4 The New York Review
Stepping Out
Clair Wills
I hold hands with strangers. I do it quite
often, and for long minutes at a time.
I wrap my arms around them to bring
them close in an embrace. I search their
faces. I fit my body to their dips and
hollows. Recently a man said to me, “I
can feel your hot belly.” He happened
to be French, and something about
the deliberate way he said it, carefully
pronouncing the English words, meant
that I could suddenly feel my hot belly
too. It was as though I were inside him,
and the heat pushing out through my
skin was really pushing in. The mem-
brane between us was suddenly so thin
we could have peeled it off, or pressed
right through it. Where did I end and
where did he begin?
This man was a stranger, or, rather,
he was a person I had just met. I did
not know his name. We were standing
close, listening for the moment in the
music when we would begin to dance.
We were listening for each other. It is
often in the moments before the dance
proper begins, before conscious mo-
ment and figure intrudes, that listen-
ing is at its most creative and we are
most aware of the body—our own and
others’.
What do we write about when we
write about dance? Arguably there are
as many ways of talking about dance
as there are types of dancing. But the
experience of dancing—what it feels
like, as opposed to what it looks like—
has been poorly served by language.
When we try to describe how it feels
to dance—in the kitchen, on the dance
floor, or on the street—we are stuck
with externals. Adjectives like ener-
getic, romantic, joyful, liberating are
as much about what we hear as about
what we feel, and sometimes they are
about what we see—although we can’t
see ourselves dance. Even if we look
in a mirror, we are watching ourselves
watching ourselves dance.
It is the problem of the predicate,
memorably summed up by Roland
Barthes in his impatient dismissal
of the way we talk about the singing
voice. “Are we doomed to the adjec-
tive?” he asked. “Are we faced with
this dilemma: the predicable or the
ineffable?” Barthes’s discomfort with
description extended as far as objecting
to human relationships being figured in
language: “A relationship which adjec-
tivizes is on the side of the image, on
the side of domination, of death.” The
aim should be to abolish within one-
self, and between oneself and others,
adjectives. He felt the same way about
metaphor, the drawing of analogies.
And it is true, the point about dancing
is not to be like anything, or compared
with anything, not to be this or that, but
to be.
When I dance I dance with another—
mostly touching them, and always, even
when we break away for a solo, aware
of them. I dance in partnership. About
five years ago I started to dance jazz
dances from the swing era—the lindy
hop, balboa, and shag. Sometimes I
dance other partner dances, such as the
tango, the waltz, and the foxtrot. I am
aware there is something embarrassing
about this array of retro styles. And yet,
when I dance, I dance in the present.
In partner dancing there is a leader
and a follower, and early on I realized
that the obvious choice for me was to
learn to follow. It was not simply my
gender (many women choose to lead)
and my size (not very tall), but that I
had for years been learning to follow
without knowing it. Following is read-
ing. Reading is the ultimate transfer-
able skill, which is lucky as it is my
principal skill, a kind of overdeveloped
interpretative tendency I find hard
to turn off. I apply it everywhere and
was most reassured to realize I could
apply it to dancing too. In fact, it was
required.
Each dance is a small—four- or
five-minute—collaboration. There are
actually two leaders. One is the person
you are dancing with, who leads you
through a series of figures in time with
the music. And the other is the music
itself. The task of the follower is to lis-
ten to both of them, to hear them, and
to respond creatively in turn. It is like
reading a poem, or a very short story,
and making something new of them
inside your head, except in the case of
dancing that something new has to be
expressed as movement. Here read-
ing becomes writing, tracing lines and
figures in space. The best dances hap-
pen when the leader in turn responds
to the follower’s movement, and the
distinction between call and response
becomes muddied. Some of the most
exhilarating partner dances I have
watched have been between two men
who continually swap roles, teasing
each other with their ability to both
read and be read.
Are there any more glorious images
of partners dancing than the photo-
graphs of Paul Newman and JoanneWoodward having fun in their living
room in 1963? The images are still, yet
we can feel the movement in the flick
of the wrists, that exuberant lift of
the hip. They are matching and meet-
ing each other by dancing in parallel.
