Dancing: an essay from 2020

“So they called at the inn
for a room to dance
and who but they danced merrily —
and the very best dancer among them all
was Old John Webb who was just set free.”

“The Escape of Old John Webb” was on the Kingston Trio’s 1960 album “String Along,” which I listened to countless times. It is one of approximately 98 million songs that mention dancing, and, like dancing, it is clever and lively and a bit obscure. When it came out, it sparked controversy (of course it did), because the Trio (as I understand it) had a habit of taking old ballads from England or wherever, changing a few things around, and claiming credit for the resulting “new” songs. Some people didn’t like that.

At least when your feet dance the cha-cha, you don’t have to pay royalties to anyone (though if you want some music to dance to, you do).

Dancing back in the days of Old John Webb did sound like fun, in a way. Yet it seems odd that when Old John manages to regain his freedom, he celebrates, not by shooting off fireworks or something, but by moving across the floor in a series of formal, socially-acceptable patterns. Pretty tame, there, Old John! Is that really the best you can do?

My own history with dancing is characterized by experiences ranging from elated abandon to acute embarrassment. I’m going to sketch in just a few of them here. (I should add that I’m talking about dancing in which I was a participant. Dancing in which I was not, that would include Alwin Nikolais, Pilobolus, Alvin Ailey ((but no ballet, no, no)), plus numerous step dancers, morris dancers, swing dancers, and practitioners of Appalachian clogging. That’s for another day.)

•    Let’s begin with Mrs. Ferguson’s after-school dance class. In my town, parents who wanted to expose their eighth-graders to the social graces signed them up for “Fergie’s.” When you heard that your folks were sending you to her dance class, you knew that there was no getting out of it. Mrs. Ferguson was an institution. For years she had been running beginners’ classes for large groups of maturing schoolchildren in the spacious and high-ceilinged grand ballroom of the Maugus Club. The Maugus was usually open only to members-and-their-guests, so this was one of the few ways to see it from the inside. Mrs. Ferguson, it was said, hailed from a tony neighborhood in an old-money part of Boston. On the dance floor, she stood with extreme good posture, tall and broadshouldered on tiny feet, resembling a plumb bob. She was a solitary and commanding presence, the center of our uneasy attention, imparting instruction in dance, with dollops of deportment, while we, fidgeting in our churchy clothes, sat as quietly as we could on hard chairs around the perimeter of the room. We stared at her, trying hard to listen. Because maybe something about this would turn out to be really important, who could tell? In that respect, it was very much like church. Mrs. Ferguson did not solicit questions from her pupils. There was simply the teaching, the rituals, and, on your part, the accepting, the doing-or-dying. That was dance, then: a beautiful potential, which could become the wondrous creation it deserved to be, only if everyone kept their mouths shut and strictly followed the rules, of which there were many.       

We had to learn and never forget how to do many proper things: invite a young lady to be our dancing partner (a girl you might have thrown a snowball at the previous winter), how to hold our partner in standard ballroom dance position (“facing partner, slightly offset to the left, lower bodies together, upper bodies apart, both looking left; the man’s right hand is just below her left shoulder blade and her left hand is on his upper right arm”). We boys stood close enough to our partners to sense that girls, too, perspired. For many of us, learning to dance was a tough climb, partly because the boys were expected to lead. First we had to summon the energy and presence of mind, then we had to hold that energy in check. Some of the boys suffered bouts of bashfulness; I saw one of Fergie’s assistants grab one of these boys and shake him hard by the shoulder. “Now, do it!” How could they be expected to turn him into a little gentleman if they didn’t first cleanse him of his bashfulness?

The dances we learned were basic and few: the waltz, beginning with one session devoted entirely to mastering the box step; the foxtrot; the cha-cha; and the lindy. There was a ray of hope in the lindy, because it was clear you could dance it to rock ‘n’ roll, as Fergie’s assistants demonstrated for us. The lindy was fun, and I would try to get better at it, many years later.

