partners of the same gender?
While I haven’t been to many teaching studios, I suspect my experience to be somewhat typical. Couples, composed of male and female partners, begin taking social dance lessons with an open mind and a shared enthusiasm. About six months in, something changes. A year later the woman is still taking lessons and making progress while her partner is addressing calendar conflicts. Six months after that and she is on her own perfecting techniques that she could no longer even begin to convey to her male partner but is still enjoying the company of her female classmates and gay instructors.
As a current student, I occasionally go to group classes, a session that involves many students of varying skills and experience focused a on single dance or technique, west coast swing for example. West coast swing is a very non-threatening social dance that involves very little touching by each partner. The lead is accomplished by a simple hand hold where the lead parter presents an upraised palm and the follower places their hand, face down, in the palm of the leader’s hand. The connection is completed by the lead partner lightly placing their thumb on the top of the followers hand. That’s it. No pelvic grinding. No Argentinian tango pivot turns. The leader uses this connection to guide their partner, back and forth on an imaginary slot, by suggesting moves and then getting out of their way.
My group class is composed of three males and ten females which by conventional practice amounts to three leaders and ten followers. As it turns out this ratio is not out of the ordinary, in fact, many group classes, especially those catering to advanced skills, have absolutely no male representation whatsoever, with the possible exception of the instructor. It was during our third class, the first where there was any partner connection, that the reason for this became obvious. Our instructor, standing in as one of the leaders during the session, instructed us to join in partnership, not to dance but to acquire a sense of what it means to be in connection. As instructed, I offered my palm and my partner, a woman who I hadn’t been introduced to, placed her hand in it. I then rested my thumb on the top of her hand. She glanced down at our hands and then back at me and announced, “That’s the wrong knuckle”.
“Wrong knuckle?”, I inquired, since, thus far, knuckles weren’t included in the syllabus.
“Yes”, she said. “It belongs here.”, taking my thumb with her free hand and moving it above her index finger.
Obviously out classed and well beyond my meager skills, I simply replied, “Oh.”
But then glancing at my instructor’s hand, who happened to be standing right next to me, I noticed his thumb was resting on his partner’s hand on the same knuckle mine had been resting on prior to my partner insisting it be moved.
In between formal instruction my wife and I would go to a local vocational school that offered group lessons that catered to the occasional dancers and afforded them a place to practice. The instructor would walk the group through some basic choreography but was mostly there to provide coaching as requested. The beauty of the place was that the lessons were held in either the cafeteria or the gym so there was plenty of room to move, a necessity when it came to dances like foxtrot that require line of dance. During one of these sessions there was a couple that was obviously struggling to find the beat. The woman loudly request that the instructor come over and tell her partner what he was doing wrong. To which the instructor said, “I am sorry I can’t do that, besides, why should I tell him what you’ve already been saying all night long?”
When we first started taking lessons, maybe it was our second or third session, we encountered an elderly couple, at the time the only other people in the studio and they were waltzing. Not just any waltz. It was nearly divine. They moved in perfect unison, each rise and fall, each change of direction, each shift in inertia seems to have been scripted by Disney fairy tale. When they came off the floor it was impossible not to ask how they’d come by their skills. They were more than modest about their abilities volunteering that it was years and years of practice. But just before leaving the studio the man, holding the door for his partner, confessed that it wasn’t always easy, in fact, he said, it almost cost them their marriage more than once, to which his wife told him to shut the fuck up.
The women currently invested in ballroom dance are an interesting lot. Most are accomplished, educated, affable, attractive and of notable means; this is not an inexpensive hobby. Most are in committed personal relationships, straight or gay, these are not lonely women, at least not in the conventional sense. Yet learning to dance in partnership, regardless of how advanced their skills, in the context of relationships that they profess to be a part of, doesn’t seem to factor into their objectives. Some seek the thrill of competition or the comfort of companionship. Some long for one more moment as the center of attention, the star of their own recital. Others just like moving to music which is how ballroom dancing first gained popularity; the prospect of meeting and dancing with a stranger was one of the reasons people went to the Roseland in the first place. But such encounters were almost always anonymous with respect to each partners ability and that dearth of expectation most certainly factored into any proffered consent.
That is no longer the case. What is abundantly clear is that dancing with an acknowledge partner is not a priority; instead it has become a matter of self-affirmation, as partner inclusive as Wordle or pilates. This was never more obvious than in the last session of my west coast group lesson. Our instructor was finally going to put us together in partnership to execute and review a move called “the whip”, a move that requires partners pivot while in dance frame around a center of motion before returning to their initial starting positions. But before he did that he wanted to ensure that each leader was sufficiently familiar with the move as to not put any follower in physical jeopardy. To do that he assumed the role of the follower and called out an eight count to conduct the choreography. When it became my turn, I extended my hand with my palm turned up and standing in front of me, my instructor placed his hand in my palm and then wryly said, “OK, now make me feel pretty.”
And there it was, reduced to its raw, immutable essence, the compelling motivation behind the renewed interest in ballroom dance. Nearly 100 years after the introduction of foxtrot, nearly 80 years after big bands and 60 years after feminism, public partnered dance has finally recapitulated social mores, not as a valued social comportment but as a private indulgence performed publicly, a kind of a Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok moment. Which would seem to explain the absence of acknowledged male partners when it comes to social dance. Why bother? Betty Friedan buried Prince Charming in a vegetable garden in Syosset back in 1963 and the collective feminine consciousness has never looked back. Nobody’s bothered to mount a search party for the missing Fisher King on Long Island. Instead the male component of ballroom dance been replaced by well trained surrogates who can, when properly induced, “make you feel pretty”.
But at least we can all breath a collective sigh of relief knowing that, somewhere, buried at Jungian depths of the female psyche, women still seek affirmation in the collective effect their visage has on others. What seems to have been forgotten by the intervening generations is that gender isn’t some freestanding, unipolar phenomenon; it doesn’t exist absent its complement no matter how hard you may want that to be, they are inextricably entwined and when you buried Prince Charming, you broke the spell. What is curious is the persistent diminution of acknowledged male partners in public social dance especially when no amount of consent would extend that same privileged to strangers, onlyfans notwithstanding. When you diminish an acknowledged partner, you mar the very notion of your own essence. regardless of what sexual preference you publicly profess.
It is also curious that this particular moment has arrived at the same time when gender ambiguity and fluidity has taken center stage in our collective social consciousness, when males openly parade about as women having their very own Tiktok moment while enjoying the mute consent of female suburban feminists. I guess it might be hypocritical to call out gender surrogates when you might have to admit that you’ve been on board with it since you can remember, especially when it fulfills your own need for public affirmation, including feeling pretty. Under current circumstances and the ceaseless pursuit of affirmation, one can only conclude that when the fragility of modern sexual mores dictate that traditional gender roles need not apply, partnerless dancing becomes its own pyrrhic reward.
Copyright@KirkMKlasson2023
