Basics: Dance

“A Basic of Life” by Sally Sommer

Dance/USA Journal
Spring 1995

“Dancing,” says Brahms La Fortune, architect and clubhead, “is like breathing.  First you breathe, then you dance.”

Movement is fundamental for all of us.  Without it, we die.  If movement is the body’s survival tool, it is also the soul’s salvation.  Altered states are caused by the physical repetitions that produce the enkephalins and endorphins that abolish pain and promote ecstatic highs.

Moving well, or watching someone else move well, is enormously exciting.  Sports fans scream in pleasure at a graceful play, reflecting the same passion balletomanes feel when they see an elegant cabriole or perfect pirouette.  The reason why we find this rewarding is because we are all experts on human motion.

Everyone knows how to read movement.  Every day we make life-and-death decisions based on how well we perceive movement in space.  Calibrating to the millimeter and millisecond, we factor the trajectory of the approaching car with how much time we need to scurry across the street.  While reviewing a shopping list we scan people on the sidewalk, making instantaneous assessments based on physical data: Is that person benign? Or crazy or dangerous?

Brahms “Bravo” LaFortune, calibrating to the millisecond

Our response to movement is immediate and intense.  Nonverbal communication is lightening swift and, because it is taken in viscerally, it needs no explanation.  One body talks to another and we physically absorb information. This is a basic mode of communication – familiar and cozy – because it is the way infants and lovers learn, existing in a state of sensory absorption where the skin sucks up information.

We live within a circuit of body knowledge that gathers sensations from the outside and registers information from inside.  We experience the world through our bodies and simultaneously experience our bodies in the world.  Watching dance engages all these processes: we get a kinetic charge from observing movement; we feel how difficult the movement is; we exalt in the dancer’s flight because we, too, have dreamt of flight. When the dancer is good, s/he transports us to an altered reality where desire and kinetic response merge, where time suspends for a few seconds.

Archie Burnett and Iriena Herrera, in the club, c. 1996

Currently I am working with a group of club dancers on a video project called Check Your Body at the Door.  Started with a grant from the NEA Dance Heritage Initiative and continuing with a grant from the National Initiative to Preserve American Dance, Check Your Body at the Door documents some of the extraordinary dances and dancers of New York City’s underground club world.

Willy Pinedo watching during filming at Lincoln Center, 1993

Watching dance at the clubs is like clinging to the safety-net of trapeze artists.  You are so close to the action you get showered with sweat.  In the darkness, at the edge of a circle surrounding the dancers, the kinetic involvement is intense.  In a flash you have to be prepared to step back and open the circle if the dancers begin diving.  Because they exist outside the world of established dance institutions – with their requisite systems of daily classes, auditions, companies, performances, and the support and camaraderie of fellow dancers who define themselves as artists – club dancers view dance more rawly.  For the club dancer, it is the way to survive.  Going dancing is “going to work.”  The club is a multifunctional space – a rehearsal hall, an institution of learning and socialization, a center for emotional therapy, a place to escape reality, a performance arena.  The club represents safety, a place to get away from it all.  Linked by a common passion, hard-core club dancers may have danced together for years yet they do not know each other’s given names (they use nicknames), telephone numbers, or what they do in this “outside” life.

Clubheads, at Sound Factory Bar, c. 1992

They do not speak of themselves as “artists,” and instead of creating art, they “bust a move.”  If they are called “artists,” their response is at once shy, proud and surprised.  Dancing is more realistic, more basic.  Dancing is something they have to do – like breathing – and they dance in order to give value to their lives.

Conrad Rochester, a gorgeous smooth dancer, dances in memoriam.  “When I was about thirteen or fourteen-years old a guy got killed.  A guy shot him.  And I realized we weren’t gonna be seeing these moves no more.  So I decided to take a move from each one, and to perfect them in my own little way, so I could remember them. So each time I do their move, I am letting them know that I am still out here, rocking for them – for the love of that person and for the love of the dance.”

Archie Burnett, clubhead and transit worker, says, “Dancing is therapy to release whatever frustrations and angers you may feel.  No matter how bad things have gone on the outside, once you step inside that club, you will feel different.  You work it out physically and mentally.  It keeps you in shape.”

Tiny and beautiful, Barbara Tucker is queen of the underground-scene.  Since the project started, Tucker has become a number-one recording artist of dance music.  Yet she is also a deeply religious woman who views dancing as spiritual transcendency.  “I dance to praise God.  I used to sing in a gospel choir when I was a girl, and I never understood why you could praise God in song, but not in dance.  At the clubs, I realized you could do both.  It definitely is a release and relief from the day to day.  And, at the end of the evening, or in the morning, if you are a real club dancer, your spirits are lifted.”

Ron Thomas works a variety of jobs to support his twin boys.  Before leveraging his body up to a handstand from a prone position, prying upward on his fingertips, he blesses himself and the floor.  “If I can feel that energy within myself, I can fly.”

Stylish movers and articulate describers of themselves and the underground clubs, they dance in an idiosyncratic and personally virtuosic manner.  If the movement is only about physical power it is not respected; the flashy stuff must be leavened with wit and invention.  Although totally improvised, the dancing has formal qualities, a keen sense of the shape of itself and its historical context.  These improvisations are created through fast physical exchanges, a play of characters, attitudes, styles.  This is the crucial social context that gives club meaning.  It is the inclusive participation of a group of people that connects them into a community and forms a sacred bond.

Nestor “Neck Bone” Ortiz in the cipher, c.1993

Club dancing brings dancing back to the basics of the moving body, driven by invention, wit, style and social knowingness.  It is the stuff of life and better survival. As Brahms LaFortune says: “ breathe, then you dance.”  He pauses.  “Well, even if I were a fish, you know I’d be a dancing fish.”