dance & argument
For me, to dance is to craft arguments while I am not actually crafting arguments. To sequence arguments is to dance while I’m not actually dancing. I trace this personal connection back to an overexcitable child’s quest for meaning-making.
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Before I crafted arguments with words, I danced. Possibly most kids do. I have danced since I was a toddler, pirouetting, fouettéing, falling, and rising on my first stage: the living-room table. Some view these years as pre-cognitive but it might be more precise to call them pre-linguistic or, better yet, pre-words. For maybe, dance is a language. And maybe the toddler’s dance is a bodily attempt to make sense of an internal cognitive motion that, before words, could not be expressed in any other way.
To dance is for my body to think, to organise some of its cognitive energy through a sequence of movements in time & space, sometimes to the beat of music, sometimes not. And so dance is the beginning of expression and also the end. To construct arguments is for my mind to dance, for the thoughts to hop-skip-trot on paper or otherwise. In between dance & argument, I doodled and drew on walls because words arrived last. But, when they arrived, they came suddenly and all at once. It was dizzying like a nice long twirl. But I enjoyed it because there were now considerably more ways to make meaning.
This does not mean that dance & argument are one and the same to me. Obviously they are quite different. In English, we were trained on the wheels of the five-paragraph argument (introduction, claim 1, claim 2, claim 3, and conclusion). But Madame O’Neill told us something else in French class: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In legal arguments, we start by defining terms or laying down the elements of a rule. Historical arguments are similar in that there are claims that must be proven with evidence and explained with reasoning. However, historians bring a particular almost-obsessive focus on the evaluation of sources, either separately or woven into the main of the argument. In economic arguments, while models, lemmas, and diagrams are not necessary, if they are relevant but absent, the ‘dismal science’ becomes even more dismal.
All that said, whether analysing the construction of the Afghan nation in historical fiction or the domestic justiciability in English law of the Paris Agreement and the UNCRPD or a comparative analysis of venture capital and private equity from a sustainable development perspective, I felt the fun tizzy of a dancing toddler. Though, of course, the dance can come to an abrupt end. This once happened the night before the deadline of my development finance presentation when I realised that my proposed model only fit one set of data. Thankfully, the historian in me knew that context is queen. I rationalised my dismal model in the specific context of a counter-factual and made some meaning of it.
I think that is what does it for me — the opportunity to make meaning — whether that is structuring my thoughts in a particular order on a piece of paper or choreographing a sequence of steps. And, meaning can also be made while taking-in the arguments of others and watching others dance. Once, I saw a flamenco bailaora live. She tapped the stage beneath her feet just as powerfully as a dabke dancer at a Jordanian wedding. But, the dabke’s Levantine joy-cry was the opposite of the unforgettable melancholia that dropped from the bailaora’s feet like sad marble globules finally falling as drops from my eyes. It felt like a Moorish mourning of the roaming Roma for a long-lost land. Or at least, that’s the meaning I made in that moment.
Both times I witnessed the percussive power of the flamenco feet, first in Seville and years later in Barcelona, my mind wandered back to my teenage years watching my Irish friends step-dance at my school’s annual UN-day concert. Though there were differences too. The Irish girls donned eye-cooling satin leprechaun-green dresses that rose just above-the-knees with sheer black stockings whereas the bailaora was a frilled and ruffled flame in a floor-length orange-red gown. And though their feet tapped with equal ferocity, the Irish hand and arm movements were minimal or none. The head and shoulders were high and straight and the silky torsos levelled and upright. But the legs! They were like unstoppable swinging, sweeping bows automatically moving through time. And the feet! They were like bouncing bulbs lighting time’s path.
Was this the hardy Celtic spirit-in-motion? Was it marching forward to the tune of the uillean pipes, through migrations, famine, violence, and division, with the head held high in dignified uprightness?
‘To read the history books was sympathy. To feel their feet’s vibrations ripple through the floor and onto my very own body became a spine-chilling empathy.’
Perhaps, it is the human spirit.
To read the history books was sympathy. To feel their feet’s vibrations ripple through the floor and onto my very own body became a spine-chilling empathy.
Yet, there’s more to dance & argument that is moving. To find one’s feet in a debate or a space saturated with air and music is an act of individuality. At the same time, it is a connectedness with that which surrounds oneself. I might call it a connected individuality.
This became especially clear when I saw a particularly unique form of jugalbandi between a kathak dancer and a tabla player. It was unique because traditionally jugalbandi is vocal or instrumental, not between a dancer and a musician. The tabla has always appeared to me like a little drum with a bindi on it. And that day, it truly was connected with the round seat of wisdom between the brows of the Indian diva that danced on the same stage.
At first, it looked like the dancer was simply dancing to the beat of the drum, contributing minimal musicality with the sound of the ghungroo anklet. But, there was a turning-point after which the musician drummed solo and the dancer danced solo, one after the other. In this back-and-forth, there emerged a conversation. They held their own as individuals but were also connected with each other. It felt like they were improvising to each other, even if it might have been rehearsed to-a-tee. They seemed to be in-sync. But it became unclear who was leading whom. It was like a new form of leadership altogether.
