And Then We Danced

by Henry Alford

  That my next available Tuesday—the day I usually went to Luigi’s—was Valentine’s Day seemed like a cosmic nudge. Francis was in a whimsical mood—ebullient, even. Two not-yet-unwrapped bouquets of roses sat on the registration desk. When I pointed out that one student had signed the sign-in sheet merely with his initials, Francis shrugged his shoulders and said, “Everyone adds his own je ne sais quoi.” I said, “Well, then I guess I’m Henry with a y.”

  In the studio itself before class had started, I chatted up a woman in my age bracket who was wearing a gorgeous calf-length fur. “It’s seal,” she told me. “I got it when Fosse put me in the national tour of Chicago as Roxie.”

  I swooned slightly. Fosse, seal coat, money—I wasn’t sure which was the source of my enthusiasm, it all seemed juicy.

  She continued, “But it’s not my good coat. The good coat I got with my Grand Hotel money.”

  This the Broadway veteran Penny Worth, who understudied Dorothy Loudon as Miss Hannigan in the original production of Annie. I introduced myself and said I was honored to meet her.

  Francis put nine of us students through our paces. When he saw me delicately negotiating the arms-between-the-legs move, he said, “Just one more, Henry, then we’ll call the paramedics.”

  The routine was set to the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love,” and included in its line-up were two bouts of jazz walk, two pas de bourrées, a passé on either side, and two full spins. Francis did the routine with us three times without music, and then broke us up into two groups so that one group would watch the other.

  As is always the case when I’m delivered of a bunch of choreography on the spot, I found myself able to remember, and to perform to lower mid-level competency, a little more than half of the moves. I simply cannot do the routine in its entirety, so what I’ve learned to do is to try to “master” the three critical moments: the opening, the close, and the climax or flashiest move. Everything else, I let go of, absolving myself from any bloodshed or unbeauty; all is dissolved in an inch of Vaseline on the camera lens.

  When Francis said that Penny’s and my group would be up first, I was thrilled to hear Penny say, “Shall we do this, Henry A.?”

  “Absolutely!”

  She continued, “Henry A. and Penny W.: it sounds like we’re in AA.”

  Yes, I thought, and I should probably be on the step where you call everyone in your life and apologize.

  There were four of us in our group, but to me it was just me and Penny. At first blush I’d thought that having a seasoned pro standing next to me would make me self-conscious, or amp up my tendency toward gestural schtick, but it did the opposite: none of the five students standing against the barre would bother to look at me, I realized—they’d all be looking at Miss Hannigan. (Partners: let them deflect attention from you.)

  We positioned ourselves and commenced. Before coming to class, I’d cooked up a little visualization exercise. I now went into it. I tried to imagine how I’d feel if Greg passed. I pushed my shoulders forward like I was pushing a tackling sled of heartbreak; I spun like I was winding up to kick loss in the face.

  On one of the six run-throughs of the routine that Francis gave each of the groups, I watched myself doing it in the mirror. My work had so much more resolve than my usual harried, Sorcerer’s Apprentice flailing did. During another run-through, one of the other dancers raised her eyebrows while nodding her head at me: the first time I’d ever been “complimented” by another student at Luigi’s.

  Half an hour later, as I was leaving the Jazz Centre, I ran into Francis in the hallway.

  “That Henry, he sure likes to dance,” he said to me.

  “It’s true! And today was the first time I ever got any emotion into it.”

  “That’s good,” he said, smiling. “No, that’s not good—that’s huge.”

  DANCE AS INTIMACY AND SOCIALIZING

  1.

  ONE OF THE BEST WEDDINGS I’ve ever gone to took place in an old, crumbling farmhouse in the Catskills. A groovy young filmmaker of my acquaintance was marrying her groovy young filmmaker boyfriend. What put this wedding up on its feet, both literally and metaphorically, was the dancing. After a brief ceremony, lots of funny toasts, and a heap o’ barbecue served under a tent, there was no awkward or conscience-driven need for us guests to hit the dance floor so as to show support for the couple or to fan the party’s flames, as sometimes occurs at the beginning of wedding dancing—people were simply joyous and tipsy and ready to shaaaake it. Someone started blasting B-52’s and Talking Heads from inside the house; a bunch of us rushed in and commenced gyrating in the living room, spilling over onto the stairs and the screened porch.

