When the Dancing Stops

I miss dancing.  It may seem trite, or perhaps even insensitive to say this when so many people have lost so much more than I have lost during this pandemic. Sometimes, though, it is the small pleasures that we miss the most and grieve over when taken away.  As the world tentatively begins to lurch back to something akin to normality, I know that dancing won’t becoming back anytime soon, at least social dancing. Oh sure, we can still cut a few figures around the house or on the driveway, but it’s not quite the same as dressing up and going out to a big dance hall with a wonderful sprung floor and dancing the night away with friends. I wonder if we shall ever get back to this.  I expect that social dancing, at least as we know it, will be one of the last things to come back. We probably won’t be dancing again until we have a tested and safe vaccine for COVID-19.  Even then, will dancing be considered an acceptable social activity?  Given that we may never go back to the handshake when we greet one another, I can only imagine how reticent people will be to embrace on the dance floor.  I also wonder about the viability of our few wonderful ballroom dance halls, lovingly maintained and administered by volunteer boards, as they try to weather the coronavirus storm.  I worry that they will not be able to survive and that many will have to make some serious financial decisions with respect to future operations.  There are some things that can get back to normal quite quickly; some activities that are easily resumed. I am afraid that ballroom dancing is not one of them.

You might wonder why I am so deeply grieved over what is clearly a “first world problem.” Why is dancing so important to me? What makes not dancing during this time so difficult and saddening?  Surely, there is a large portion of the population who would likely never notice, much less care, if another ballroom dance was ever held, or if there were no ballrooms left to dance in.  What is it about dancing that makes it such an integral part of my life that when I cannot do it I feel like something important is missing? What do we do when the dancing stops?

I fell in love with dancing about seven or eight years ago. I don’t remember exactly when I started dancing.  I know that it was in my early days as priest at Trinity Church in Bradford, Ontario. My wife, Athena, and I were new to the community and were looking for something that we could do together. We signed up for ballroom dance classes and we enjoyed ourselves and met many wonderful friends. While Athena still dances with me from time-to-time, she did not embrace dancing with quite the same passion I had for it when I realized that I had found my sport.  I have never been an athletic person, but ballroom dancing was the perfect combination of exercise, art, and relationality to make physical fitness enjoyable for me. Most importantly, though, it allowed me the opportunity to build some much-needed self-confidence. Dancing requires vulnerability and self-confidence in equal measure.  This is one of the balances we need to learn to strike in life, in general.  Dancing is a way of helping me achieve that balance, which I have not always been good at maintaining, much less achieving. Despite the fact that I am an extrovert and quite outgoing, I have always been quite insecure – insecure about my body, my abilities, and even my likability. Dancing made me challenge my insecurity. It is wonderful to get up onto the dance floor and feel good about what I am doing, even if I am not a star.  It is a good feeling to know that people want to dance with me.  It’s a wonderful feeling when I can lead someone through a series of figures and both of us come off the floor feeling invigorated and joyfully in the moment. I have never been a “great” dancer (probably just mediocre, at best), but that doesn’t really matter. It’s about having the confidence to do it, even though I’m not perfect, and enjoying it, despite the fact that I’m not perfect.  I have a good friend, Andria, with whom I dance with regularly. We often take classes together.  Whenever I finally learn how to do a relatively simple figure, she calls out “mad skills!” It’s okay to be just mediocre.  Dancing has taught me that.

Dancing has also shaped me in ways I never expected. It is both a deeply self-revealing activity and an intimate activity. When you hold another person and move with them around the floor, leading and following, anticipating and attempting, failing and recovering, you develop a bond with your dance partner that requires an extraordinary vulnerability.  I have several regular dance partners and each dance relationship is intimate and unique. But there is another intimacy that is discovered in dancing, and that is an inner intimacy with the hidden self.  This hidden self is the person we try to hide from others.  It is the person we often try to hide from ourselves.  However, one cannot dance successfully without developing a relationship with this hidden self. If opening up in vulnerability to another person feels dangerous, it is even more so to have to face the person we keep hidden within.  Dancing can be an uncovering and growth in appreciation of that inner self. The relationality of the dance is not only a relationality that exists between two people, but also a relationality that exists in the self.  Dancing helps us move from fragmentation and dis-integration to integration and wholeness. The more I can learn about the “me” that I keep hidden away, the more I can understand and appreciate other people.  If I can have some self-compassion, I can begin to develop compassion for others.  If I can discover my inner strength, I can admire, rather than fear, the strength of others.  If I can be vulnerable, I will learn to honor the vulnerability of others.  If I know my own insecurities, my own unfulfilled hopes and dreams, my own weaknesses, then I am less likely to project them onto others, or if I do, I can reflect on why I have done that and learn how to avoid such projection in the future.  Dancing teaches us self-respect and respect for the other. This is one of the reasons I miss dancing so much.

