Dance as Community

by Mady Cantor

A dance class or dance activity is, at its most basic level, a group of people moving together, in the same place, at the same time. How does it grow from that simple objective state into something deeper and more meaningful? How does it become a community where people feel a sense of belonging? What elements are needed to make that transformation? What kind of alchemy is at play?

To get some answers I looked for dance practices in which the sense of communal engagement is high. I focused on classes and groups designed for adults, in different parts of the country and in different styles. Four practitioners shared their experiences and insights about community formation through dance. Their perspectives differ but some common themes emerged.

The first example comes from Seattle where Anne Green Gilbert teaches at the Creative Dance Center, the school that she founded 40 years ago. For the past 18 years she has taught a weekly class called "Keep Dancing: mOdern for 40+ . " The class is going strong, at maximum capacity with 22 students. It typically attracts school teachers,

Creative Dance Center class

Photo credit: Bronwen Houck Photography

occupational and physical therapists plus parents and grandparents of children who dance at the school. There are always newcomers who join the regulars, some of whom have been taking the class for over ten years.

The development of a sense of community and belonging is built into the five-part class structure that Anne has refined over time. It starts with the BrainDance warmup and the exploration of the movement concept that threads through the class, including a game-like improvisation which often has the students dancing to duets and trios. It is followed by a substantial skills section with floor and standing technique, a folk dance, and a dance created by Anne. This leads into the choreography section which is the part of the class which offers

the most opportunity for bonding. Small subsets of four to five dancers disperse to various parts of the building to develop and negotiate their ideas, and then return to perform the resulting dance for the group. A reflection section follows with a sharing of impressions and opinions in response to open-ended questions such as “what did you notice about (the underlying concept), what grabbed you?” Two rules in the reflection section: no names are mentioned, and no one is invited to say how the dance could be improved.

The sessions culminate with a performance of a piece choreographed by Anne with improv components. The piece has been embedded in the class structure and developed incrementally from class to class. Just like five-yearolds, they are quick to ask about costumes (which tend to be something simple and effective, like a mix of brightly colored tops and black bottoms, or shades of blue). Veterans encourage new folks who sometimes are anxious about performing. They film it in the final class and have an immediate class-only showing, accompanied by snacks and drinks. They watch it twice – the first time the expectation is that they will watch only themselves, and the second time they can relax and take in the whole piece. It’s a low pressure/ high involvement experience.

The result of all this is a cohesive, inclusive group -- friendly, warm, often ery chatty when the class is over. Anne feels that the class has become a community because they feel connected, seen, and accepted.

A less formal example of creating community through dance is found in northwest Philadelphia in a neighborhood called Mt. Airy. The Mt. Airy Dance Collective was conceived in 2014 by dance educator Monica Cameron Frichtel. She had young children and little free time, but wanted to keep dancing and knew it would be difficult to get to classes in the downtown area of the city. She was looking for a way to move, create and dance with others right in her own neighborhood. She found a local dance school with a studio available on Sundays for a nominal fee and put out the word.

It turned out that there were a number of people looking for the same thing. They came from a variety of backgrounds – with dance experience ranging from the informal to the professional, in modern, West African, club, belly dance, salsa, jazz, ballet, folk dance, tap. The group included dance teachers as well as photographers, media specialists, entrepreneurs, college professors, and landscape designers. They ranged in age from 30 to 70. What they had in common was an appetite and curiosity for dance.

During the pandemic the collective met outdoors in the unused parking

lot of a train station, with random dog walkers as an audience. According to one member, “to dance as a community felt like a lifeline during the intense months of social restrictions. It was one of the only ways to both socialize and move.

Mt. Airy Dance Collective at the height of the pandemic.

Photo credit: Gabrielle Mahler

Over eight years the group has coalesced into a core of six regular members and others who attend when they can. A format has developed — there is no teacher, and no plan, but a lively series of crowd-sourced ideas for a warm-up, movement phrases, and sometimes improvisation prompts. Someone might say, “I feel like doing some floor work” or “My back feels stiff, who has a shoulder and hip idea?” or “Let’s travel through space” or “I heard this great music. Let’s dance to it. ” Movement sequences might be drawn from past experience or might emerge on the spot. The style can come from any corner of the dance sphere, supported by the excellent music ideas brought in. The group shares an interest in movement analysis, of understanding the subtle details of physicality, rhythm and accent. One One member said that “ideas from the group get me out of my own movement rut. The group gives me new rhythms and ways of shaping movement. ” Another said “all of our dance ideas find a home here.

The collective has done a few informal performances in the local area, including an election day celebration and a procession at a local arboretum, for example. The focus, however, remains the weekly dance experience. It offers community, friendship, exercise and joy. There is camaraderie, warmth and jokes, but above all, there is dancing. Said one member, “What I love most about the collective is the surprising burst of shared creativity every Sunday, driven by a need to express.

Social dance, by definition, fosters a sense of community. In many styles, the feeling of being part of a community is bolstered by the close physical contact, deep attention to music and to a partner, and cultural connection.

One example is Argentine tango, where community formation is rooted in the milonga, a tango dance party tradition that exists all over the world, everywhere that Argentine tango is practiced. Carolyn Merritt is a long-time Argentine tango dancer, frequent milonga attendee, and the author of Tango Nuevo (University Press of Florida, 2012), part memoir and part ethnographic study of contemporary tango. She shared her knowledge of milongas.

