the bossanova
Do you do a lot of dancing? Do you like to dance? Are you a private dancer that only dances behind walls where no one can see you? Or are you a dancer that is more of a social experiment? I loooooove dancing. I dance when I can and I live on both sides of the dance floor, the side that has people watching and the side that is hidden from the eyes of others.
As a child, I took tap, jazz, ballet, ballroom and folk dancing. It was really more for my mother, who had me in gymnastics, and an assortment of other living vicarously-esque dreams before dancing came along. I can't say that much of what I was taught stuck, or that I remember any of it, but what I lack in skills and talents, I more than make up for it in willingness. And sometimes willingness is enough.
Of course, this isn't a "willingness" to try, but a willingness to make an ass out of myself. And when I mean "ass" I mean - ass. When I dance, I dance for me, and that doesn't always look as fluid and graceful as the macarena or crunking or Swan Lake or Gregory Hines.
When I was a teenager, I used to go to a contra dancing class in Friday Harbor, Washington. The classes were held in an old couple's house that were world travelers and had accumulated all these dances like so many others collect shot glasses or thimbles. They had thousands of these dances. Each one was written down on a piece of paper that was floating around with other pieces of paper in a large box. The idea was that someone from the class would reach in blindly and pull out a new dance for us to do. This way you never knew what was coming.
If you're not familiar with contra dancing, it's just dances collected from time and space from every culture in the world. One dance could be an old Mexican dance that a bride and groom would do after their marriage, and the next one could be a Yugoslavian farmer dance of grieving for a lost goat. Learning the background of the dance was half the fun of learning the steps in the dance.... Sometimes. The chicken dance, so popular in American weddings, is a real dance from some country. It's a contra dance.
Everyone paired up and it didn't matter what your partner's sex was. You face each other in two rows across from each other. Then the group instructor tells you the story of the dance, how to do it and then walk you through it once. Then he would dig a record out of his collection of thousands of old records. (it's really amazing that he could remember every dance and which record to grab. He could have been lying and we would have never know it.) The instructor would play music that seemed to justify the wanky steps he had just shown you and you would faithfully do as you were told. It was odd and awesom.
If you were lucky enough to have a partner of the opposite sex, the dance was fun, moderately flirty and incredibly worthwhile. But if your partner was of the same sex, then there was an awkwardness to trying to be graceful, courteous and in "showing your partner your heart". Thankfully after every song, the lines would move one person to the left and relieve some of the awkward homosexual tension that many of the dancers felt. With each dance came a new partner and in an odd "wife swapping" way, you smiled.
You dance for hours and you never do the same dance twice. There were thousands of dances that I never got to try, and I think of them when I let my toes twinkle today. "What were those dances like?" But instead of asking the right people or looking it up to find out for myself, I just invent my own dances and give them my own names. Isn't that how all those dances were created in the first place? I mean, have you ever met anyone who invented a dance? So isn't it possible that some idiot like me came up with all those dances? I think I am qualified to invent a dance or two. Well, dances might be a tad too generous for this behavior, it's more like modestly controlled convulsions.... Set to music.
For the last four months, all I have been listening to is Jazz. It's wonderful for the mind, but not great for getting out and stepping lightly. In fact, in all the years of my dancing, I have only cut a rug to one jazz beat. That dance - The Bossanova.
There is a song....
It's quite catchy. (Quite).
My bones are bit creaky and the muscles don't have the coordination that they used to during all my hot nights of Kansas ballroom dancing, but my mind is still flying across the floor leaving a sonic boom in the wake of my art. But instead of taking my aging as a negative, I look at my aging as a fine tuning. I like to think that before I was too wild and that I needed to subdue some of my moves and make their meaning more powerful. I say this, of course, as a convienent lie.
I hope that my dancing days are still on the rise and that my future will be covered with new dances that will help me express myself when words fail me. Dances that show my joy. Dances that show my sorrow. Dances that show my devotion to peanut M&M's. Dances that show my displeasure with children.