  Around midnight, having danced for two hours, I was sweat-soaked and still happily boogying on the porch when a crazed and torrential rain started. The wide sheets of water pouring off the porch’s roof looked like a dried Fruit Roll-Up if it were made of jellyfish. The dancing got even wilder; it was as if the sheets of rain on three sides of us were pressing in on us at foot level and lifting us slightly off the floor. That moment when you’ve been bodily thrashing for a couple of hours and realize that you’ve burned off the alcohol in your bloodstream but have seamlessly replaced it with something equally enlarging? I was there. I felt lighter than air, a gaseous vapor.

  Around 1 a.m., the rain slowed to a speckled scrim, and some fifteen of us stumbled onto the lawn like newborn gerbils struggling to form eyelids. I saw a big flare-up of flame startlingly close to my face: the person standing next to me had ignited a gnarled wooden club, turning it into a torch. He started walking toward the woods. We all followed behind, as did, at the far end of our mob, another torch-wielding guest. Walking for about six minutes through the eerie, drippy woods, I was impressed by how little effort I had to make—it felt like we were motored by vestigial pull. I shared a look of expectant glee with the person behind me; I had no idea where we were going, but I sensed that animal sacrifice might be in my immediate future.

  We stopped at a clearing, and two of the guests started to take off their clothes. I thought, No one wants to get the animal sacrifice all over his clothing.

  But, then, our mission became clear to me when one of the torches lit up the area directly to our left: a swimming hole.

  And behind that: a waterfall.

  * * *

  The part of this evening that I can’t seem to let go of is the one-two-three of dancing, then huddling in the dark, then scuttling through the woods in group formation carrying torches. It was all so caveman. So what if our loincloths were wash-and-wear separates bought 30-percent-off at a Donna Karan sample sale? Each rain-speckled tree and bush was a potential woolly mammoth—but, as with the Fosse amoeba that my high school pals had formed outside Studio 54, we were impervious due to our number.

  Which intrigues me because most anthropologists think that the original evolutionary function of dance was to allow humans—and maybe even encourage them—to live in groups larger than tiny clusters of close relatives, thus making themselves less vulnerable to predators. After all, if you encounter a lion or bear on the trail, what are you supposed to do? Wave your arms, jump up and down, appear large.

  I am Hugh Jackman, hear me roar.

  * * *

  Ask enough dancers why they dance, and the word that keeps cropping up is community. Whether we’re fleeing our family or our stifling job or the dead-eyed but occasionally vituperative fish that is the internet, many of us find in dance a primal, fully immersive experience that allows us to meld with other people, be it for three minutes or for three decades.

  On its face, the Intimacy and Socializing function would seem to have a lot in common with Social Entrée, but I hasten to point out that the intimacy and socializing I’m referring to is unmarked by social ambition. Indeed, the Intimacy and Socializing function can often be distinguished by what it’s not. In many instances, Intimacy and Socializing is the function (with the possible exceptions of Politics and Healing) that is the
least interested in or dependent on artistry. (To be sure, intimacy wants a gentleness and a sensitivity, but these qualities are more aids than necessities.) Intimacy and Socializing is less about a well-executed pirouette than about the coffee afterward.

  Dance’s power to draw its practitioners together reminds me of two things. The first is my godson Ruslan Sprague, the son of my high school friend Carl and his wife, Susan. Ruslan has danced a lot with the Albany Berkshire Ballet, and has studied with Boston Ballet and Ballet West. He loves the work of Czech choreographer Jiři Kylián, and would one day like to have his own company.