The other reason that I feel so profound a loss at this time is because dancing is one of the things that helped me through my breakdown. In December of 2018 I fell apart.  One does not just “fall apart”. It is a long, descending journey. Often, we don’t even know we are on that descending slope until we crash at the bottom of the hill. That was certainly the case with me.  I did not know how sick I was. I was a workaholic and I even overworked when I played.  Not only did I try to do too much, but I felt that if I was not perfect, I was a failure. Needless to say, I am not perfect. Thus, I came to believe that I was a failure because no matter how hard I tried to “get it right”, I was always falling short of the mark. People do not seem to be afraid to tell you, or others, when you let them down. As my mental health deteriorated, I began to think that everyone hated me for failing them, for not being the perfect priest. I truly believed that I was a failure and I left my ministry and went on a stress leave for nine months.  What does any of this have to do with dancing?  Well, dancing was one thing I kept doing throughout my illness.  I never gave up dancing.  During the first few months of my leave, I could think of nothing else but my failure. Yet, when I went onto the dance floor it all went away.  The ruminating would stop.  I did not think about being a failure as a priest, or a failure as a person, or about the people I had hurt, or those who had hurt me.  It was the only place I could be truly “in the moment” and know joy again.  During my sick leave, which lasted nine months, I kept dancing. Sometimes I danced three nights a week.  I was afraid that people might see me dancing and wonder how I could be so sick if I were out dancing all the time.  I was afraid of being “reported to the bishop” for dancing when I should have been sitting at home resting. I don’t believe now the bishop would have begrudged me the dancing. The truth is, dancing was a significant part of my recovery.  Eventually, I found the right SSRI dosage, and took part in an excellent mental health day program for several months at Mackenzie Health in Richmond Hill, but until I began to be able to work through my breakdown and what caused it, dancing was the only place I felt normal, confident, able to be vulnerable, and whole. The people I danced with did not care that I was a failed priest. They were simply my friends. It was a happier, healthier world that I could escape into, if only for a couple of hours at a time.  So, this is the other reason I miss dancing so much – it got me through a time of crisis in my life and made me feel alive and well when my world came crashing down.  Here we are again, in another crisis, a different crisis, and I could sure use some dancing. Alas, it is not to be.

What is one to do when the dancing stops?

It feels as if something important is indeed missing. I think many of us are grieving in all sorts of ways and over all sorts of things we have lost during the pandemic. For me it is dancing, but there are many losses. Whether they are profound or small, every loss hurts. When we deal with grief, an important step is to recognize that things are no longer the way they were, and that they may never be the same again.  That is one of the things about grief – it is recognizing and coming to terms with what we have lost.  It is also learning to live in the “new normal.” Thus, my “first world problem”, the thing that is causing me so much grief, is that I can no longer engage in an activity that has brought me so much joy, so much healing, so much self-discovery. 

I felt that grief profoundly underscored a few weeks back as I was sitting in my chair listening to a track of wonderful “crooner” music.  First there was a foxtrot, Sinatra singing “Fly me to the Moon”, and then a waltz, Andy Williams with “Moon River”, then a romantic rumba, followed by a playful cha-cha.  I love listening to this music because it reminds me of the joy I feel on the floor, whether dancing with Athena, one of my other partners, or with my teacher, Cristina.  As the songs played, I felt transported to those happy and healing moments, and yet I was profoundly aware of the distance and inaccessibility of those times.  It was bittersweet in the truest sense of the word.

The other day, when that same track was playing, I decided to let this emotional dissonance to simply wash over me.  I let both the joy and melancholy co-exist as I closed my eyes and decided to just be open to wherever these emotions would take me. Before long, in my imagination, I was in a ballroom. I saw myself dancing on the floor of one of the ballroom dance clubs that I frequently visit. I imagined my self and one of my partners dancing my favorite dance, a foxtrot, around the large floor, going through a complicated routine.  The thing I realized first is that in my imagination, I am instantly able to correct my rather bad and lurching posture!  My teacher, Cristina, often says to me “Don’t dance like this!” and she makes hunching gesture as she moves forward.  But in my imaginary dance-world, my posture was perfect.  Remarkably, I had also dropped the COVID pounds I have put on over the last several months. I found myself navigating expertly around the floor.  I could actually be the dancer I wanted to be. The sense of melancholy over losing something I had lost gave way to the inner peace of being mindfully in the moment. I was there on the dance floor, not simply remembering a past moment, but creating a moment in the present, even if only in the imaginative landscape of my mind.

