Groove Is in the Heart
The primal, adaptable power of dance
Can you remember the first time you ever danced? Most of us cannot.
I mean, it’s entirely possible that you or I boogied down while we were still in the womb, as Isadora Duncan claimed she did, maybe gently roiling our mother’s amniotic fluid with a tiny, Fosse-esque shoulder isolation.
Or maybe it was more high-minded. Maybe, like Fred Astaire, we speculatively put on a pair of ballet slippers at age four to kill time while waiting for our irritatingly talented older sister to finish her dance class.
Or maybe we used a gardening implement to stun a small visitor — as Twyla Tharp did a rattlesnake at 11 or so, creating what she considers her first “dance” — and thus yielded a densely layered critique of man’s effort to achieve dominance in the face of unnecessary slithering.
But it’s all a little hazy.
However, I can remember the first time that I actively enjoyed dancing. Come with me now to suburban Worcester, Massachusetts, to a sunshiny Saturday afternoon in 1975. Behold my 13-year-old self, all boyish enthusiasm and buckteeth as I whiz past you on the street; savor the utter awesomeness of my bright orange Schwinn and its Naugahyde banana seat. That single bead of sweat on my brow? It may not be purely the result…
