Why are we so shy about getting on the dancefloor?
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
"If you can talk, you can sing
If you can walk, you can dance"
—Zimbabwe proverb
My nephew Myles is two and a half years old. He's learned a lot in the last year or so. He's got the walking thing down cold, his talking has progressed rapidly from "Da-ba-ba" to "Cookie!" and even that toilet-training business is coming along pretty well. He's still a little shaky behind the wheel of his astonishingly large toy car, which takes up a third of my sister's living room and could really use those "beep-beep-beep" warning signals dumptrucks turn on when they're going in reverse. But basically, he's a sharp kid (and, my sister would want me to point out, extremely cute—cuter than any other kid, ever).
Myles does something else, too. If you turn on music, his little body starts moving. It doesn't really matter what kind of music. His blond curls bob. His pink legs shimmy. His pudgy fists wave around in the air. In short, he dances. Last time I visited, we had Charlie's Angels going in the VCR, and whenever the soundtrack erupted with Destiny's Child or some other thumping R&B track, Myles leapt off the couch and started shaking his thing so vigorously in front of the TV screen that his sedentary parents and uncle couldn't see much of the movie except glimpses of Cameron Diaz and exploding buildings. (The movie itself includes a spectacular dancing scene involving Ms. Diaz in her skivvies, but I digress...)
Now, my sister was an inveterate rug-cutter in her younger days. I remember seeing her and a friend gasping for cool air outside a party one time, the both of them giving off great clouds of dancefloor steam. But I'm pretty sure she hasn't been giving Myles any lessons in the Electric Slide. He's just doing what comes naturally.
And so to my point: For all I know, 20 or 30 years from now Myles will still be strutting his stuff, shaking a tail feather at anything that moves him. But I doubt it. Because while almost all two-year-olds will bounce around joyously to anything from James Brown to James Galway, very few 25-year-olds will.
I go to see a lot of live music. Some of it's quiet and acoustic or avant-garde jazz or solo classical, the kind of thing that simply doesn't lend itself to dancing. But a lot of it is loud and boisterous, heavy on the beat and down in the groove—rock, soul, blues, country music, old-time music, you name it. This is stuff that was more or less invented for dancing. And yet when you look around a club or a concert venue in Knoxville, even during the rowdiest numbers, you might see a whole bunch of toes tapping and maybe even some hips swaying. But dancing? Actual movement of multiple limbs? Well, a little, here and there, more often women than men, but not much.
So what happens to us between the ages of two and 25? Why don't we dance? Why don't we do what comes naturally?
"A lot of us have puzzled over it," says Brent Cantrell, executive director of Jubilee Community Arts. Jubilee puts on a wide range of music shows at the Laurel Theatre, most of it music that was until recently accompanied by dancing.
"Certainly with traditional Anglo-American music from this region, people would often flatfoot, which is an individual style," Cantrell continues. "It's not quite clogging, it's pretty free-form stuff. And people don't do that as much as they did 15 or 20 years ago."
He and other observers offer several possible explanations for the apparent development of a wallflower culture. Roughly speaking, they break down into three influential factors: people, places and the music itself.
Taking them in reverse order, let's consider the music. R.B. Morris, a poet and an actor as much as he is a singer and songwriter, is used to audiences responding differently depending on what he's presenting to them.
"It's a wonderful thing for people to dance," he says, speaking from the performer's perspective. "Just like it's a wonderful thing for people to sing along with the words to a song. But it's wonderful also to have an audience that locks into what you're doing. And maybe you're taking them along somewhere and they're watching attentively."
It's certainly true that the lyric tradition that came down through minstrels and balladeers and entered rock 'n' roll via Bob Dylan demands a different sort of attention from the audience than the various forms of traditional dance music. Once people started talking about songwriters as poets, the hushed-coffeehouse aesthetic spread to the rock clubs and into the storytelling side of country music too. The audience was supposed to listen more than anything else.
Likewise, the whole "art music" scene that originated somewhere around the Velvet Underground and has been handed down through generations of pale skinny indie rockers was never about the groove, or not that kind of groove anyway. The Velvets and their legions of descendants made music for nodding out, not getting down.
Morris remembers when R.E.M. and their contemporaries first emerged that it became a college-rock norm for audience members to walk right up to the front of the stage and just stand there, watching. "It's become a thing," he says. "It's almost like you're watching TV."
