We don't call it a movement for nothing

Dance: more than a metaphor for revolution

I am very happy to report that I have been dancing again lately.

Once a month I go to a salsa club in the city with a couple of moms in my neighborhood whose lives, like mine, used to revolve around social dance, before we had kids. Getting back into the rhythm of dancing is liberating. Dance springs me free from the loops that get stuck on repeat in my mind. One-track rumination about the state of the world and my responsibility to respond gets transformed into an intensely focused creative energy.

When I dance, all of my mental and physical energies are channeled into listening and responding to the music, to my partner’s gracious invitations, and to the capacity, energy and desire of my own body to move in a particular way. Sometimes, I enter a flow state, where the rhythm feels as familiar as my own heartbeat. Each step seamlessly follows the last. I am not thinking (at least not consciously). I am simply a human being in relationship with my whole self and the human beings around me.

For me, this is meditation. This is joyful contemplation. This is communion.

Photo by Ardian Lumi on Unsplash

I’ve discovered over the years that when I am regularly dancing, I am happier, clearer-headed, and more imaginative in the way I respond to life’s most pressing problems. And I’ve found I’m not alone in this. I have met many people in caring professions and social change-oriented vocations for whom dance is a vital form of contemplation and collective care. I know a swing-dancing hospital chaplain, more salsa-dancing school teachers than I can count, and a psychologist whose dance talents include (but are not limited to) lindy hop, salsa, ballroom and hip hop!

These friends remind me that freedom is not something that simply happens in our heads. This is not to dismiss the importance of discourse. As a chaplain, writer, podcaster and priest, my daily work involves compassionately listening for understanding and talking with folks about liberation. And I know, in my body, that for liberation to be realized, it has to get under our skin.

Dancing, I embody the freedom I long for the world to know:

Joy. Connection. The sense of belonging to my body. The dignity of my body being treated with respect. The reciprocation of this respectful relationship toward other bodies.

There’s a reason why white supremacist, Western colonial societies are so quick to demonize dance or restrict its practice to the purview of highly trained professionals:

Dance is dangerous.

Its practice threatens the status quo in which bodies are (de)valorized on the basis of social location (race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability, etc.), and separated from one another by violent hierarchies of human worth.

If you have a body, you can dance. By which I mean, you can move to the rhythm of your heart. It can be as simple as the nod of your head, the tapping of your toes, or the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe. We can’t all do the same physical movements, it’s true. Yet we can each move in different ways that connect us to our shared humanity — to a collective embodied experience — while representing the uniqueness of our respective stories as individuals and communities. Dance is democratic like that.

Movement also suggests that we can create distance between ourselves and the status quo as we shape new ways of being in relationship with ourselves and one another. When we get into our bodies in ways that are creatively expansive, honoring of our capacities, and respectful of the bodies of others, we cultivate a liberated imagination. I had a whole conversation about this on the podcast last year with therapeutic dance teacher Gabrielle Rivero, who explained,

“When we move, we can engage with the world in a way that actually makes us feel better, in a way that actually makes us feel whole, in a way that actually brings back memories to the brain. That movement allows us to engage with the world in ways that we haven't even processed yet, in ways we haven't even engaged with yet.”

Embodying our joy, grief, lament, and longing, we reclaim movement as a crucial site of collective healing and systemic transformation.

What if the revolution were a dance party?

I have asked myself this question for well over a decade. It has come up:

• When I worked with folks at Homeboy Industries who as teenagers had enjoyed street dancing. Dance was their outlet for creativity the glue that held their community together, until dance crews groups were vilified by the city and broken up by cops, sending these young people spiraling into gang involvement and cycles of incarceration. Dance parties at Homeboy were revolutionary: a joyful affirmation of the goodness of bodies which society had thrown away.

• As a priest who leads congregations through liturgy — the movement of worship that includes gathering as a community, listening to scripture, responding in song and prayer, being fed by the Eucharist, and being sent into the world to love and serve. I frequently return to the experience of co-leading with seminary friends a yearlong Subversive Liturgy on the steps of the Pasadena Police Department to honor the life of JR Thomas — a Black man killed by police — and to call for justice. Our embodied lament was often followed by exuberant dance parties. Our movement for justice infused with joyful resistance to despair.

  

  The Baladi Dance Group beside the apartheid wall in Palestine.

• While watching videos of young Palestinians using dance to express the sumud (steadfastness) of their brave and beautiful culture in the face of horrific violence, and seeing adults offer dance classes for children amidst the ruins of bombed buildings in Gaza. There is incredible power in movement to retain collective memory, to highlight a culture’s unquenchable life force, and to insist upon the right of a people to breathe free and flourish.

Dance is not simply a metaphor for revolution — movement is the very heartbeat of social change.

I envision a world where embodied expressions of liberation are embraced as a taste of the freedom yet to come, a freedom also available in surprising forms in the here and now. I see trust built across communities through courageous, creative, collective movement. I imagine us all dancing in the streets, emphatic in the insistence that life gets the last word.

Questions for reflection: How do you connect with liberation in your body? Do you dance? Walk? Practice yoga? Focus on your breathing? Do you sense an invitation to embody liberation in a new or deeper way today?