•     Multiple ballroom-dance tune-ups in my 20’s and 30’s, to get me ready for this or that wedding reception. Or at least make it so that I wouldn’t be watching my own feet most of the time. When the rubber hit the road, though, I usually forgot everything I’d learned.

I was to be an usher at my older brother’s wedding in 1970, and it was explained to me that I would be paired up with one of the bridesmaids, and would be expected to dance with her at the reception, alone and in full view of the hundreds of assembled guests. To wow them with my style and aplomb, you see. This demanded a private lesson, at a small studio down by the railroad tracks, a setting not at all like the Maugus ballroom. I had no girlfriend at the time, so they supplied a practice-partner for me, a pretty teenager in a black leotard and leggings and a short skirt in a bright red plaid. As soon as we went into dance position, I suddenly felt very warm and my mind went blank. I don’t know what I learned, but I forgot it as soon as I learned it, maybe before.

Then there was Madame Rosa. Before Annie and I got married in 1984, we felt that another tune-up was needed. (The need to dance in ballroom style kept cropping up! Like crabgrass!) We chose Madame Rosa’s out of the phone book because we could walk there from our apartment. Her studio, with walls covered in red flocked velour, was in the turret of an immense Victorian. Within it stood the great mound of Rosa herself, once a lithe dancer of note, many years before, now covered in a long gown that matched her walls. Annie and I stood in dance position, but so far apart (the better to see our feet) that Rosa was moved to exclaim, “My goodness! Have you two just met?” She did teach us one thing that stuck: in the waltz, when your weight went onto your left foot, say, you had the option of turning your head slightly to the left and glancing away to the far corners of the room. Then doing it with your right. It extended the form of the dance, making the two of you appear more graceful, and really, we needed all the help we could get.

•    The loose and sometimes drunken boogeying of my college years, and the decades that followed. This was emancipation: to think that there could be dancing where you didn’t need to know any steps, didn’t need to lead, could change partners freely or dance by yourself or sit down to rest at any time. When they put a Grateful Dead jam on the stereo and cranked up the volume, or the Stones’ “Some Girls,” or Toots and the Maytals, you were going to jump out on whatever dance floor there was, and do what came naturally. Naturally!

Later, the rising popularity of disco put pressure on us free-form dancers to, once again, take a partner in dance position and execute rehearsed and exact steps out on the floor. I took a pass.

•     Contras and squares. When you marry a fan of folk dancing, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself at a contradance or square dance. The music sure is sweet but you’re not allowed to sit off to the side and listen to it. You’re there to dance, so, up on your feet everybody! Nor are you allowed to rely on your more experienced partner; in the course of the evening, the caller will invite you, not to say pressure you, to “now thank this partner and go find another one.” Yikes! They said this was supposed to be fun!

In a contradance, all the available dancers pair up, with the individuals in each pair facing each another, forming two long straight lines down the length of the hall. The music starts, the caller calls, and the convolutions ensue. The patterns of the choreography repeat, and are fashioned so that a couple will end up traveling the length of the set to its bottom, where the two dancers trade places and get ready to enjoy the dance anew, now from the point of view of traveling up the set. Got it? The caller stops giving detailed directions after a few minutes, and the dance goes off on its own like a living thing. Beautiful! But: in the event of a misstep, contradances are difficult to stop and reset. If you, the easily-flustered beginning contradancer, turn left, say, instead of right, or forget to cross over, or happen to sneeze and lose a beat or two, not only are you lost, but so is the whole set you’re in, and the lines crumble. Embarrassing!

That’s why I will always prefer a square over a contra. In a square dance, the four couples that make up each square, though they may go through all kinds of steps of varying complexity, will always wind up back where they started. So if anyone gets lost, the square can regroup and start over within a few measures of music. Safety dance!

Need I add that no adventures in dancing such as these will be happening this week, or this month, or possibly at all, this pandemic year. Aside from taking lessons online, or practicing at home with or without family members, or watching performances on TV or other devices, dancing has ceased. This is remarkable.