I hearby declare this "The Summer of Dance" and I ask that you seek out a new dance, whether it's your own or one that is already established, and make it your voice.
As a child, I took tap, jazz, ballet, ballroom and folk dancing. It was really more for my mother, who had me in gymnastics, and an assortment of other living vicarously-esque dreams before dancing came along. I can't say that much of what I was taught stuck, or that I remember any of it, but what I lack in skills and talents, I more than make up for it in willingness. And sometimes willingness is enough.
Of course, this isn't a "willingness" to try, but a willingness to make an ass out of myself. And when I mean "ass" I mean - ass. When I dance, I dance for me, and that doesn't always look as fluid and graceful as the macarena or crunking or Swan Lake or Gregory Hines.
When I was a teenager, I used to go to a contra dancing class in Friday Harbor, Washington. The classes were held in an old couple's house that were world travelers and had accumulated all these dances like so many others collect shot glasses or thimbles. They had thousands of these dances. Each one was written down on a piece of paper that was floating around with other pieces of paper in a large box. The idea was that someone from the class would reach in blindly and pull out a new dance for us to do. This way you never knew what was coming.
If you're not familiar with contra dancing, it's just dances collected from time and space from every culture in the world. One dance could be an old Mexican dance that a bride and groom would do after their marriage, and the next one could be a Yugoslavian farmer dance of grieving for a lost goat. Learning the background of the dance was half the fun of learning the steps in the dance.... Sometimes. The chicken dance, so popular in American weddings, is a real dance from some country. It's a contra dance.
Everyone paired up and it didn't matter what your partner's sex was. You face each other in two rows across from each other. Then the group instructor tells you the story of the dance, how to do it and then walk you through it once. Then he would dig a record out of his collection of thousands of old records. (it's really amazing that he could remember every dance and which record to grab. He could have been lying and we would have never know it.) The instructor would play music that seemed to justify the wanky steps he had just shown you and you would faithfully do as you were told. It was odd and awesom.
If you were lucky enough to have a partner of the opposite sex, the dance was fun, moderately flirty and incredibly worthwhile. But if your partner was of the same sex, then there was an awkwardness to trying to be graceful, courteous and in "showing your partner your heart". Thankfully after every song, the lines would move one person to the left and relieve some of the awkward homosexual tension that many of the dancers felt. With each dance came a new partner and in an odd "wife swapping" way, you smiled.
You dance for hours and you never do the same dance twice. There were thousands of dances that I never got to try, and I think of them when I let my toes twinkle today. "What were those dances like?" But instead of asking the right people or looking it up to find out for myself, I just invent my own dances and give them my own names. Isn't that how all those dances were created in the first place? I mean, have you ever met anyone who invented a dance? So isn't it possible that some idiot like me came up with all those dances? I think I am qualified to invent a dance or two. Well, dances might be a tad too generous for this behavior, it's more like modestly controlled convulsions.... Set to music.
For the last four months, all I have been listening to is Jazz. It's wonderful for the mind, but not great for getting out and stepping lightly. In fact, in all the years of my dancing, I have only cut a rug to one jazz beat. That dance - The Bossanova.
There is a song....
It's quite catchy. (Quite).
My bones are bit creaky and the muscles don't have the coordination that they used to during all my hot nights of Kansas ballroom dancing, but my mind is still flying across the floor leaving a sonic boom in the wake of my art. But instead of taking my aging as a negative, I look at my aging as a fine tuning. I like to think that before I was too wild and that I needed to subdue some of my moves and make their meaning more powerful. I say this, of course, as a convienent lie.
I hope that my dancing days are still on the rise and that my future will be covered with new dances that will help me express myself when words fail me. Dances that show my joy. Dances that show my sorrow. Dances that show my devotion to peanut M&M's. Dances that show my displeasure with children.
I hearby declare this "The Summer of Dance" and I ask that you seek out a new dance, whether it's your own or one that is already established, and make it your voice.
posted by Daniel Loomis | 12:46 PM
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