  Ruslan came into my life in 1995 when Carl and Susan decided to adopt. Carl and Susan went through the requisite year or two of bureaucratic rigamarole—lots of filling out of applications and notarized forms, lots of waiting. Finally, they flew to Russia to pick up three-year-old Ruslan. On their first visit to the orphanage they were accompanied by a group of other parents also meeting their adoptees for the first time. Carl and Susan immediately fell in love with the affectionate and charming Ruslan. However, lest the children get worn out, the adoption agency had stipulated that the parents’ first visit with their kids should be short, about half an hour.

  Thus it was hugely gratifying to Carl, on his and Susan’s return to the orphanage the next day, to have Ruslan immediately recognize him among the scrum of parents. Ruslan ran to Carl and threw his arms around his legs. Carl was moved to tears.

  I had a coffee with twenty-six-year-old Ruslan two years ago at a café in Chicago, where he was doing a residency at the nearby Hinsdale Dance Academy. I asked him what keeps him dancing, given the rigors of his field—the low pay, the lack of job security, the physical exhaustion, the absence of medical insurance, the built-in obsolescence of one’s talent.

  “I love the family aspect of it,” he told me. “Everywhere I work, even if it’s only for a week, I form a little family with the other dancers.”

  * * *

  My second thought is of Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about drag ball culture and voguing. If you’ve ever used the expressions “throwing shade,” “yasss queen,” “werk,” or “fierce,” you can probably trace it back to this film, which paved the way for, if not outright inspired, both Madonna’s “Vogue” video and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Drag balls had been held in Harlem since the 1920s, of course, but until Jennie Livingston made Paris Is Burning, few people outside the scene were aware of them.

  Seven years in the making, the project started in the summer of 1985 when Livingston was walking through New York City’s Washington Square Park and stumbled onto a group of drag queens. Despite the fact that it was raining, the queens were voguing while calling out moves like “Witch queen in drag” and “Saks Fifth Avenue mannequins.”

  Soon Livingston found herself and her camera immersed in the world of drag ball competitions, where the mostly black and Hispanic queens flamboyantly strut the runway and then dance, all the while emulating movie stars or the stratum of society most likely to reject them—society types in jodhpurs, military personnel, Wall Street bankers (complete with briefcases loaded with credit cards and airline tickets). “This is white America,” the emcee of the ball featured in the movie explains. “And when it comes to the minorities, especially black, we as a people, is the greatest example of behavior modification in the history of civilization. . . . That’s why in the ballroom circuit it is so obvious that if you have captured the Great White Way of living or looking or dressing or speaking, you is a marvel!” A queen’s ability to embody a given type—e.g., “Executive,” “Alexis vs. Krystle,” “Town and Country”—is, of course, called “realness.”

  That the participants in these balls usually have their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks is what makes the pageants hilarious. The queens—many of whom, we’re told, are working as hustlers—have such sad backstories that the balls could easily come off as a pity parade. But what keeps the individual performers’ quixotic pursuit from seeming abject or pathetic is the fact that each of them belongs to a “house”—a group of friends or “children,” who are presided over by a mentoring “mother” and sometimes a “father.” As one interviewee points out, houses are gay street gangs.

  “When someone has rejection from their mother and father, their family, when they get out in the world, they search. They search for someone to fill that void,” one mother says, shortly after telling us how her own homophobic biological mother had angrily burned her child’s mink coat when she found it, angry at her son’s sexuality and the fact that his breasts were bigger than hers. “They can talk to me because they’re gay and I’m gay. That’s where a lot of the ball and the mother business comes in. They look to me to fill that void.”

  But, as we all know from our own biological families, living in small groups of people is a lot of work. The queens vent their complicated feelings toward one another through dance in the same way that b-boys and breakdancers do. In the film, choreographer Willi Ninja, the mother of the House of Ninja who would go on to dance for Janet Jackson and Karole Armitage and to help Naomi Campbell and Paris Hilton with their runway walks before dying of AIDS in 2006, explains, “Voguing came from shade because it was a dance that two people did because they didn’t like each other. Instead of fighting, you would dance it out on the dance floor and whoever did the best moves was throwing the best shade basically. . . . I make my hand into a form like a compact or makeup kit, and I’m like beating my face with blush, shadow, or whatever, to the music. Then usually I’ll turn the compact around to face that person, meaning almost my hand is a mirror for them to get a look. Then I start doing their face because what they have on their face needs a dramatic makeup job.”

