I see your unseemly dance. I see the way you flap your flaccid hands like featherless chicken wings, see how you buoy your head—drowning—under and over the swell of sound, and how your chest jerks sporadically between convex and -cave positions. It’s absurd. You’re absurd. Those beside gawk at your seizure, arrhythmic and erect. Some recoil at the emetic shapes you toss. You’re strange when you dance, so strange. It’s like you’re not even you.
After Sydney’s initial lockdown, dancefloors were open for what felt like a fleeting few weeks, and I, among many, sought, even craved, one of these dim-lit, sweaty and beer-lacquered spaces upon which to jive. I stood amongst the crowd, between friends, felt the bass beat against my chest, and found all joints in my body seized. My skin was impermeable to melody and rhythm, so thick that neither could enter my system, neither could shake loose the rust within me. So, I resorted to standardised motions: a sway, a nod, a foot-tap, a timid parting and partnering of lips to represent knowledge of and investment in whatever song was on the air. And my moves were more mentally exhausting than they were physical. It was a shallow experience, an insult to the intended liberative affair, for I was, in essence, faking—faking dance.
It’s easy to tell when I’m organically dancing; you’ll see me melt, you’ll see me ooze. My knees gyrate like butter churners, my hips swell upwards in tick-shaped motions, my shoulders roll as well as Pat Mullins, and my arms improvise tai chi. But on the post-lockdown dancefloor, I couldn’t muster this fluidity; there was something caged inside me.
An overlap between entertainment and social media has confused society’s expectations of dance. In one frame of your feed you’ll see a photo of that side-fringed, dragon-sketching, insular kid from high school now with an outward confidence, arm around their partner, and standing in front of some iconic tourist destination (Hadrian’s Wall, The Himalayas, or Uluru maybe), and in the div block below this post you’ll watch a video Aunt Mary has shared featuring some uncannily cool flash mob, or a mad dance crew from Australia’s Got Talent, or this ex-swing dancer at his granddaughter’s wedding simultaneously busting a move and a hip, and the proximity of these two posts will manufacture a subliminal association between high school friend and aesthetic dance, even though these two aspects of life may have never met, or will ever meet. Somehow, you’ll suddenly visualise this high school friend twerking expertly.
TikTok is the worst for accelerating dance anxiety. The platform feels like social media, but is built around entertainment dance. It floods us with visually appealing, well-executed choreography in a space that suggests these dancers are everyday people, but they’re not. They’ve almost always had training. They’re almost always semi-professional. And with incessant repetition we come to expect the same quality of dance from everyone: friends and family, neighbours and randoms, colleagues and politicians (maybe not politicians). We come to expect the same aesthetic dance from ourselves.
I think there’s an imprisoned familiar inside of us we need to unshackle to dance naturally. We need to tear down its confines—the brick and mortar and bars—and allow it to fill us out, come into our skin, occupy us from core to mantle to crust. We need to let it move for us, think for us. We need to let it push us to the blissful sidelines of existence. Our familiars can feel animal sometimes, and that’s part of the reason we cage them. But the longer we leave them imprisoned, the more time we give to the penitentiary to reinforce its walls. During the initial lockdown, my construction workers were on overtime. They hired excavators to dig a moat around my prison and then erected another wall around that. And the walls they build these days are superior, a product of technological advancement (here correlated to social media in this quickly spiraling analogy). The concrete confining my familiar is rated for like 80+ MPa.
Not only does social media accelerate the construction of dance-penitentiaries, but also bolsters against demolition. Because, say the vibe on the d-floor one night is cranking, and everyone’s inhibitions are lowered, and your unshackled familiar inhabits your shell. You’re throwing shapes unseen, shapes impossible to visualise in our particular 3D space: tesseracts, glomes, polychorons. And your friend is vibing your groove, is like enlightened by your unfolding, sees a message in your moveset that’s going to feed the hungry, end all war, and like harmonise humanity. So what are they going to do? Well, instinctively, they’re going to share what they see, whip out their phone and record your dance, and upload it to the www. where it’s available for literally everyone to experience. And you yourself even want this because the total harmony you think will result is probably beneficial to the world, our race and other higher-dimensional beings (which you’ve likely just seen). But people on the www. are so distanced from the vibe they can’t read the language you’re writing. And people on the www. are comparing your organic dance to performance dance. And people on the www. are mean.
It’s not that I genuinely believe I’ll be recorded, upload and then ridiculed online for openly dancing, but I’m aware this is a possibility. Social media poses a threat to organic dancing because of its magnitude, permanence and context-stripping capability. (1) It’s easy to catastrophise: “Omg, literally seven billion people will see.” (2) Simple to feel slighted: “They’ve made copies and copies and copies of my dance; I’ll never be able to delete.” And (3) It’s scary because you can’t explain yourself to everyone, they see your awkward groove and rule you as inept without knowing you were simply tasked with impersonating a chimpanzee. And all this potential for misunderstanding x magnification of problem didn’t exist fifteen years ago. Today, it takes serious courage and effort (and often alcohol) to deconstruct your prison walls. We have this added hesitation-inducing layer to burn through before we dance openly.
