What? Can I dance too?
Part 2 - Who gets to dance? Who needs to?
This post is the second of a two part essay on the choreography of everyday life, as Annie-B Parson calls it in her book of the same name. The first can be found HERE. If you like this post, let me know, or even better let someone else know! And if you’re intrigued about what’s coming down the line, hit subscribe and you’ll get each episode by email as it’s published (unless you’ve already subscribed, in which case, I thank you!)
“We move like nature, we curve and spiral and rotate like shells and cats and snakes, we lunge and dive and bob like wind and lions and waves, we crawl and duck and jump like frogs and drops of water and crabs, we gather and float and pause like leaves and butterflies and oceans. And we stand around. We stand around a lot.”
The Choreography of Everyday Life, by Annie-B Parson1
Dancing is existing…
Part of the problem of dance and dancing is that it’s all wrapped up with the who and what and how:
Who dances? Performers, participants, peasants? People called ‘professional dancers’? Cheerleaders? All of us?
What is dance anyway? Something we all do, all of the time? Or some of us, some of the time? Something nature does? Something we choose to do? Something our bodies need? Something we learn?
How do we dance? Just by moving? With precision or abandon? Standing or sitting around? In ways prescribed by others? In ways taught by others? In ways our bodies need?
All of this is an interdependent jumble. Dance can be a burst of radical freedom and showtime-on-pointe. It can be celebration, transformation, intoxication – even indoctrination. And everyone can dance… can’t they? Well, interdependence is always more complex and complicated than what appears on the surface. This dance thing – this music thing – is always tangled up in other stuff. The social, cultural, political stuff that tells us who the ‘normies’ are in any given sphere. And who holds privilege, and who has to resort to transgression and dancing in corners.
However, it can be very simple from an experiential point of view. Mariah Person, a black, neurodivergent woman and movement practitioner, writes that, for her, ‘dancing is existing’:
“I think the body is absolutely amazing. Dancing is me being able to be my most open self. It allows me to process… Not being able to dance is like feeling bound. It’s like having a part of you that’s being told it is not allowed to exist. It’s very difficult. I hear music in my head. My brain is always making things so I’m hearing things in the environment and then integrating the sounds into movements. I always have a reason to move. If somebody was to take that away? It’s like having your own best friend in your head and then someone taking them away from you.”2
It’s like electricity
When the film Billy Elliot came out, it touched a chord for many boys. The binary of boxing versus dancing in an early scene might have been a little obvious, but for most boys – in the North East, as elsewhere – there was a truth that dancing was something that ‘lads’ only did as part of their tribe, not at a dance or ballet school. Air guitar for the rockers; spins and cool moves for the Northern Soul boys or B-Boys – boys dance was communal and marked out territories.
Once, years before the film came out, I and my friends were out for a night out at the Rex Hotel ballroom in Whitley Bay. A group of us were shaking our long(ish) hair to some heavy rock number or other, and a crowd of skinhead soul boys took exception, threw chairs at us and attacked us with fists and boots. My friend Phil and I ended up in hospital, and I needed several stitches on the part of my head that a chair had bounced off. There was a clear message there. We couldn’t dance the way we wanted.
The irony was that I enjoyed dancing to soul and disco far more than shaking to rock anyway, but the boundaries were set, and you learned to take care to be in the right place at the right time where nightlife dancing was concerned. It was ever thus, but as time went on, as long as you were careful about where you put and moved your body, dancing could be amazing – as Billy Elliot says in the film, “like electricity”.
However, learning to dance, as Billy Elliot also found, was a different story. The class of little girls in tutus in the boxing gym at the start of the film could be any ballet class across the country – even now. Boys don’t ‘learn to dance’ – not as a norm. More boys do go to dance schools, of course, but in our culture there are still expectations and assumptions around who the dancing boys (and girls) are, based on the variations of gender, class, ethnicity, colour, size and shape, that peg out who accesses ‘dance’ training and performance.
There are always exceptions to rules and, like I said, it’s complicated. Within the worlds of dance performance and competition - from ballet and traditional forms to more contemporary genres – men often still disproportionately control these spaces – getting to be choreographers, directors or ‘stars’. As a counterpoint, in traditional folk and working class forms of music and dance, women and men all took part, though there were episodes (such as in the dark history of the Morris Ring, one of the dance form’s umbrella organisations) where women’s groups (or ‘sides’) were excluded. In other traditions, however, like North-East clog-dancing, there seems to have been more of an egalitarian feel to things.3
I don’t want to get into history here. I don’t want to get far from a little boy for whom ballet “is like electricity”, or a young woman for whom “dancing is existing”. I don’t want to get far away from experience, from embodiment, from the ways we naturally move like nature; the ways we stand and sit around. This is dance too – the ordinary, everyday choreography of the soul.
A little while ago, I was driving home from a work trip and had a Defected House playlist blasting from my car speakers. I was driving safely and was suitably focussed (just in case you were worrying), and the music was marvellous. What kept me ‘regulated’ (if that’s the right word), was the way I was responding. Alone in the car, I wasn’t ‘dancing’ in the way I might do if the same tracks were played on a dance-floor, but something moved inside me – something that is always moving…
Movement makes the world
Michael Klien, associate professor of the practice of dance at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina has been taking some of the ideas and experiences of inclusion and equality and putting them into practice in a course that "endorses dance as a politically, socially, and spiritually transformative force in society.". For him, dance encodes reality – our bodies encode reality:
“For example, how we think about gender, about production, about the relation of the individual to the collective.”4
The ambivalence of the relationship of the individual to the collective – in terms of assumptions and unseen norms – can be experienced quite specifically by neurodivergent people. Movement practitioner and dancer, Susanna Dye, explores this in her work around the relationship between stimming5 and dance:
“My recent interest in stimming came out of my paradoxical relationship with dance, and my discovery of my neurodivergence as an adult. Growing up, I was an intuitive dancer, trailing a path of whirling, waving and kicking limbs through our small downstairs flat. Yet the way dance classes are structured left me feeling like dance was not for me.” 6
The video above - Stimming - is a collaboration between Susanna Dye and Manon Ouimet, and is the result of Susanna’s exploration of stimming and dance.
