Late last year I found myself curled up in the cab of a truck, trying to snatch a precious quarter hour of sleep as the Black Hills of South Dakota rolled by. My flight plans had imploded (by which I mean that I had forgotten to book one), and I had hitched a ride. We were going to sleep in three-hour intervals to make it across the country in under three days. I didn’t care, as long as I was home by Christmas Eve. For all the usual reasons, but especially for the dancing.
As far as picturesque Christmas traditions go, Coffeys have it a bit thin on the ground. We do cut down a tree, we do sing badly and incessantly, but mostly, our peculiar rites consist of not doing things. Not decorating until Christmas Eve. Not buying each other presents if we don’t feel like it. Not taking the lights down till Lenten shame sets in. In envy of my Italian cousins, I once asked my mother if we could do a feast of the seven fishes. She considered. Fish was expensive, and we were Irish.
“We could do a feast of the seven fishsticks,” she suggested. And we do, to this day. But the other thing we do is dance. After the vigil, with the tree finished, fishsticks eaten, pét-nat opened, we put on my dad’s “Rocking Christmas” playlist. You can find a cha-cha version of almost any carol. But here, you also see the proper place and value of the Boomer Christmas canon. These songs are terrible to sing and grating as mood music. But many of them—“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Run Rudolph Run,” “Little St. Nick,” the crooners—are exactly the right mix of silly, sentimental, and rhythmically defined.
Everyone starts out sitting and talking, politely pretending for no reason at all that it’s not going to happen this year. The songs pick up speed; my dad jumps up and pulls one of the girls on the floor. Someone moves the furniture; someone moves the rug.
Other than attending a convent school, there is nothing like having five younger brothers for destroying any feminine reserve about asking men to dance. If you don’t ask—cajole, threaten, bribe, physically drag—a twelve-year-old boy onto the dance floor, you’ll dance alone. My dad taught my sisters and me to dance, holding us close and letting us feel the easy, playful beat carry his body. We tried to teach the boys, and it is always bittersweet to realize in turn that another one has grown up enough to lead you around on the floor. Most parties I remember growing up involved dancing as the night wore on.
Here I will address—really, ignore—the inevitable criticism: all modern social dance is a degenerate reflection of the atomized society that even in its “conservative” form prioritizes the nuclear dyad and allows immodest mingling of the sexes. The English were right about the waltz in 1820 and the Argentinians were right about the tango in 1910 and Sayyid Qutb was right about “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and the only properly traditional position would allow nothing but Morris dancing. Well, put me in veil jail, because I don’t care. Modernity has its wins, and they include companionate marriage, wastewater treatment plants, and partner dancing. The clasp only maintained by constant tension, the collapse into close embrace as couples hem you in, the inventiveness and wit entailed in following, the giddy heights attainable by consistent practice with a regular partner—it’s a drama and a joke on the whole system of social relations both engendered by and constraining romantic love. Who would do without it?
What we learned from my dad and tried to teach my brothers was simple: how to hold and adapt yourself to your partner, how to wait for the beat, how to endure feeling like an idiot without letting it overwhelm you, how to go between a two-step and a rock step, how to spin and be spun. Mostly, how to enjoy moving to a song without a lot of fuss.
It’s not what they’ll learn at the swing-dance clubs that proliferate at every Catholic college and reasonably vibrant parish, usually with an eye to elevating and reclaiming the culture. Let me be clear: the kids who commit to these things far outstrip us in ability, and are to be admired and commended. Their aerials, Charlestons, Jumpin’ Joes, etc., are a delight to behold. But sometimes I think an opportunity is missed when a young person’s—especially a young man’s—first experience of dancing is in a swing club. When I’ve danced with these earnest and wholesome fellas, I often feel the object of a grim determination to throw me around the floor with as much virtuosity and as many revolutions possible within the time allotted. Leading a partner less able than you is perhaps the highest and most unattainable form of mastery, so it is not surprising that even with the very skilled, these encounters have an element of mutual mortification. With the less skilled, the effect is that of an unusually boring apache dance.
