The Love of Dance: Love Sign Blog Post #10

The Love of Dance

Duh!! As in I LOVE to dance and in all this time it had not yet occurred to me to write about it; I have so much to say. Here is my start.

My eighth grade friends and I were 14. It was 1978. Summer was on its way. My Uncle, as in my mom’s extreme younger brother who was like my super cool older brother, had just got out of the Army after a 3 year tour of duty. He’d come to live with us after an honorable discharge as they called it. His was a peace time tour. He was 21. He drove a few generals around occasionally, but mostly he was a Disc Jockey directly for the Army, and in the evening, a DJ at clubs. He had a great voice and he knew how to play to the crowd. I’d learn these things later on. He had been stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. While there he’d made a few German friends and they had turned him on to the local music and dance scene. They had helped him get some powerful, high end, and loud sound equipment. He had brought his twin turntable mixing board and his Squire Mini Bin speakers home to our house in San Anselmo California. To me and my 4 friends he was cooler than cool. He’d lived in Europe. Had a French girlfriend. Played music all night in German clubs, was super fit, and he could dance. One day in May soon after he’d returned from Frankfurt, he came home early from his job in town, about 4 O’clock in the afternoon, and found my four friends and I grooving to his setup, turned way up. He’d said we could play it, but to be very careful. I’ve forgotten now what we were playing, probably Staying Alive by the Bee Gees, but he also had 100’s of EP’s of hot European singles; the Army had paid to ship all of his stuff home. When he yelled “STOP”, we all froze thinking we’d ruined his gear and imagining we were about to have our asses kicked but good as he now knew karate and had been through “basic training”; we were terrified! Instead of a beating, we received the dance lesson of our lives. In full Rick had yelled; “Oh my god, STOP, you guys are horrible, you’ll never get laid dancing like that”! He had our full attention. He proceeded to add; “I’ve danced in German clubs, I’ve been taught by black guys, let me show you how its done you idiots”. He proceeded to show us all how to shake our asses, instead of beating them. I never asked the other guys what the lesson was for them, but for me it set the tone for a following 41 years of dance adoration. When he was done, he said we were all pathetic and we might as well forget about ever getting laid; that landed. We all paid close attention to how to really dance from that day forward. And over the years, I have to say, all of my friends showed some skill and definite rhythm.

Fast forward to the photo you see in the header of this blog piece. This was taken in Portland Oregon a couple of weeks ago shortly after an “ecstatic dance” had concluded at noon thirty on a Sunday 41 years after the now infamous dance lesson in my childhood living room. Every Sunday for the last 15 years 200 to 300 people have gathered in the glorious Tiffany Center ballroom at 1437 Morrison St. in Portland, OR to shake their asses, feel great, to generally feel alive, to feel welcome, and to move their bodies. Sunday morning, yes you heard that right. Dance has been with us humans since time immemorial. Cave drawings and many other kinds of evidence point to ritual movement and dance being a part of human culture always. I remember a Japanese dance I learned years ago which carried all of the movements that a person needs to plant, care for, and harvest rice. And yet it has amazed me since I began dancing again in 2007, after a multi-year hiatus, that folks now dance, with all the flavor and fervor of night club action, at 10:30 to 12:30 on a Sunday! Dance in all its forms and in new forms has grown, expanded. An extraordinarily dedicated individual, Gabriel Roth, evolved a type of dance centered around five named rhythms; the rhythms”, in order of their appearance at a “5 rhythms dance” such as the one I enjoyed in Portland, are called flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. It is easy to look up this online if you’d like to know more. My sharing here is all about the radical, widespread, multi-disciplinary world of dance as a beloved form of natural human action. Dance is therapeutic, its good exercise, it calms the mind, it carries knowledge forward, it brings people together in a common language, not unlike a smile, which transcends spoken language. I had danced in clubs all over the country for decades, ever searching for the ease and welcome of the five rhythms environment. Every now and again the pick-up energy of a given club would abate. People would just dance. Straight men with straight men, women in groups, people alone, and it was cool. I remember dancing at a favorite club in San Francisco, a place called The I-Beam. It was a special place that welcomed all and I found a haven there; it wasn’t necessary to have a date, or for only men to dance with only women.

To be continued…

Thank you dear reader!