I’ve been away from my Cape Town Swing family for some time now, and perhaps the melancholy of the moment has provoked these musings. In them, I’ve found an invitation to myself, and perhaps this can be an invitation to you too. “What is this invitation?” you think to yourself as you read this over the top of your coffee cup. Well, read on, dear reader.
Dancing, you see, requires a vital act of willingness on your part: the willingness to be vulnerable. This willingness is needed not only upon first arrival into partner dance culture, where you must step out of your comfort zone and try something new, but also each and every time you go dancing, finding the willingness to be vulnerable in the dance.
What do I mean by being vulnerable? After all, the swing scene as it exists today (as I’ve experienced it) can be proud of fostering environments in which people feel welcomed and safe, and so hopefully, no one is made to feel vulnerable.
In this context, I’m speaking about stepping willingly into your vulnerability by opening up to how you truly feel in the moment. Not masking your emotional state by some need to fit in with the milieu of the environment, or even to fit in with the mood of the music.
You may arrive tense, forlorn, agitated, or anxious, and the room may be filled with people who appear to feel otherwise. If you know many faces in the room, you may more easily slip into the frame of how they are being. These familiar faces may be conversational, joking around, having a laugh, or a few dances or glasses of wine in, and you step into that frame of being. But arriving in a room full of strangers? Well, that can be a different story. This is precisely where I found myself lately, as I’ve spent the last few months living and dancing in Amsterdam.
I’ve found several dance scenes in Amsterdam. For whatever reason, there are well-established scenes mainly constituted by friends and acquaintances and other scenes (the sort of landing ground for newer dancers in town) where most people appear to be strangers. Discovering the latter type of scene first, I felt immediately intimidated by not knowing anyone and by everyone else also seeming not to know anyone. That intimidation made me miss my Cape Town Swing scene with all my friends and familiar faces even more. In truth, it made me feel rather uncomfortable being there. Looking around, I could tell by body language and the lack of conversational engagement that many people were feeling similarly. I found the draw to return week after week to be, well, rather weak.
Luckily for me, Lindy Hop has a certain addictive quality, and I needed to get my fix at any cost, so I did return. However, I quickly gave up on the idea of using dancing to make friends with strangers in this new strange city I was temporarily calling home and instead simply focused on the dancing element.
I came purely to dance, and this brought with it a certain freedom. In particular, it brought the freedom to be vulnerable in that I did not need to put any effort into trying to express a desire for connection beyond the dance. I was simply me, as I was in that moment: standing on the side of a dance floor, feeling awkward, inadequate, lonely, or homesick. However I was, I was just there and allowed all that sentiment to be—unconstrained.
Now, stepping onto the dance floor, I had two choices: one was to allow my mood to emulate that of the music, so for much Lindy Hop-oriented Swing music, that would be light-hearted, playful, zesty, and uplifting. Alternatively, I could, in a sense, honour my internal emotional state by not trying to mirror or emulate the emotions of the music but rather simply allow the music to find me as I was and to move through me and to move my body entirely unobstructed by any pretence.
Choosing the second option (which I learned from Blues dancing, more on that later in these ramblings) opened something entirely new for me. Suddenly, the dance was not just a dance between me and a partner, but rather, the dance was a dance between my internal state and the external world around me (including the music, the atmosphere, and my partner). And boy, did I like the way it felt! So much so that here I am writing this in an attempt to explain it to myself as much as to anyone else who finds themselves reading this.
This personal, experiential revelation shed light on something I had noticed in other dancers but had never been able to articulate. Some of my favourite and respected dancers in our scene often appeared to portray an emotional energy in their facial and body movements that was, in a sense, opposed to the emotional state suggested by the music. Their faces would carry a look of solemnity, wistfulness, or sentimentality whilst the music was shouting “Pull on your party pants and let’s start a food fight, baby!” (I mean with all those food references, what else could they possibly be insinuating, right?)
And so, I would look at their forlorn faces and think, “But, but, but, it’s Lindy Hop!” How can they not have some cheesy grin plastered across their faces from ear to ear? And yet, in and amongst this apparent disjuncture, I saw bodies doing amazing things!
Looking at these dancers now, I recognise how the beauty of their dancing comes from their souls. It comes from them being entirely true to how they feel in that moment. Light and shade, as it were.
That’s not to say that every amazing dance is one of extreme dynamics of this nature—nay, nay, not that at all. Rather, when the joyfulness is expressed in the faces or movements of the vulnerable dancer, it is coming from a deep, true place, for it is dancing all that is left to dance in that person.
And so, meeting the heart where it finds itself, wherever that may be, and dancing from the soul allows the movements to be increasingly authentic in their expression. And it is in this authenticity that immense and intoxicatingly beautiful movements emerge.
Being a vulnerable stranger gave me entirely new insights into the beauty of the dance. I somehow feel like I relate to it and can understand it more profoundly. It’s like I learned a whole new vocabulary in this dance language and that this vocabulary has all the juiciest words and phrases!
Now, the wonderful thing is that you don’t need to go off and be a stranger in a strange city to experience this. Or to arrive at our local gatherings and feel like you can’t allow yourself to be swept up in the joyful milieu around you – lest you fail to honour your internal sorrow (oh, you tortured artist, you!). No, no! Indeed, dance offers the solution.
For as much as Lindy Hop introduced me to the emotional realms of joyfulness, Blues dancing, I have discovered more recently, has allowed me to sink into and explore the more shadowy places of my emotional landscape. Indeed, Blues music comes from this place of inner melancholy. And I’ve found that well-held spaces for Blues dancing have really allowed me to honour the emotions of my present state and surrender more into vulnerability. This is aided by a collective sentiment in the space, where others are opening up to this vulnerability also. Think of it as a place to safely descend into the well of emotions deep in your soul. This is the beauty of blues I have discovered and delved deeply into recently during the Trippin Blues Amsterdam festival.
Bringing this newfound insight back into my swing dancing has been a real gift, and so I guess my invitation to all dancers is to seek to deepen vulnerability in your dancing, surrender more to the fullness of your present experience, and in that, find a powerful place of authenticity to revel in. Why the invitation? Well, you can’t have a food fight by yourself now, can you?