But, arguably, this is sour grapes. It is not the fault of the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy that I never took the time to learn the Charleston. Here is a more serious complaint: change the music, and the whole thing falls apart. If a country or blues song comes on, or a waltz, or a rumba, the young men freeze in their tracks—or, worse, try to dance to Peggy Lee the same way they were dancing to Benny Goodman.
Not knowing the waltz is no more a punishable offense than not knowing the Charleston. But the difference between learning a dance and learning to dance is what you do when you don’t know the steps. You listen to what the music is saying about itself, you feel the beat, and you come up with a way of moving that is fun for you and your partner without violating the social equilibrium on the floor.
Swing is probably an attractive option at these colleges and youth groups for two reasons. First, since it’s a reasonably athletic dance, it renders moot most of the current and embarrassing questions of propriety. Second, because there are clear technical gradations to master, it offers a better chance of appealing to young men. For whatever reason, many young men like leveling up. They like video games. And treating dance as an athletic exercise in discrete skill-gain affords distance from the painful vulnerabilities it contains: the possibility that your chosen partner will not want to dance with you or will not enjoy herself, the terrifying jouissance of allowing music to possess you, the frustrating, cloddish failure to be possessed by it, the inability to control or even know how you are perceived. At worst, dancing is a nightmare: a supposed pleasure whose whole structure foregrounds the struggle between the internal experience of the agent and the tyrannical objectivity of social perception that is the essence of shame.
I sympathize; I am a bad dancer. But I love dancing, because it is a great pleasure to move your body to music, and another to move it in the matrix of social intercourse: to push and pull, to follow and lead, to be surprised and adapt. Mastering steps and performing them excellently is an important part of the social matrix, and an important pleasure in itself. But I worry that when it is offered as the foundation and sum of learning to dance, dance becomes just another video game. Young dancers are, too often, just another kind of nerd. Restricting your world to that of measurable correctness (in other words, being a nerd, a group that in the era of early specialization and intensive clinics frequently includes jocks) means missing out on too many good things. But if you are a nerd about dancing, you not only restrict the pleasure, you also miss out on the process.
Learning to dance, unless you’ve been doing it since you learned to walk, is largely an exercise in perseverance through shame and fear. You must endure, and ignore, the shrill, incessant, defensive “Me???” inside your head, until it becomes quieter, replaced by a beat. You must bear looking the fool, and learn not to let it destroy your dignity or poise or good cheer. There’s a reason dancing is a time-honored prelude to falling in love. You must enter a situation where your control of your own body is in question. You must submit to something outside yourself, letting it move you rather than simply exerting effort to achieve your will. You must give up the hope that perhaps led you out on the floor to begin with, of moving magnificently and looking marvelous. You must say, like Arjuna, that victory and defeat are the same, and look only for joy. And then, miraculously, you will get yourself back; humbly foregoing action and seeking a joy you cannot command, you will more and more find yourself able to act in previously unimaginable ways. There is an irrefragable courage that is only generated by humility. Courage and humility allow the pursuit of joy. Joy humbles and emboldens. “Vivir con miedo es vivir a medias,” says the heroine of the greatest dance movie ever made. It’s true.
Swing is great. The waltz, tango, polka, rumba, cha-cha, et al. are great, and the more expert we all become at them the happier we’ll be. But more young people should be pulled all unwilling onto the floor by their elders at parties to execute an impromptu and inexpert two-step or salsa to whatever music happens to be playing. It would be good for them, surely, to learn to dance in the safety of the domestic. But it would be good for all of us if social dancing became more truly social, less the preserve of hobbyists and more what it is when you come from a dancing family: an ever-present option hovering in the air. By the jukebox at the bar, in the kitchen as onions brown, at a party with a little empty space, on the street in a moment of spontaneity—we should all be bold enough to put hands on shoulders and waists, to lead and follow clumsily, to feel the beat and move to the music as best we can.