Carolyn explained that milongas are generally held at night, typically from 9 pm until at least midnight or sometimes until 2 or 3 am. About 25-50 people tend to show up at the milonga Carolyn attends in Philadelphia. The group tends to be multi-generational; the lighting is dim; there is usually a bar with wine and beer available.

Although tango has a strong improvisatory element, the milongas are not free-wheeling or impromptu events. They have a structure and are governed by certain social codes.

First, there is an expectation that beginners do not just show up at a milonga but first spend some time learning the basics of tango, usually in a class. Tango schools often sponsor milongas and sometimes the classes flow into the milonga.

The evening proceeds in “tandas” which are sets of three or four songs. There are three types of songs: tango (traditional, romantic), vals (3/4 time), and milonga (more upbeat, syncopated, faster). Tandas are bounded by “cortinas” which are brief sections of non-tango music, sometimes pop music. The cortinas serve as a transition between the sets. To change partners, dancers offer a simple “thank you” which provides a way to move on, with no need for further explanation.

When looking for a new partner there is a practice called “cabaceo” which is understood as a face-saving custom. The inviter, historically the man, initiates the invitation by making eye contact and

Milonga:

Photo credit: Matthew McLaughlin.

perhaps a subtle gesture toward a desired partner. The invitee can hold eye contact to accept, or simply look away, which avoids any public embarrassment on the part of the inviter.

Another practice is that a pair often holds stationary in the tango embrace when the music starts, for about half a minute. They can use the time to just listen to the music, or to chat. Once they start moving there is no further talking. What then happens in the embrace is improvised, based on tango vocabulary.

The style calls for a leader and follower in every pair and the partnership requires a high level of physical trust. It is not uncommon for followers to keep their eyes closed while dancing. Traditionally men are the leaders and women the followers, but this has opened up in recent years, after much discussion in the tango world. Women can lead; pairs can be same sex in many milongas.

Additional protocols include dancing around the space only in counterclockwise direction. Expectations surrounding dress have been relaxed in recent years, but

dancers are expected to wear shoes in which they can easily do the pivots that are central to tango movement.

Sometimes the tangueros get together for a drink beforehand, or to celebrate life events or even travel together to milongas in other cities, but it is the dancing itself that creates the sense of belonging. Dancers, even when they might be strangers to each other, are very close in the moment of the dance, always in physical contact and moving in unison. The dancers belong to each other and to the larger group, supported by the music, the spatial patterns and the social codes.

The Dancing Reading Online Group offers evidence that a sense of community can develop even without in-person contact. DROG, as it is called for short, is an unusual project founded in 2017 by Michael Richter, an artist, teacher, performer and researcher who had moved from Los Angeles to Baja California Sur, Mexico. He felt isolated from the dance world and reached out to a small group of dance friends and colleagues around the US and Canada to form an online group. This was a few years before the pandemic would make commonplace the use of Zoom.

DROG has met monthly since 2017. The group has nine members, including Dawn Pratson, of Rockport, Massachusetts who has been a member from the start. She said that at the beginning everyone was asked to suggest books and articles that were meaningful to them. The selections were wide-ranging and organized in year-long themes, drawing from nature and environmental writing, ecofeminism, memoir, liberatory texts as well as from dance sources. They read an article by Efva Lilja, a Swedish choreographer who danced in the Arctic, and dance writers Andrea Olsen and Melinda Buchwalter. They read a book by Kazuo Ohno on Butoh and texts by James Baldwin and adrienne maree brown and others.

What makes the project unusual is that the readings are discussed and turned into fodder for online movement exploration and dancemaking, with different members rotating in the facilitator role. The group discovered that dense and even difficult texts open up and come alive when approached through movement. A book on moss, for example, led to a memorable movement warm-up. Malcolm Gladwell’s description, in Talking to Strangers, of the practice of word completion tasks inspired a translation into movement.

Other texts led to “assignments,

” in which each member selected three paragraphs of interest and improvised in and around that section and then created a phrase. Sometimes that led to further development in a call-andresponse format and the addition of music; sometimes they went into breakout rooms where they would share their phrases and design a group composition that they performed for the others. The sessions have more movement than talking, about a 60/40 split.

Some members of DROG have met a few times in-person, at an NDEO conference

Online Reading Group

and at a factory in NY where they made a dance, but it remains primarily an online project. Dawn said that despite the distance and the screen, DROG has produced an intimate connection among members. The process of grappling with challenging ideas and sources has become a way to forge meaningful bonds. Dawn described it as “a pure meeting of minds and bodies.

A careful look at these dance events and activities reveals some commonalities. They all rely on the power of continued engagement over time. The feeling of belonging does not emerge overnight but takes sustained participation. The class in Seattle has been going on for decades; the tango dancers have to commit to learning the fundamentals before joining in at a milonga.

The participants share a genuine curiosity about movement and a willingness to take risks and experiment collectively. DROG, for example, asks its members to read and think in novel ways. The dance collective thrives on the close examination of movement. In all of them, process is valued over product. There are performative moments built in, but rehearsal and performance do not dominate.

Interestingly, none of the groups rely on external social activity, like getting together for meals or having other gatherings. It is not prohibited or discouraged, but it is not an important component. The dance experience itself is the central language in the formation of the communal character.

Finally, these dance settings appear to be sites in which the usual social armor is softened. Perhaps because the participants are moving and breathing and maybe sweating together, or because they are sharing aesthetic and sensory experiences, other things become possible: intimacy, trust, vulnerability.