However, lest you think I had finally fulfilled my selfish desire to be perfect, I soon discovered that even in my imagination, I make a lot of mistakes. As I consciously danced through the figures I know so well, I realized that I was not doing as well as I thought.  I would get so far and then forget what came next, but as this happened, I had a breakthrough. I was not dancing in Cristina’s studio; I was dancing on a 40 x 80 dance floor of one of my favourite ballroom dance clubs in a much larger setting.  In real life, when I am in the studio, I don’t have very much trouble remembering the order of the figures, but I find this happens when I am on a larger floor.  As I puzzled over what was going wrong in my imaginary dance, I suddenly realized that I was experiencing the same problem in my mind that I experience when I really dance on the larger floor.

I don’t know if this is true for all dancers, but it is true for me, that when I learn to anchor certain figures is a certain physical space, it is not always easy to transfer them into a different environment in which the length and width of the room is different. Figures need to be modified. Some figures may need to be “under-turned” or “over-turned” depending on whether they are danced in a corner or along the line of dance.  In the studio, I am used to dancing a particular set of figures along the length of the room and another smaller set along the shorter width of the room. However, on a bigger floor, one finds that figures that were once danced along the short wall are added to the long wall, and then comes the corner, and now what?! In such a situation, where the memory of the figures is rooted to a certain space, along a certain wall, well-known figures can become irretrievable when the dance geography changes. I had always thought this was because of the pressure of the moment of dancing in a real-life scenario rather than the studio, dancing amongst a crowd, being watched by others, or a myriad of other excuses.  What became clear as I danced in my imagination on that big floor was that I had the same problem in my imaginary ballroom that I was having in real life. My memory was anchored in a spacial geography.  Neither in real life, nor in my imagination, could I translate my routine from one setting to another because it was anchored in my memory to a particular physical space – the studio. Without the visual cues of the studio (which wall I was dancing along and where I was along that wall), it became difficult to remember the sequence of figures, especially when the size of the room drastically changed. My memory was un-moored, and I could not retrieve the information to remember what came next. I was surprised to learn that this was happening in my imaginary dance in the same way it did in real life.

As is turns out, memory is indeed connected to spacial arrangements. It is one of the ways in which we retrieve data. In the ancient world, the great orators and rhetoricians used what is called a “method of loci” (or “method of spaces”) to remember and order large swathes of material.  This is done by imagining a room and placing representative objects around the room and then recalling them in sequence. For example, to remember the orders of the letters in alphabet, one might place a giant apple at the front door of the house. A welcome mat on the inside door might have a picture of a honeybee on it. You might immediately be greeted by a cat, and then a dog, etc., etc. When trying to remember the letters of the alphabet, you then have images anchored in an order in a location. Cicero describes this method in de Oratore, Bk II, with the story of a man who remembers the location of dead bodies in a collapsed building by searching his memory in this methodical way.  This method is sometimes called a “memory palace.” Viewers of the BBC series, Sherlock, in which Sherlock Holmes is adapted to a modern context will recognize this as the method the great detective uses for organizing large amounts of seemingly unrelated material data and finding the connections between items. 

Without realizing it, I had constructed my own memory palace, or at least a memory room, and it was the dance studio.  Each figure sat in a particular place in that room. Indeed, the whole routine was spacially anchored, and thus anchored securely in my mind. Each component had its own locus.  However, when I changed rooms, I lost my anchor. As I sat in my chair with my eyes closed, trying unsuccessfully to execute my routine in my imaginary ballroom, I suddenly realized that I needed to add a new room to my memory palace, and that was the grand ballroom. I needed to re-choreograph the entire routine in the larger space. The order would stay the same, but figures would land in a different place on this larger dance floor than they do in the studio. I would need to rethink what it looked like to have those well-known figures fall in a different space and what obstacles might be encountered by dancing the routine in a different setting.

Thus, over the past couple of weeks I have gone about this task. I have put on some music, closed my eyes and worked through the figures in the larger space. First, I have imagined the larger space in detail, as I remember it from real life, and then I place the figures carefully along the new dance floor.  Essentially, I am creating a new room in my memory palace. From time-to-time, I imagine an obstruction that needs to be navigated and how I might recover if I must abandon part of the routine.  So far, in my mind, I have danced my foxtrot, waltz, and tango routines in this imaginary space. Next will be the quickstep.  I go over them again and again, trying to anchor them more securely each time.  Will it make a difference when I dance them again in the real-life version of this grand room?  I suppose I will only know when the dance halls open up again, which will not be very soon.  I have a lot of imaginary practice time ahead of me. I will keep you posted.

Dancing continues to be important to me, even though I can’t engage in it with friends as I was so used to doing in the past.  I miss it. Yet, even in this time, I continue to learn and grow through dancing, even if it is only in the ballroom of my mind. When the ballroom closes, the dancing never really stops.