How to Dance Like You Like to Dance

non-expert advice for the movementally blocked

1: Wake up, you miserable faker.

It is perfectly okay to bob your head and step from left to right with your arms dangling at your side. It’s okay, but it isn’t dancing, and you know it.

Or it’s barely dancing. The bob-and-step, as I will call it—unnamed because no one ever wants to talk about it—is best understood as a rest position, like corpse pose in yoga. It is the least energy-intensive way to stay in a room full of moving bodies without becoming conspicuous. It expresses nothing and it feels like nothing. I will go out on a limb here and say, dancing should feel like something, or maybe you should skip it.

Imagine you were dancing in your room alone, purely for enjoyment. How much time would you spend doing the bob-and-step? Very little, I think. More than that and you would feel stupid to yourself. You would feel like a stupid, lobotomized zombie who has forgotten even the rough pretense of fun.

The bob-and-step cannot save you from the judgments of others, either. This is the main thing to notice about it: It doesn’t even function as camouflage. No one is fooled. No one looks at you and thinks “having a good time dancing.” You do not look at the other bobbing-and-stepping dancers in the room and think “having a good time dancing.” You might think, at best, “Oh good, they’re all approximately as dead as me.”

When you understand that it does not work even on its own terms, you will see the bob-and-step for what it is: a mostly impotent strategy for camouflaging your own experience of feeling isolated and out of place. It is a self-deception masquerading, to you alone, as a deception of others.

This sounds bleak, but isn’t. You can, instead, admit that you are isolated and out of place, and perhaps don’t know what the hell you’re doing, either here, on this dance floor, or more generally, in most situations. You could look at the awkward souls that surround you, stepping and bobbing into each other like stray driftwood, and feel a ripple of compassion for them. They have perhaps forgotten the traditions whose wreckage they now drift as—and maybe you have too—but you can be together in not really knowing how to arrange yourselves.

These are good first steps, I think, for dancing as if you like to dance.

2: Allow yourself to be influenced.

Step two is to notice what’s going on around you, and let it inside you.

Your dancing problem has never been a dancing problem, really. It is a perception problem. More specifically, an un-perception problem. You are unseeing something, and it’s making you clumsy.

The primary thing you’re unseeing is the other dancers, and the choices they’re making with their bodies. You are not seeing those people clearly 1) because you are afraid to see your death reflected in their eyes and 2) because you think of them as irrelevant to your task. You think of them as irrelevant because you haven’t understood them as a source of optionality, of energy. All the movements they’re making are movements you could be making, too. All the ways they are feeling are trying actively to affect you, to infect you. All you have to do is notice.

In my years of unhappy dancing I labored under a silly rule, which said that dancing was a mode of self-expression. Specifically my self was supposed to be expressed. When I danced, I was supposed to intuit motions that corresponded with the music, to do what the music wanted me to do—but also, these motions should not too closely match those of anyone around me. That would be unoriginal, signaling that I was out of touch with my own special uniqueness. The teacher would accuse me of plagiarizing, and I would get a bad grade. Worse, other people might notice they were having an influence—on me!—and that would be mortifying.

If you have a fake rule like this, cut through it by finding someone who’s moving in a way you like and copying them wholeheartedly. If you’re shy about it, start with someone who’s far away from you, and won’t notice. If no one is really dancing—if everyone is bobbing and stepping—then find some small distinction in the way one person is bobbing, and exaggerate it in your imitation.

There seems to be an idea floating around (or else where did I get it) that dancing should be the spontaneous expression of some inchoate internal state, or else is false. This raises painful questions of authenticity, style, and personal branding. These questions are boring and make dancing feel like writing autofiction. Try expressing someone else’s state instead, as revealed by their bodily motions, and let your style be determined by the random noise you can’t help injecting into the imitation. You will feel immediately more connected to the scene, because to be influenced already is to be connected.

When you open yourself to influence, you are likely to become more influential, on someone. This may be uncomfortable at first. It is the main thing that’s happening when you see two or more people dancing well together, seeming to inhabit a single mind. Unless they’re dancing according to a particular tradition with predefined steps—or even if they are—if you watch closely you will see that they are mainly just mirroring each other, in a pulsating envelope of empty space. With the music, of course. The first time I found this possibility for myself, I was startled that it was so easy and led to such natural improvisations. The challenge isn’t the mirroring, which is easy, but allowing for the intensity of inter-bodily communication without flinching back to the land of death.

Which, I’ll reiterate, is okay for some of the time.

3: Dance like somebody is watching.

Another dumb idea I used to have: In order to dance authentically, I should stop caring what other people think of my appearance and motions.

I used to have this routine I’d do, where I would start any public dancing by moving in a way that was a little strange or exaggerated or comical, and keep it up until I located the private kinesthetic caution-tape outside of which things became actively embarrassing. Then I would steadily make little pushes outside that boundary, doing weirder and weirder things, until eventually, if I worked at it long enough, something would shift, and I would feel temporarily inured to shame.

It sort of worked. But it was aggressive, and this aggression came out in my movements. Pushing against the boundary felt like pushing against the room’s imagined judgments. It had a noticeable “fuck-you”-ness to it, and when the boundary collapsed it felt like breaking free of social context altogether, entering into a state of pristine isolation. I would frequently find myself on the edge of the room or in the corner, dancing by myself in a wild and deliberately jerky way. This, I must acknowledge, was a mode. It was not un-fun. I was even sometimes able to imagine that dancing this way made me look free, and cool, and uninhibited compared to the other dancers around me, out there dancing all regular like. Occasionally someone would give me a high five, or ask me what drugs I was on, and whether I had more.

This kind of asocial or antisocial dancing was, in retrospect, just another attempt to manipulate an imagined audience. It was the flipside of camouflage, more like it than different. I was trying to show the others that I didn’t care what they thought—that I wasn’t afraid of them, as I clearly was. It was the next best thing I could think to demonstrate after being actually good at dancing, which I took to be the only alternative and assumed wasn’t available to my historically awkward body.

Instead of this or similar bullshit, I have a simple suggestion: Care about the perceptions of those around you as much as you do. Or more. Dance in a way that might entertain and enliven them, so that they may want to keep dancing with you, and you with them.

Notice how much broader a mandate this is than “dancing well.” Dancing well suggests trained specialization in the form, perhaps a preplanned routine you could perform on-stage while a seated audience watches in silence. Nothing against that variety of skill, which I would love to have, but the skill of merely connecting is more universal—we don’t, as a rule, survive childhood unless we learn to hold someone’s engagement. It is mostly non-conceptual, this skill. We just do it somehow, over and over again, through trial and error and across forms, modulating our communications to the faces we find mirroring ours. This is not different.

As for the private embarrassment cocoon, it seems like I’m only free in relation to it when I’m no longer concerned with destroying or escaping it. The most liberating thing I’ve ever learned about dancing, as a technically unskilled dancer, is that dancing is the solution to all of dancing’s problems. Which is to say, every problem you have about or while dancing is a way of dancing. If you’re embarrassed, you can see what it’s like to dance embarrassment. If you’re tired, you can dance exhaustion. If you’re angry at the atomization of man and the disintegration of communitas made raw on the average Brooklyn dance floor, you can dance your anger, and whatever it flowers into, with or without a straight face. But try doing it for someone, or ideally with them.

Imagine the most hideously graceless person in the world, clomping around on a stage in utter confusion. Now imagine that this same person chooses to dance their hideousness, their gracelessness, their confusion, making a deeply felt and unrepeatable display of it, for you.

In what sense could such a gesture fail?

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