I have a friend and colleague (“C”) who is is getting married soon and there will be a first dance. His fiancée (“D”) is a professional dancer. C is not a professional dancer. Nor does he consider himself to be a dancer of any kind. But he loves D, and he wants to participate in the wedding traditions that matter to her.
“Are you practicing?” I asked. “Has someone choreographed the dance? Will you be leading?”
“Yes, we have a dance figured out. And D says I have to lead.”
“How’s that going to work?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said sheepishly.
“Let me see. Show me what you’ve got.”
“Ok, I’ll show you one part. It’s a box step.”
C immediately looked at his feet and kept his eyes glued to them throughout the process of trying to recreate a box step from memory. He identified his starting foot that would be going forward (left foot). He identified the foot that would be starting the horizontal motion (right foot). He willed his right foot to move again, this time backward. And then, slowly, painfully, the left foot sideways to the left.
“Ok, C, the first thing you have to do is get your eyes off the floor. And we need to fix your posture. Lift through your center. And imagine you’re wearing a bra that is pulling down and center towards your spine on both sides.”
“A bra?”
“Yeah, right. Sorry about that.” I stood behind him and put the flats of my palms on his shoulder blades. Then I brought my hands slightly down and to the middle and his shoulders straightened. “Way better!”
We practiced a bit with his eyes up, his stomach pulled in and his back straight while he methodically worked on the steps. He still had no feel in his legs or feet for where to go, there was still no muscle memory. He had to think, hard, about each step.
“Let’s try it with music,” I suggested.
He played the “first dance” song on his cell phone and identified the moment when the box step would come in. We started over and at the right time we box stepped. I stood in front of him doing the box step backwards while he went forward and forward when he went back a a few times. I dropped out when I sensed that he was following me. He was not allowed to follow in this dance as per D’s instructions.
“The music should help you,” I offered. “At some point, when you practice enough, your legs and feet will want to move the way they are supposed to when that musical section comes on.”
C looked at me dubiously.
“You’ve got this, C,” I said. “The most important thing, more important than getting the steps right, is to feel the song and your love for D.”
“When we practice, I start getting it at the end. It’s at the beginning each time that I have to think a lot.”
I think the key to dance, to life, is to just start moving. If you just start moving, your feet have to go somewhere to catch up. You can corral them a bit later into patterns, but they are there to help the moving. It’s not about the feet. It’s not about the steps.
In philosophy grad school I read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty believed that perception is not reducible to the physical apparatus that brings in the sensory information. Seeing, for example, is not limited to the physical components – eyelids opening, rods, cones, optic nerve, and brain. You can react to brute sensations of vision, or one can interpret them and act accordingly, such as when you notice that a red octagon with “STOP” across the front is a stop sign. The interpretive move, the “what it means” part, is part of the perception, the phenomenological part.
When it came to dance, C was operating in a pre-dance-educated space of sensory input. For him movement was visually connected, which is why he had to look at his feet. The felt, instinctual, habitual motor program had not (yet?) been adopted by his brain-body system.
Watching C learn how to box step reminds me of how it was for me at the beginning of learning to type. At first, I put my hands on the correct keys but there was no instinctive sense of where the letters were. I had to look down at my fingers, much like C looking at his feet, to see where the letters I wanted were. To express a sentence, like I’m doing now as I type this, just slightly slower than real time, was an excruciating, painstaking process.
Typing, though, unlike dance, is merely instrumental in the sense of being a tool to do something else. I will never use the typing keyboard to do something interesting and patterned with the typing just as an exploration of the typing medium – it is not a piano or a percussion instrument even though there is a clickety clack. (In this sense a musical instrument is not merely instrumental.)
Will C ever develop enough proficiency with his box step that he’ll feel that he can play with it, add expressive elements, dance in the moment in a way that can lead someone else? Perhaps. But perhaps for him the proficiency will be more like typing – a tool to achieve his goal of connecting with his wife at their wedding, celebrating this ritual in front of their family and friends, and getting this part over with. For C this may end up being a dance he performs without entering into what it is to be a dancer, like a bar mitzvah boy who reads from the Torah by sheer force of will and memorization.
I hope he is able to transcend the memorization and execute stage so that he can truly feel something of what it is to be a dancer on his wedding day. But perhaps dance is not for everyone?
Perhaps dance is not for everyone. There, I said it again. But I say it performatively as something I think I ought to acknowledge, logically. I cannot really understand what it means.