Blog #3: The Dance Floor is Freedom

To Nick Heilman, and his ability to conjure up the floor.

Dancing, at its highest, is like alchemy; the transformation of crude matter: flesh, sweat, and hair into an elixir that heightens reality into a game coached by the spirit of gold. It's in those rare moments of total abandon when I know – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that the physicists are right when they say the universe is an electromagnetic field. It is also a field like a baseball diamond is to the sport of baseball: an area defined by rules where anything is possible. Dance is a game played on a field called the dance floor, and I give the same reverence to it that lifetime baseball fans give to their home diamond.

But I did not always revere the dance floor. Because like many white boys growing up in rural America, I could not recognize the spirit of dance – at all! Sure, I could appreciate it, but only from afar, as an audience member cloaked in shadow, or passively watching America’s Got Talent with my mom. Not only could I not recognize the dance floor, I actively dismissed it as nothing-at-all.

The first experiences I had with the setting were at middle and high school dances, a place where in theory everyone would come together and shake off prepschool’s shackles. But pubescent insecurity is a powerful force, and through that lens I saw dancing as nothing more than a social nightmare, an amoeba of faces that would swallow me in shame and spit me out in disapproval. Every time I tried to dance the hovering image of my own face mocked me from afar; always the picture of an anxious face making a fool of itself and screaming its insecurities so loud that I'd always put my head down and step aside. It hurts to think that for countless boys and girls, an experience like that can be the end of dancing forever.

Healing that trauma is one of the greatest blessings of my life. In time college arrived and swept me far away from home. To Boston, where I discovered substances which cut me loose and music that I didn't need to pretend to love. I met friends who with a single warm eyed glance showed me again and again that there is nothing too embarrassing in my body to hide. I wasn't intellectualizing or trying to make logical sense of dancing anymore, it just made sense by way of action: the spontaneous movement of my body language, the nonverbal grooves, all the swooshes and twirls that communicate nothing but “Let’s fucking go”. Then, without knowing how or when dance entered my life as not just an activity but a life philosophy, a tangible alchemy.

There are still moments when that phantom trauma returns, judging and criticizing me from afar: the shadow of my younger self. Moments when shame floods my stomach, my step falls out of rhythm, and the fabric of the universe again seems crude and joyless. But these moments are nothing but shadows and echoes, all of which evaporate the second I look at them authentically. After that valley is crossed, a mental state sometimes follows: a deep concentration where my head seems empty and full, and for an instant I glimpse the limitless possibility between each and every step.

I think that if dancing with others is a game, then dancing alone is a sacred ritual.

An unexpected plus to quarantine is that it's forced me into nights when I dance alone – something I rarely did before – and it's yielded new insights that I don't know if I would've discovered otherwise.

One occurred this past Saturday night, when I was listening to Meddle by Pink Floyd on my record player. I was aiming for a pensive mood, so I turned off the lights, swayed my body to the beat, quieted my thoughts, and waited for an image to arise in my mind's eye.

It was during the first verse of the album's 23 minute prog-rock epic "Echoes":

"Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air

And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves

The echo of a distant time comes willowing across the sand

And everything is green and submarine."

When my imagination was plunged into a sea of liquid energy like a seaman who walked the plank, and without thinking I lowered my body down, down, down, until my butt almost touched the floor. I asked myself: What is this feeling? What is pulling me down? The next moment a childish grin spread across my face and I opened my eyes, floored by the insane fact that gravity... exists!

–Sky, are you serious?

–Wait wait I can explain! ...Not just that gravity 'exists' but that gravity is a force, an active force that pulls, something I can lean into like a surfer leans into the wave. I then realized that I resist leaning into it all the time without noticing; when I'm standing I resist the pull through tension in the soles of my feet; when I'm sitting down I resist the pull through tension in my shoulders and neck; when I'm sleeping I can resist the pull with my whole fucking body!

So, with this insight into... Reality 101... I connected with the fact that dancing is never something to force, it's always something you lean into. Because the force is always active, regardless of will. In this framework the dance floor is more than a space, more than an analogy to a football field – it is a force of action that challenges my equal and opposite re-action. It is the weight of the world asking me to surrender my heaviness to its will. Leaning into it closes the circuit between dancer and dance floor, and the next move comes as easily as electricity travels a wire.

Dancing is philosophy in action. It is a framework in which to see and relate to the world, and a source of perpetual insight. But, it is one that forgoes the grasping of the mind for the expression of the body. All philosophies posit a path to freedom, and a letting go of suffering; and on the dance floor that freedom is in action, and the end of suffering is in giving away your weight to the weight of all things – to the energy field of all things – to the floor of all things.