On the other hand, Dylan knew what he was doing when he married his stream of consciousness prose to a beat, and "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is still plenty danceable. And the relentless flow of words in hip hop hardly diminishes its booty-shaking ability. So if the influx of other art forms into pop music is one factor in clearing dancefloors, it can't be the only one. Consider R.B. himself—his words are central to his music, but you won't find a better reason to dance in this town than when he and his band get revved up on "Long Arm of the Law."
So then there's the question of place. In the era before amplification, music venues were necessarily small so everyone could hear the band. Hereabouts, it wasn't unusual for anyone with a large living room to host a dance. They'd move out the furniture, roll up the rug, bring in the entertainers and romp around the floorboards. But consider what we have to work with now: theaters, mostly, with rows of fixed seats. However much you might be itching to sproing around the Tennessee or the Bijou, you're going to be constrained by the layout—and maybe by courteous concern for the people sitting behind you.
"It's just how it's presented, what type of venue," says Benny Smith, a concert promoter with A.C. Entertainment who's attended hundreds of music shows with all types of audiences here and in other regional cities. He says that if his company anticipates a dancing crowd for a show at the Bijou, they'll often make it general admission seating so the people who want to dance can wander up front and the more sedate ones can drift to the back. He acknowledges the Tennessee is trickier—the best option there is for people to shimmy and shake in the far aisles along the walls.
Smith notes that the Sundown in the City concert series on Market Square seems to be loosening a lot of limbs. "For one thing, I think there's room," he says. "And you've got the whole outdoor party atmosphere. You're not seated." It doesn't hurt that the concerts have included irresistible dance acts like ¡Cubanismo!, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Southern Culture on the Skids.
But even at that, you'll see a lot of people lurking around the edges. What's disconcerting is not only that they're not dancing, but that so many of them seem like they would like to—their legs and arms twitch slightly to the beat, like they're keeping something contained that desperately wants to come out. And here we reach what seems like the biggest single anti-dancing influence: self-consciousness. Many, many people are reluctant to dance for fear of looking foolish.
Cantrell thinks it might be an unfortunate side effect of growing awareness of dance as an art form. Over the past half-century, everything from square dancing to break dancing to disco has been celebrated in movies and TV shows, quantified and codified.
"I think people in many cases are getting the impression that there might be a right and wrong way to do things, that things are supposed to be choreographed," he says. He notes the emergence of "tag team" clogging and two-stepping on programs like Club Dance, in which every couple has costumes and a down-pat routine. "That's not how people used to dance," Cantrell says. "But I think people think that's how people used to dance, and they feel intimidated because they don't know how to do it. The way people used to dance was pretty unregimented. This wasn't a very regimented society."
He chuckles at the memory of a folk dancing discussion at a conference some years ago. "Someone said, 'Well, everyone knows that when you flatfoot, you're supposed to keep your arms to your side.' Well, that was news to me. Who decides that rule? Is there an International College of Clogging that lays down guidelines? But once that gets out there, people start saying, 'Well, maybe there's a lot more things about flatfoot dancing that I don't know.'"
Smith thinks East Tennessee's native reticence plays a role too. "It's such a conservative area, not only with morals and politically, but everything else." By comparison, he says audiences in famously freaky Asheville, N.C. are much less reluctant to fill a floor. "It's more of a free-spirited area. They're not consciously aware of 'Oh my god, somebody might see me dancing.'"
Plenty of media theorists have suggested that Americans in general have become much more self-conscious since the dawn of the television age. We spend so much time watching other people that we can't help thinking about who might be watching us. On dancefloors, Smith says, "sometimes I even catch people watching to see if other people are watching them dance."
An informal survey of some acquaintances echoes that tendency. Although my women friends were more likely than my male friends to say they like dancing and don't worry about what other people think, almost everyone agreed that they're more likely to dance unabashedly if they've had a couple of drinks. Which means that dancing, like everything else we're more likely to do under the uninhibiting influence of alcohol, is something we're all a little uptight about.
That's a relatively modern phenomenon. People of all cultures have been dancing to all kinds of music for as long as music's been around. "I worked with dance quite a bit in West Africa, and dance among the people I worked with there is considered almost a form of prayer," Cantrell says. "It's sad to see it falling out of the fabric of our daily life."
The solution: don't worry so much about it. "Try to find a beat in there somewhere, and if you can stick with it, good," Cantrell says. "And if you can't, that's OK. That's all dance is."
Smith agrees. "You're holding your soul back a lot of times if you don't," he says. "Like James Brown said, 'Get up offa that thing!' You'll feel better."
July 12, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 28
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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