Dancing Through Life
The Art and Practice of Social Dancing
Joy to the world,
All the boys and girls.
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea,
Joy to you and me.
THREE DOG NIGHT
I knew it!
Frolicking across the grass with my friends, belting “Joy to the World” at the top of our lungs, I knew we were on to something big. Singing and dancing felt so right, but not only that: it felt important.
Unfortunately, as all singalongs and dance parties go, we eventually forgot the rest of the words, our feet got tired, and we sat down for lunch. For better or worse, I set that haunting feeling of importance aside, and returned to my regularly scheduled life: eating lunch, memorizing lines, and, of course, crushing on Rachel and Bri. After that fateful day at theatre conservatory, I forgot my discovery for more than a decade.
Of course, I can’t say that I lacked any help in trying to remember it. For the past seven years, a majority of my closest friends have been trying to help me. While I have been trying to bring “joy to the world” by studying the environment at Stanford University, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Atmosphere/Energy, and an Master’s degree in Earth Systems, my friends have been doing something else, something truly big and important.
In addition to studying Earth Systems, and Human Biology, and Psychology, and Civil Engineering, my friends have been doing something else, something that holds the potential to have an even greater impact than any and all of our degrees combined.
At this point, you’re probably thinking that my friends must be planning some extravagant intervention of extraordinary magnitude: the next Google, the next Apple, the next Wikipedia. I’m sorry to disappoint, but it’s nothing like that. Instead, what my amazing friends have been doing is nothing more, and nothing less, than dancing together to some really good music.
No regrets, just love.
We can dance until we die.
You and I, we’ll be young forever.
KATY PERRY
Last winter, I gave in to my friends’ continuous counsel, and signed up for Dance 46, “Social Dances of North America I,” with Stanford legend Richard Powers. Skeptical, and to be honest, a bit apprehensive, I showed up for class the first day of the quarter. From that moment on, my life has never been the same.
As soon as I took my first step of four-count swing—if I recall, it was to Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”—my old discovery came rushing back. Social dancing was not only fun—more fun than I‘d had in years—it was truly, madly, deeply important.
I didn’t immediately know why this was so, but I was sufficiently inspired to keep on digging. For the past year, I have spent one-seventh of my waking hours dancing, on a quest to understand the power of social dancing as a big and important force for good. In the process, I have learned more than twenty-five different dance forms, including swing (four count, six count, triple step, traveling, lindy hop, west coast, hustle), waltz (box step, cross step, rotary, redowa, mazurka, hambo, blues, polka, schottische, five-step), foxtrot (box step, magic step, club two step, cross step), latin (cha cha, salsa, tango, merengue, rumba, samba), the one step, and various choreographed group and line dances. With each dance, I have come one step closer to understanding my old discovery: that social dancing is an Art and a Practice.
Of all the lessons that I learned in high school, there is only one that I remember verbatim: according to Paige Price, my senior year literature teacher, “art is an attempt to make the ineffable effable,” to simply say what cannot simply be said. Although I didn’t fully appreciate it then, I remembered it long enough that I eventually did.
Many years later, in this brief essay on the virtues of social dancing, I aim to show you that social dancing is truly an Art in this sense of the word, as it so beautifully illuminates several otherwise ineffable facets of its subject, which I see as none other than life itself. Social dancing gives us the opportunity to experience these facets of life in a concentrated form, enabling us to improve our skills not only on the dance floor, but also in the greater ballroom of life.
In this way, social dancing is not only an Art, but also a Practice, in the special sense of that word developed by the human potential and positive psychology movements. In these contexts, a Practice is something that we consciously engage in to more fully develop our potential as a human being. As I hope to show you, I see social dancing as the pinnacle of Practices, unrivaled in its ability to draw forth the deepest humanity in each of us.
“I hear and I forget. I see and I understand. I do and I remember.”
As the saying goes, it’s one thing to hear or see something, but quite another to actually do it. If we aim, personally and collectively, to develop as human beings, it will take more than hearing, and seeing, and talking, and writing. It will take actually doing something different. On this point the evidence is unequivocal: the data from many fields over many years has consistently shown that education, while extremely important, is by itself insufficient to generate behavior change. If we want to change ourselves and the world, we will need nothing less than a radical culture shift in which can we evolve improved norms and habits.
In my view, this is exactly what social dancing can help us do, as through its practice we create such a culture shift. As we will see, social dancing is not only an Art and a Practice, but also a Situation, in the special sense of that word developed by the Situationist International, a group who sought to change the world by constructing “situations” in 1960’s France.
According to the first journal of the Situationist International, a “constructed situation” is “a moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of unitary environment and the free play of events.” A “situationist” is “one who engages in the construction of situations.” In practice, the situationists wrote, “the really experimental direction of situationist activity consists in setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognized desires, a temporary field of activity favorable to these desires. This alone can lead to the further clarification of these simple basic desires, and to the confused emergence of new desires whose material roots will be precisely the new reality engendered by situationist constructions.”
In plain, everyday language, the situationist is someone devoted to helping individuals to “critically analyze their everyday life, and to recognize and pursue their true desires in life” by “setting up temporary environments that are favorable to the fulfillment of such desires.” In this sense, the social dance teacher, the social dance DJ, and the social dancer are situationists par excellence, as they work together to create environments which allow us to critically analyze our lives and values and pursue behaviors that are better for us and for others.
Dancing more than one full day each week, I am often asked, incredulously, “Why?” This is my first attempt to reply, by describing social dancing as Situation, Art, and Practice, showing how dancing can change our lives and the world. But for those who want an even shorter reply, this is the one I will give you for now: I dance not only because it is fun, but because it is the most important thing I can do to improve my life and the world.
When I think about the future I want to live in, and the kind of people who will live in it with me, and the kind of people who will help me get from here to there, and I ask myself “where can I find these people?” the answer is clear: on the social dance floor. When I ask myself “where can I teach these people?” the answer is the same: on the social dance floor.
As you read this book, I hope you’ll understand why, and join me on this journey, Dancing Through Life.
This essay was to be the introduction to my book, Dancing Through Life: The Art and Practice of Social Dancing, which eventually evolved into Waltzing: A Manual for Dancing and Living, co-authored with Richard Powers.