  Three years after the film’s debut, when journalist Jesse Green attended a memorial for one of the cast members—Angie Xtravaganza, the former mother of the House of Xtravaganza—the mood among the surviving queens was bleak. Not only had the mainstreaming of drag that the film had inspired limited, ironically, the queens’ performance opportunities, but most of the film’s survivors felt betrayed by the film’s success. Though they’d signed release forms and were aware that the subjects of documentaries are not typically paid, all but two of the surviving principals from the film had hired lawyers, given that the film had taken in $4 million after only costing $500,000 to make. One of the queens, Paris DuPree, whose 1986 ball was featured in the film and provided its title, sought $40 million for unauthorized and fraudulent use of her services. Though Pepper Labeija had called her ball Paris Is Burning to suggest that the fashion capital of the world would be jealous of her ball’s competitors, journalist Green invokes the earlier, darker reference—Hitler asking “Paris brennt?” in 1944 to find out whether Paris had fallen—and lands on the withering observation “Paris has burned.” (Though the passion for voguing has mostly subsided in the States, it flourishes in Europe.)

  In the article, the tiny tendril of hope that pokes through the rubble comes from one of the mothers, Dorian Corey, who emerges sanguine about her brush with fame, and full of wise counsel for the brood she looks over. “I love all that madness,” Corey says to Green about the drag ball scene. “But I tell the children to think very serious, and if it’s at all possible avoid the drag life. It’s a heartache life. If you do pursue it, make sure you get your education, some kind of skill.”

  2.

  Tommy Tune tells a story about the time that Martha Graham visited his college in Texas in the early 1960s. “She was so dramatic, we were all in awe,” he told the authors of Conversations with Choreographers. “She said in her lecture, ‘All great dance comes from the lonely place.’ This little girl in the back of the room in a real Texas voice said, ‘Miss Graham, you said that all great dancing stems from the lonely place. Where is the lonely place?’ Martha Graham raised herself up and said, ‘Between your thighs. Next question?’ ”

  Martha may have been onto something. For its participants, dance’s purchase on intimacy—sexual or not—i
s one of its most powerful attributes. It takes only one seismically wonderful dance with a partner to confirm the aforementioned “a good dance is better than sex.” Lindy Hop pioneer Frankie Manning used to describe the dance as “a series of three-minute romances.” In 1994, for his eightieth birthday, he started a tradition of dancing with one partner for each year of his life, thus conducting, in a single night, eighty three-minute romances.

  Some people seem to get their dose of intimacy from watching dance. In 2016 alone, roughly 2 million people, most of them women, saw a Chippendales show, and the touring revue Magic Men Live! sold some $5 million of tickets at 148 shows all over North America. Viva the pectoral implant industry.

  For social dancers, who may have shown up at a dance event with the express purpose of finding a mate, the question of intimacy has a special piquancy. Indeed, psychologists have even gone so far as to use motion-capture technology to determine what kinds of dance moves win admiration from others. In research published in the journal Scientific Reports in 2017, these researchers determined that women were most admired for swinging their hips (but not too much), keeping in time with the music, and asymmetrically moving their arms and thighs. Meanwhile, men were most admired for tilting and twisting their necks and torsos in a variety of positions (the majority of men, the researchers pointed out, only move their arms and legs, and do so in a repetitive fashion).

  However, we should also note that two kinds of peril lurk at the dance/intimacy crossroads. The first is the presence of creepy men (and the very, very occasional creepy woman). This tends to be a gentleman forty-plus years old who is on the chase, and who sees in any dance-based gathering an opportunity to vent unwanted ardor. On two occasions I’ve momentarily felt like I was one of these fellows, and both occasions were searingly awkward.