Touching Matters: Dance and Romance

“The longing to touch/be touched. I feel gratitude when I touch someone—as well as affection etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body—and that there are bodies in the world.”  Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh.

“Well I was born to dance. It’s a sacred duty, like being in love, and eventually I’ll reach some great conclusion.”  Frank O’Hara, Lunchtime Poems.

This piece is one part of a series of informal conversations centred on the theme of dancing and dating, addressed by two members of the Safer Spaces team: Alex and Selina. Alex, as a newbie to Swing, wanted to explore some of the tangible and intangible aspects of dance and romance with the better travelled Selina and so Alex asked the questions. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. 

Alex: In the world of ideas, it’s easy to feel like you are all “mind”. While listening to music and dancing, I am “body” with somebody else, I am touched. 

Selina: For me, dancing is partly about touch. When I think about the continuum of touch, touch can be platonic, joyful, playful and it can also be erotic; it can signal intimacy, connection, affection, sensuality, and can be but it doesn’t have to be connected to sexual interest. 

I feel that dancing also has a wider aura of romance. Whether that’s constructed through films and weddings and it probably is, we are primed to look at two people dancing together —and say, “Oh, that’s romantic”. And maybe there’s some truth to that. When we are invited to dance by someone else, we are invited to connect, to feel, to touch. We can connect that with romance. 

But whilst dance and romance may sometimes accompany one another, like two friends, I don’t think they are fused like siamese twins.

Alex: Can you say more about that fusion?

Selina: When I dance, my main ‘romance’ is with the music and the movement. I may invite someone to share that wider ‘romance’ with me. If I invite someone to a comedy show, I invite them to share laughter with me. While we may share laughter together, we won’t fuse each other with the source of our laughter: the comedian. We would be confused if we did. While dancing with someone else to music, we might confuse the source of our joy—the dance and music—with our specific dance partner. There is such a wonderfulness in sharing that dance moment too, especially if we feel like we are floating on air after the dance is over, that it’s easy for some to confuse the romance of the moment with a romance with the person.  If a comedian and a stage can create moments of shared laughter, dancing to music can create moments of shared romance. 

Alex: Ah, that’s lovely! 

Selina: And I love being able to do that with dance; the chance to experience shared romantic moments with dozens of people. It doesn’t have to mean all the other things that romance can mean. And what a relief! Like, what if you want to dance with a friend or a family member? I started learning Swing dancing with my Dad! With Kizomba in Angola, everyone dances it with their grandmothers. Our definitions of touch in dance need to encompass all of these possibilities. 

Ultimately, I believe that dance and dating should be things that, if they happen, take place in parallel. If  dating becomes the secret or sole priority behind partner dancing then the questions a person may ask in a dance space may not be primarily about dancing but become about other aspects: what should I wear to dance class? Who do I find most attractive here? Who are the people my age? Are they wearing a wedding ring? How can I try to only dance with them? Of course, if you are single, these may be valid questions, but it can reduce the wider joy of dancing! You want to dance with fewer people, or specific people, and may also share fewer invitations.

Dancing should be something we come to because we love dance and music and have a romance with those things. If romantic love for another happens along the way, then wonderful! But there are other wonderful things that can happen too, like learning other ways to touch through dance or experience other meanings of joy, romance or intimacy. 

Alex: For my first Swing class, Brendan said Swing helps people learn how to touch platonically.

Selina: The notion of platonic touch is incredibly important. Just because I have focused attention above on how dancing can feel romantic in some ways, I think it’s equally important that we can connect into touch without romantising it.  There are some cultures and places where touch is abundant. In other places, touching other people safely has to be learned, and Cape Town Swing can play a role to help people learn this. And that’s a massive statement in this country! In South Africa, and in many other parts of the world, touch is hyper-sexualised, it is often unwanted, and many people, especially women,  find it difficult to describe their own boundaries and have their boundaries respected. This can create problems in dance spaces in particular. 

Our society may become much healthier when people can connect within a song and enjoy a few minutes with someone else. If this safe touch has to be learned, then we have to be intentional about creating safe spaces where touching, feeling and connecting through dancing can be both consensual and are protected from abuse or misinterpretation. 

In being consensual and intentional, it’s not about being the safety police or consent cops or whatever, it’s about saying: how do I learn to do touch? How do I learn not to sit and wait for a man to ask me to dance? How do I learn to feel like I can say no? How do we navigate dancing well in close holds? How can I put someone else at ease? Can I enjoy the feeling of romance in a dance and learn to let go of it after it has ended? How can I be sensitive to the other person’s needs?

Alex: Cape Town Swing seems intentional about helping people do that.

Selina: Yes, at Cape Town Swing, I feel that we are intentional in at least two ways. 

We protect the experience of dance from our socially defined pre-existing boxes about what touch means. Otherwise, taking someone’s hand or moving them closer to you on the dance floor can be unintentionally interpreted as something other than dancing. We want to protect people from these misinterpretations. Since the dance community is an open community, new people arrive to connect and some people may even arrive with intentions to get close in uncomfortable or inappropriate ways. Our space has to be able to also protect dancers from people like that.  

So, to get back to your question: if we are intentional, then we also protect the space against unintentional misinterpretation and against people entering with harmful intentions. 

We do this for a simple reason: to realise this beautiful thing that makes us vulnerable. 

Alex: On that point… Suppose there’s a duck-outta-water (me) who has never learned how to dance before but has been raised in a culture where prolonged touch is often erotic by default but wants to learn. What’s your advice to make that shift?

Selina: That’s why I feel it’s important to have agreed verbal and non-verbal cues in dance spaces so we don’t default into the erotic. It’s particularly important for new people in Swing and also for those coming into the scene from other dance styles. We need to know what those cues are and to have those conversations because what feels OK is also different with each style. 

Swing and Lindy Hop focus on joy and a kind of open-holded connection which makes it more clearly platonic. There are other styles of dance that are more sensual, like Burlesque or Kizomba, and there’s also Blues. Blues comes from a tradition of lament and so while there is a slower tempo and at times a closer embrace it’s not by definition sensual because there are many ways to do Blues. 

I did a Blues night at my house and one of the things we did was talk about how we each like to dance Blues and what we are comfortable with. It gave us the chance to speak freely. Some people liked closed embrace and some preferred solo dancing. What was nice about that was when I started dancing with people there, I already had a sense of what someone liked. Without having that conversation, I may have taken it personally if someone said no to dancing with me which can happen in the scene. Talking about it, having the conversation, makes things easier. 

And what a gift the dance community is if we can practice ways of making people feel comfortable whilst being vulnerable! What a gift it is if it helps us to realise how to touch one another in a way that feels safe and joyful. Where there is so much talk of what we might call ‘toxic relationships’, it matters that we are able to create spaces where people of all genders and sexual orientations can learn to dance together.