Heal our Country One Connection at a Time

In an old bio, I call myself a "dance slut." If it's dancing, I'll try it. I teach belly dancing, and waltzing, and swing dancing, and polka. I started a French Cancan troupe, and a flash mob group, and several dance companies that do Vintage social ballroom: how people danced from 1800 to 1960. I've performed with Scottish dance groups and Ukrainian dance groups. When the opportunity presented itself, I've studied tap, and salsa, and hula, and international folk dance.

It amazes and pains me how many people in the United States would LIKE to learn how to dance, but they've never learned. The opportunity doesn't present itself, they don't have access to a teacher for the kind of dance they want to learn, or they say they are too shy to be on a stage in front of people. That is the statement that appalls me the most.

There is this prevalent idea in the United States that dancing is something you sit in a chair and watch - it is not something you get up and DO.

I'm sure the plethora of ballet studios, and this idea so many parents have that if you have a daughter, you need to enroll her in ballet class as part of her education, to teach her things like grace and ballance and stuff, doesn't help. But I really blame the TV shows. Things like Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance and all the rest portray dancing as something that you perform. Not something everybody does.

In the 1960s, everybody danced. Because everybody can wriggle to the music while pantomiming swimming! In the 1930s and 40s, everyone knew how to swing dance. Can you imagine an army full of American soliders who didn't know what to do with "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy?" Inconceivable, because our soldiers knew how to dance. So did their parents who did the Charleston, and their older siblings who did the One Step and the Turkey Trot.

So our current dance desert is a recent phenomenon. People don't dance now. There's a generation of guys terrified of dancing because it's "gay." As if that's a bad thing. Well, a lot of us are over that, now. So now we as a society can start dancing again.

The dancing is out there. But you need to know where to look. Most towns have contradancing (the full name is New England Country Dancing. No one calls it that anymore), which is fun and easy. You just have to go find it. You'll be dancing with some confidence in an hour. Meanwhile, swing dancers are swing dancing, salsa dancers are salsa dancing, belly dancers are belly dancing, and Argentine Tango dancers are tango-ing.

People just don't know that it's out there. Five years ago, I started working on a TV show I want to put on PBS called "Dancing Across America." Every episode, I go to a different town and show a different kind of dancing. I shot a pilot on Vintage dance in Cincinnati, Ohio. I showed it to my local PBS station, I got a lot of advice, I shot a new pilot episode about Irish dancing in Dayton, Ohio.

That's where I got derailed. Three editors and a move to North Carolina later, I finally got the episode put together. I started networking with the PBS affiliate in Charlotte. I was collecting names and contact information to shoot an episode about the salsa dance community in Charlotte. Then Covid hit, AND my husband took a new job in Illinois.

Now that it's becoming safe again to breathe directly into a partner's face, all the dancers who have spent the past year teaching solo classes on Zoom are slowly coming back together. Dancing in parks, dancing with masks, requiring a vaccination card for entry to a dance event. The nightmare of the last year will heal quickly for them, in the arms of partners while they foxtrot or waltz or bachata.

The rest of the country could use some of that same healing energy. After a year of deprivation from contact with other people, everyone needs a three-minute hug moving to music, which some of us call blues dancing. After a decade of political division, everyone needs to make a meaningful connection with a fellow human being, and NOT care what political party that dance partner belongs to.

My passion is teaching people to dance. We need a lot more dancing in this country. People don't need to all be doing the same kind of dance. People don't need to only do one kind of dance. But showing people all the different possibilities, introducing them to all the options, seems like a great first step.

Pun intended.