Dance, Monkey, Dance!

You wouldn’t know it from looking at me, but I’ve never been big on dancing.   

Dancing in middle school–the stiff, side-to-side shuffle, elbows at ribs, forearms at 90 degrees, fingers in the famous ‘about-to-snap’ mode–was a Night Of The Living Dead Hell for me, simply because I felt so…exposed.  With every step, I thought, my raging desire for my the out-of-my-league seventh-grade girl across the gym in the clogs and Chinos would be painfully evident to everyone around me. 

I think everyone feels exposed when they dance.  For some people, like my wife, that’s liberating–she likes being allowed to say “look at me!” from time to time.  You’re supposed to feel free and loose and spontaneous, on the dance floor, but most people just feel awkward.  They look like they’d rather be getting a tooth extracted. 

These days I seem to have entered a devil-may-care place with my dancing, and, much to the chagrin of my family, I bust moves in grocery stores, libraries, funeral parlors…wherever the impulse hits me, whether there’s music playing or it’s just the voices in my head, which sometimes sing.  I haven’t learned anything about dancing, in particular, in the intervening years since middle school, except that worrying about whether you look cool or not is pretty much the kiss of death.  Having now given up completely on being cool (having a 6-month-old will do that to you), I actually fancy myself an okay dancer. 

What a shame, then, that, according to this, dancing itself just ain’t cool anymore.  No one seems to be doing it.  Dance floors across the country are empty.  And some people believe that’s a real loss:

…dancing helps foster a kind of social harmony. Daniel J. Levitin, the neuroscientist and author of “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), points out that over the course of evolutionary history dancing has always been participatory, not spectatorial.

“I think evolution selected music and dance as ways that people could come together and defuse any interpersonal tensions that arise from large groups,” he said. “One suggestion is that music and dance helps humans to get along. We see that there is the release of soothing brain chemicals when people sing and dance together.” So if we don’t dance, we’re that much closer to savagery.

Back in the day, the article suggests, everyone danced.  It was a social lubricant.  You moved your body, you came into socially-acceptable contact with people, you worked up a little sweat, maybe, dropped some inhibitions, warmed up, and pretty soon you were talking and laughing and making new friends.  It was like an amusement park ride you could jump on any time music was playing.

But now, it would appear, no one wants to embarrass themselves.  People are afraid of pulling an “Elaine” in “Seinfeld”–looking so ridiculous on the dance floor that you get shunned for it.  We’re more likely to laugh at someone who’s willing to get up on a dance floor and move than we are to join in.  Like singing in public, it’s more of a test of guts and mettle than a group free-for-all:  who’s going to risk the humiliation?

 

I think that’s too bad; dancing awfully, so you look like a disemboweled monkey, is a universal right.  I think it’s even in the Constitution, and no one should take that away from us.  The Fear Of Dancing epidemic is symptomatic of a more widespread Fear Of Looking Like a Dumbass that’s really shutting people down, big-time.