A ‘duet’ is one way of translating jugalbandi but more literally it means ‘entwined twins.’ And visually it looked more like its literal meaning. Through this jugalbandi my mind’s eye re-saw the same quality in other dances I had witnessed: a distinctness without domination. I realised that those absorbed in ‘voguing’ at college parties were connecting with themselves and me and everyone around them all at once. The angular borders the voguers drew in the air were statements: here I am, now watch me move. The ensuing spins of the catwalk, and the dips of the duckwalk were supporting evidence that made me agree, yes, indeed, you have arrived and you must be seen.
But there was nothing belligerent about it. And this is rather interesting because argument can sometimes be viewed so. In fact argument has been compared to war inasmuch as I compare it to dance. But I have never been moved by an argument out of fear of bellicosity. Maybe out of fear, one begrudgingly feigns acceptance of a war-like stance. But that is not the same thing as being moved, persuaded, engaged to thoughtfully disagree the way you might be moved out of awe, respect, or curiosity of a finely choreographed set of statements. So to my eyes, war does not appear to be the apt metaphor. Dance & argument are both powerful without domination. Without threat of aggression. In fact, it is something more powerful than domination. It is a connected individuality.
And yet, there is something more to it. The enrichment of a repertoire, whether through new ways of thinking or new dance steps and manoeuvres, brings freedom, namely freedom of choice.
As a kid, to keep dizziness at bay, I would always force myself to flow immediately from a nice long spin right into the next step at a uniform speed. Sometimes, even a split-second of dwindled speed was the motionlessness that stole the dancing body’s momentum. As an adolescent twirling between a dance studio’s wall-of-mirrors and the Roble Gymnasium’s hacienda-style courtyard, for the first time, I sought to throw off the yoke of my rule-against-motionlessness. Maybe, the headily picturesque space in which Spanish colonial terra-cotta roofs naturally flowed into Mission revival’s smooth stucco arches compelled me to re-examine a forced flow. Or, could it be that I was growing out of an overexcitable child’s need to stay ‘in-motion’?
Either way, an alternative was on the horizon. Chocolate Heads’ Aleta Hayes taught me how to execute a new manoeuvre, one I knew of but had never embodied: spotting. The first step was to designate a spot. Then, to focus my gaze on the spot, I had to whip my head faster than my rotating body. The whipping action is to be so fast that the eyes see nothing but the designated spot. This was about simultaneously sustaining two different speeds in the same vertical body, rather than a uniformity of speed across horizontal time. The mere thought was dizzying.
Sometimes, I picked the spot on the floor where I wanted to land. Other times, I picked the highest point of the courtyard’s fountain. Though, I confess that the positive disintegration of a long-held childhood habit was not the disappearance of that method altogether. Rather, I now had at least two different methods in my repertoire. To prevent wooziness, I no longer had to dance over a beat when the music actually begged for a little reprieve. But this did not mean that I always had to follow the music. It meant that I had choice. Sometimes I could even oppose the music’s intimation to create a particular type of meaning.
I started to realise that a dancer becomes more graceful and adept in rehearsed conventions of movement to the point that habits become muscle memory and reflexes. But an enriching of the repertoire brings freedom and an awareness that there is an infinite array of movements. Maybe there is the hope to create something better than what existed before or maybe we just see something we did not see before.
As an 8-year old there was something I could not see, something I could not distinguish between. I could not, for the life of me, tell right-from-left. In my after-school Scottish-country dancing classes this meant that sometimes I would twirl in sync with my classmates, sometimes I wouldn’t. Mrs Fleming patiently and gently reminded me that the right hand is the one I write with. Little did she know that I wrote, drew, and ate with my left hand as well. In fact, it was rather efficient if you wanted to simultaneously write with the right hand and draw and colour with the left hand or vice-versa.
Weeks went by and I gained little to no spatial clarity. It was so confusing to me that when I turned around towards the back, the right and left side changed. Patience was wearing thin. Although a good dancer, I made the entire dance look dismal when I turned the wrong way — left when everyone else turned right, right when everyone else turned left, and only sometimes turning the right way by chance.
Concerned I would not be allowed to perform on the day of our final performance, I was in dire need of a manoeuvre to distinguish right-from-left. The solution was in the giant safety-pin that fastened my red tartan skirt. I would always put it to the back because it disrupted the frontal symmetry I liked so much. I flipped it around to the front so that the giant pin sat squarely on one side. I asked my friend to tell me which side it was on. She said right. That was how I spotted the right twirl. And in one fell swoop, space changed for me and I was in sync with my classmates.
I have since become more habituated as a predominantly right-handed person. Of course, even today I sometimes inadvertently eat with my left-hand and intentionally use it when the right hand is tired. In the heat of the music, the difference between right-and-left can still be a tough one. But, I have come to appreciate something. Sometimes, it really matters whether we turn right or left in an argument. But sometimes, we can choose to stand in between or beyond the tired dichotomies of right & left, east & west, public & private, based on the kind of meaning we need to make about the world. And the kind of meaning the world needs to hear about.
Though I have met many disciplines and cultures, due to my finite experience, I miss many meanings among and between the infinite forms of dance & argument. This is not an intentional exclusion, but my natural limitation. If there is something I have missed, I hope that you will choose to enrich my repertoire for I am always looking to learn more about the argument-like sophistication of dance and the playful dance of crafting arguments.
