The Wild Freedom of the Dance

This may sound incredibly stupid, but one of the things I legit miss most about Cambridge is the opportunity to dance like an idiot twice a week. My history with dancing has been rough to say the least. I danced pretty consistently at weekly classes until I was about 14, and by consistently I mean consistently badly. Being a bit shit would fly in most amateur dance classes, however, the dance school I was at was ran by the most fierce octogenarian I have ever, and most likely will ever encounter. Honestly, it was a good class if there was only one kid crying at the end. And so began my fraught relationship with dancing.

Skip a few years and the possibility of dancing in a nightclub has become a very real threat. I must unlearn everything years of dance classes have taught me. The pros are clear: there’s no one to shout at me if I go wrong. But the cons are also evident: there’s no routine, I have to make up a creative, non-repulsive way to throw my body around to a song I might not know. A moment of appreciation is due here for ‘The Cha-Cha Slide’ and ‘Macarena’ – two songs which THANK GOD come with instructions – they have saved many an awkward dance floor-occupant from complete disaster. Anyway, my unlearning/relearning process was proving more difficult than I had initially expected. One friend’s advice was ‘bend in the middle’, yes, it was going that badly. Enter the hero: a bottle of wine. I wake up the next morning expecting to have been made into a meme. But no, I am unscathed from my dance experience, and after a few more clammy club nights I have become as Abba might put it, the Dancing Queen.

The song ‘I Get Ideas’ covered by M Ward (my favourite version, video below) has the best opening few lines: ‘When we’re dancing and you’re dangerously close to me / I get ideas / I get ideas’. Now I know that getting with people in clubs is not the traditional image of romance, but I genuinely think that there is something just a little bit magical in the dance together beforehand. These are the single most hopeful few hours of any entanglement; nothing can go wrong in the dance, there are innumerable sparks at the prospect of what might happen next, and best of all, you don’t know each other in the context of romance, so even if it’s just for one night you can believe that you’re both perfect. The haze will probably clear in the morning to reveal you’re both dickheads, but in the moments before the plunge you’re standing so high that the hangover and awkward encounters to follow are so worth it.

I miss miss miss the fun, wild absurdity of dancing. One of my favourite poets Gary Snyder has a poem called ‘What You Should Know to be a Poet’ which is literally a list of things he believes one must experience before laying claim to the title of poet. One of these experiences is ‘the wild freedom of the dance’. This is one of the most truthful lines I’ve found in poetry. If we accept that to be a poet is to be a witness, participant and scribe for the deepest movements experienced by the human race, then of bloody course ‘the wild freedom of the dance’ is essential to a poet’s understanding. Something happens that is genuinely electric when we let go and dance without restriction. Speaking is unnecessary. The movement is all. It says I am here, I am physically real, I am worth celebrating, I am both individual and part of this collective act that has always been such a basic human impulse.

'The wild freedom of the dance' captured spreading from left to right.