somatic integration and the history of American dance

I’ll preface this post by pointing out that I know there’s a long and colorful tradition of jump-jive with lots of terrific body movement, integration and fluidity.  But in the context I’m portraying here, it was a distinct subset of a subculture (swing jazz) which was so thrilling precisely because it was the exception rather than the norm of widely performed (read: generally acceptable) American dance forms.

Early 20th century popular dance involved a lot of foot and legwork, and often not much else.  I think of tap routines with alternations of stiff leg/bent knee and the Charleston, with the hands crossing the bent knees.  In both cases, leg action was the predominant feature.  The upper body was less involved and in any case, rather static.   Of course there were startling exceptions like Harold and Fayard, the Nicholas brothers; whose gravity defying leaps were a sensation of the time.  But again, these were not forms of dance that were performed by the masses… which is why they were all the more stunning to watch.  The influence of Freudian psychoanalysis was still pretty new on the scene and ideas about sexual repression and the way the mind both conditions and is conditioned by human behavior (i.e. dance) were not widely known, discussed or explored.    

Fast forward to the mid 1950s.  The typical understanding of the way most people danced comes from portrayals of the high school prom.  Here, you would find males and females moving in a very restricted manner - some slow, non fluid pivoting from the hips and swinging of the upper body (shoulders, chest)… but in a disjointed kind of way.  By this time, Freudian ideas were beginning to percolate through society (i.e. via the ‘psychiatrist’s couch’), bringing at least the idea that outward behavior could reflect and condition what was going on in the mind.

In the early 1960s the Twist came on the scene, causing a cultural explosion.  Suddenly high society types: debutantes, college graduates – and regular folks: housewives, mechanics, were swiveling their hips and torsos.  I recall grainy documentaries with folks from every social strata talking about how “cool” it looked and felt to Twist.. even while in some cases denying there was a sexual dimension to it.  The music, the expressions on the faces, though, all seem to suggest a gradual loosening of repressive sexual mores, foreshadowing what was to come.  By this time not only was psychotherapy widely understood and accessed, but increasing numbers of people were engaging in their own personal investigations of the complexities of the mind/body connection through psychoactive drugs.

By the late 1960s popular dance had become fluid and expressive, writhing, arms reaching for the sky, hands pantomiming.  These were clear indicators that revolutionary new ways of relating to the body were at hand as people began to throw off conventions of the past.  Drug and sexual experimentation went hand in hand, and the reality bending ecstacy from those experiences was writ large on body movement.

In the 1970s, disco sprang outward from a subculture centered in a few large US cities to a nationwide craze.  Interwoven with disco culture – and perhaps even central to it - was the ample use of narcotics and various and sundry types of gratuitous sex: straight, gay, threesomes, orgies, swinging, etc.  The time of Puritan moralizing about sexual practice and preference appeared to be long gone.  Disco dancing reflected this with full, intense use of the whole body – chests sticking out suggestively, aggressively, fluid twirling, leaps and the ubiquitous thrusting hips.   The movie “Saturday Night Fever” expresses this perfectly.

Over the course of the 1980s it seems dance reached an apex and a long process of somatic integration was completed, codifying a kind of ‘anything goes’ notion – if you can think it up, then you can do it.  B-boying and pop-locking seamlessly combined precise, robotic motions, spine bending, death defying leaps and spins and “wave” like gyrations of arms, legs and hips.  Michael Jackson sent shockwaves through the population when he moonwalked across the stage at the Motown anniversary special, launching countless imitators (some of us were moonwalking before he popularized it but got swept up in the excitement too).  At the same time a brash, sometimes violent and dangerous phenomenon was developing in the punk community – full contact slamming into each other, thrashing about.  The “mosh pit” emerged as a whole sub-scene; bodies crashing into each other with a ferocious frenzy, enthusiastic for the sheer joy of making contact with another body.  Madonna popularized an obscure style of interpreting the modes of high fashion, the paparazzi and camera shutters snapping called ‘Vogue’ with a video by the same name.  Whether it was highly coordinated routines to house music or free form raving, the body was totally free to do whatever it wanted.

And so today it appears that full body integration is innate to dance, natural within dance, to the point where it’s hardly even considered.  We just take it for granted that:  sure… you could perform whatever movement you can conceive and execute.  For my friend and me, it was just really fascinating to discover there was a kind of observable trajectory for the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of somatic expression – and to contemplate whether the two were actually interrelated.  I’m not sure though.  It may not be all that deep…

which brings me to my disclaimer about this whole concept.  All of it, as you may have already observed, takes place outside the context of specifically African American dance.   In hindsight I realized that it was often, if not nearly always the case that it was specifically black forms of dance that set the trends and, after hovering on the periphery for a period, overtook previous forms to become the predominant form of expression.

Eventually I may be proven wrong, but for now that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.