They are dancing as girls: Newman
follows Woodward’s lead—you can see
him checking—but in camping up her
moves he passes them back to her in a
kind of tribute. And the fact that they
are dancing ironically, with a camera
in the room, only adds to the twin-
ning—the camera actually enables the
partnership. They perform their equal-
ity and their sameness for another, as
well as for each other. The couple is a
triangle.
The wittiest moments in the queer
tango scene between Valentino
(danced by Nureyev) and Nijinsky (by
Anthony Dowell) in Ken Russell’s
film Va le nt i no (1977) occur when the
two dancers mirror each other’s move-
ments, cross-stepping across the floor
in unison. And again this is a scene of
intimacy because it is watched, a point
that Russell makes sure we notice by
placing a voyeur in the room (Leslie
Caron, in a hat to die for, loitering be-
hind a screen) to remind us of our own
voyeurism.In April 1970 Trisha Brown staged a
series of “Leaning Duets” on Wooster
Street in New York City, in which danc-
ers attempted to defy gravity by walk-
ing, leaning as far apart as possible, and
balancing against each other’s weight.
Two of the dancers are rather good at
it. They hold hands, they lean out, and
they move forward in time with each
other, step measured against step, footpushing against foot. They are equals
in weight, movement, and pace. Some
partner dances play with similar mir-
roring movements—the side-by-side
Charleston, for example, in which
partners match each other’s kicks, or
a whole series of promenade steps that
move down a line. But the equality is
faked. These movements are led, and
the follower’s task is to make it appear
as though they are not. When dancers
dance socially, a follower’s every move
is of necessity a split-second late.
The dance is in the delay. The rhythm
is all in the retard, said the cellist Pablo
Casals, and I like to think he under-
stood this because of his youthful sum-
mers playing mazurkas, waltzes, and
other tunes for dancers at local Cat-
alan festivals. A follower is all anten-
nae. She, or he, must cultivate a kind
of active uncertainty, a positive doubt.
She must be relaxed enough to feel
the slightest of cues from her partner,
and yet sufficiently poised, mentally
and physically, to be able to play—to
respond, to hold back, to make form
out of commitment, interruption, and
hesitation. Her weight must be finely
balanced so that she can answer the
call to step or turn this way or that, as
though she had anticipated it, yet with-
out having known what was coming.
She must be light enough to offer no
resistance, yet grounded enough to em-
body tension.
And five minutes later, what are we
left with? Something has been fleet-
ingly expressed, and has gone. The
leader interprets the music and the de-
sires and inclinations of her follower.
She lays figure down on top of musical
form, and the follower responds, read-
ing and interpreting in turn. But this is
a form of reading that is content with
its own process. There is no product
beyond the experience of interpreta-
tion and recognition. Although I am
addicted to watching people dance on
film and video, what I get from it is
not a recall to the experience of danc-
ing (even if I’m watching myself, and
however hard I try to reconstruct the
feeling) so much as a record of an event
that might just as well have involved
someone else. The work of the camera
turns the dance into a scene. But what-
ever has been created in the movement
of the dance has been created in the
moment and it has no meaning beyond
itself. The dance is empty of meaning,
and this emptiness too is addictive.
What might look like self-expression is
actually a way of practicing absenting
ourselves.A couple of years ago I was living in
Manhattan and dancing regularly at a
wonderfully naff studio in Midtown, all
1980s spangly disco balls, red drapes,
and photographs of scantily clad dance
competitors that might have been taken
by Baz Luhrmann, so Strictly Ballroom
were the perspectives. My teacher was
Milo, a dancer from the Czech Repub-
lic—a fact he used to explain his love
of the polka, although no explanation is
necessary. The polka, like the Charles-
ton and collegiate shag, is a dance it
is impossible to do without grinning,
with its skips, jumps, and swirls to
that sprightly pulse. “The problemSonia Delaunay: Danseuse, deuxieme version, 1916Albright- K
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