So, social media has forced a shift away from organic dance and towards pre-practiced movesets and movement trends. It urges us to be performers and threatens to deride if we boogie unusually. But, in reality, performance dance and organic dance are separate aspects of movement with distinct goals. The performance side is crafted to be visually appealing in attempt to entertain and inform, while organic dance exists for the self, has no promise to please externally. It’s there to let that little familiar inside of you out so your consciousness can relax, take a back seat. To succeed in organic dance is to let go, to care not about potential appraisal, a message, aesthetic. An ugly dance is therefore an indicator of disregard, an indicator of achieving the organic goal. So, in the coming weeks, when we go out to dance again, when we seek an unwinding through motion and music, I urge you to push for something natural, strip down that penitentiary, and give in to something base. Show me you’re an ugly dancer. Ugly dance for me.
🧑🎤 Neon: First comment! Yew!
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Haha nice one Neon.
🦄 Lady: I think my familiar is a cane toad 🤢
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: A cane toad would go off on the d-floor! I reckon I’m a squid haha
💃 Soph M: What if I am a professional dancer and my organic dancing is aesthetic? Do I have to force ugly dancing?
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Hi Soph, thanks for reading. Absolutely not. The goal here is to disregard expectations, and if that results in something aesthetic, lucky you!
💃 Soph M: Thanks, my familiar is a gazelle then
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: Sure, and mine’s pegasus lol
👨🏻🦳 Daryl K: Great essay Joel ! Though this one feels a little unfinished
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Hi Daryl, thanks for reading. Unfinished how?
👨🏻🦳 Daryl K: I dunno , just unfinished
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: Yeah, just try making it more finished next time.
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Hi Marco, thanks for reading. Any feedback on how to do this? What specifically felt unfinished?
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: No.
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Cheers, Marco.
💃 Soph M: Maybe offer solutions? How would one overcome dance anxiety (for people who have it anyway, not me)
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: Yeah, solutions. We need solutions!
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: I’m not sure I have a solution. Therapy maybe?
💃 Soph M: Okay, just had a re-read. Maybe the whole dance thing needs an analogy? Or maybe expand upon the familiars? I liked the familiar thing, but it was over so quick!
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Great points, Soph. Thanks.
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: Good job, Soph. Give yourself a pat.
Twenty-Four Hours Later
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: @Soph M, sorry my last comment was so non-committal and conversation ending. I’m kinda terrified of comments sections (even though this one’s mine lol). They set themselves up to represent real life/physical conversation and try to hide/lie about some of their drawbacks. Basically, we’re expected to give the same amount of consideration to the thoughts we express online as we do in regular conversations where the risk of a total social toppling is far less. Like, in physical talk, if I say something objectively vulgar, I risk falling out with at most a singular friend group because after the initial verbalisation, all evidence against me becomes abstract, memory, gossip. But on the net, my comments are obscenely public and heinously permanent, and something I might’ve expressed on a whim even years ago could be misinterpreted and blown up in such a way that I’m expelled from all humanity. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I legitimately appreciate your feedback and feel bad for brushing you off.
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: Wow.
💃 Soph M: Wow indeed. It seems you’re catastrophising comments sections though. 1) I highly doubt you’d say something so vulgar to warrant expulsion, and 2) people aren’t supposed to be themselves online, not their physical selves at least.
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Ok sure.
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: Are you brushing Soph off again? Don’t brush her off man.
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: No I wasn’t, I’m sorry, I wasn’t. I only meant it as a placeholder while I think about my actual response.
💃 Soph M: The whole point is you don’t think, or at least not much. Comments sections can be quite liberating if you let them. You can vent. You can support or please. You can troll. Marco knows what I’m talking about.
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: I know what you’re talking about.
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: So wait, when you say you’re not yourself online, do you mean you’re using an alias? or you’re acting/speaking differently?
💃 Soph M: Both.
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Am I the only one not using an alias here?
💃 Soph M: Yep.
🤽🏽♂️ Marco P: Yep.
🦄 Lady: Uh huh.
👨🏻🦳 Daryl K: Absolutely .
🧔🏻♂️ Joel B: Shit, is that what organic dance is missing then? Anonymity?
Six Months Later
🧑🎤 Neon: Last comment! Yew!
Hiya, Joel here. I hope you enjoyed the mock comments section above, and hope it serves to stimulate the real comments section below (a feature I will include in my posts for the foreseeable future). Feel free to comment anonymously (or nonymously or ominously). We can talk about dancing, comments sections, news, any old baloney really (except footy, I will not allow footy to invade on my digital space). Cheers.
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