“Dance was not for me”. Reading this, I had a deep and familiar sense of loss and frustration. My memories of ‘intuitive dancing’ (and something like stimming too) as a child flood in, and I wish it could have been as simple a happy-ending as Billy Elliot! Truth be told, I never knew I could dance (as in allowed to…), save for a few nifty dad-dance steps at a party to a disco or house track, and some solo waving and whirling when no-one else was home.7
There’s another dimension that goes beyond the cultural boundaries of what ‘being a dancer’ is. For Susanna Dye, it meant realising that the way she self-regulated and self-soothed as a neurodivergent person also had something to do with the intuitive, spontaneous movement of her body. ‘Stimming’ can be dance, she discovered, and dance can be a form of stimming. This says something new, perhaps, about the need to move: the ways in which movement – ‘controlled’ or not – is essential for the somatic survival of a good proportion of us humans from whatever class or culture we find ourselves in.
Those for whom ‘dancing is existing’ – who always dance through the world – well, some of them ‘became’ dancers. That is, they trained, danced and sometimes performed; but they always needed to move. They moved to live. For some of these, like my daughter Sarah, their dancing may have been partly stimming – but not just stimming, because dance is complicated, and dancing for Sarah is existence…
So what does this say to those who have been told that we are not dancers. That dancers are people with some special and privileged set of characteristics and abilities? What might it mean if we started to see neurodivergence, for example, not just as a label, disability or disorder, but as a lens through which we can inquire into deeper, more intrinsic human needs? For, as I observed in part one of this piece, people dance in so many ways.
We move like nature, as Annie-B Parson puts it, because we are natural creatures, with embodied needs for food, shelter, relationship, community and, of course, movement. So, we could be curious about how self-regulating movement like ‘stimming’ (not only done by neurodivergent people!) might work for everyone. Maybe, then we’d find out more about ourselves as embodied humans – even becoming more understanding and inclusive of difference? Which would be nice…
Of her own moving, stimming journey, Susanna Dye writes:
“Through exploring stimming, I have gained a greater acceptance of, and trust in my body. I’ve learned about how self-care is a process of deep listening, and have discovered the joy in yielding to my impulses for movement, rather than suppressing them. Identifying what stimulates my movement has enabled me to take pleasure in my physical interactions with the world and the people who share it with me.”
We are all dancing all of the time. It’s just that some movements and contexts are classed as more ‘dance-y’ than others. Yet the reality is, as Sarah Wilbur, assistant professor on that Duke University dance course says of all of us:
“We are making the world every day when we go out and move through it. Your movement makes the world.”
Notes
Annie-B Parson’s book, The Choreography of Everyday Life is published by Verso Books (2022): “A renowned choreographer explores the dance of everyday life and reveals that art-making is as natural as walking down the street.” It’s a very special thing, like an improvisation right there on the page: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2863-the-choreography-of-everyday-life
Mariah (Riah) Person is part of a group around Autism HWB (Autism Health and Wellbeing) set up in 2020 as “a space for autistic people to share the things that they have found helpful and healing”. The article from which her quote is taken is based on an interview with her by Florence Neville: https://autismhwb.com/2020/01/08/dancing-is-existing/
The history of The Morris Ring and its exclusion of women’s and mixed ‘sides’ is well recorded, though this policy was changed recently. The North East of England also has a particular folk tradition of music, dance and instrumentation. The rapper sword dance was performed by miners, but there are other clog dance traditions that seem to have had wider inclusion. At some stage, I’ll write about the Unthanks, a band with roots deep in North East folk traditions, and Becky and Rachel Unthank are clog dancers of renown!
The article about the Duke University course, Exploring the Choreography of Everyday Life, was published by Scot Huler and Chris Hildreth (Photography) on Sept 20, 2020 at: https://arts.duke.edu/news/exploring-the-choreography-of-everyday-life/#
Stimming: according to Susanna Dye: “Short for self-stimulatory movements, stimming is the rhythmic, repetitive movement we do to self-regulate, helping us to manage our emotions and to process sensory input from our environment. Although stimming is a universal part of human behaviour, it is particularly important for neurodivergent people, who experience differences in how we process information and sensory input.”, from their article Succumbing to stimming in dance (see below).
From https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/YmAoBhAAACMAri04. An interview with Susanna Dye about her work also appears here: https://danceartjournal.com/2022/03/24/stimming-towards-a-neurodivergent-dance-practice-interview-with-susanna-dye/
This is complicated too. Nobody explicitly said to me, ‘don’t dance’ or said ‘you can’t dance’, though nobody ever said ‘you can’. In fact, some people said I was a good dancer – at a party or occasional club night out. But it was occasional and never vocational. Actually, if I am honest, I didn’t allow myself. Would I have liked to do a dance training? If it was now, yes. As it was then, I accept I was never going to be Billy Elliot.