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there are dreams of animals
dancing, boreal animals kicking
up the traces along canopied
well-trod corridors
ungulates and rodents and bears
dance to the syncopated caw of ravens
when moose dance, shaggy jowls
shaking air, grace leaves the park,
mulch and chipmunk trembling
on the one and three, moose-dancing
the stutter and pound of kodo drums
bears are hirsute Nureyevs
in comparison, previous pas de deux
with leaping salmon and trout
plein-air training grounds
for ballet, in the rough
ground squirrel and vole dodge
claw and hoof, paw in paw
they circle dance the Richter-ing
ground, occasional chorus-line
kicks punctuating the air-dance
filigree of moth and mosquito
in dreams animals dance out days
and nights between kills, feasts
and couplings, roundelays and
sarabandes stoking boreal beats
and fires, backyards full
of friends of neighbours
fur, feather, and skin united
and gyrating to the times
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Who likes to dance? Girls like to dance. Do I like to dance? Not really. Why? Because I’m a sixteen-year-old boy and dancing is for girls. But that’s not true, and I know it. What other excuse can I give except the true one — that dancing scares me and that girls scare me, and that dancing with girls scares me. But let me tell you something: eventually you overcome your fears. I did.
Four years ago at Estonian school we were forced to take rahvatants (sounds sort of like “roughadance”), Estonian folk dance. We mainly did the waltz and the polka, dancing along to the folk music played by Charles, the accordion player. Charles was the only person I enjoyed in dance class because he would always crack jokes and try and make the class fun. This was never something the dance teacher appreciated, because dancing, to her, wasn’t about fun. It was something that I couldn’t even explain to you except that dance was something serious, or at least to the dance teacher it was. The other thing that I liked about Charles was that when I was just about to break down and cry in front of everyone from the torture dance class was for me, Charles would look at me, chuckle and say, “C’mon, get up on your two left feet, and just dance.”
Before the class would start dancing, the other students and I would form two lines — one line girls, the other line guys — from tallest to shortest, the tallest guy being paired off with the tallest girl, and so on. I was the shortest boy, so when the line finally came to me all the girls had already been paired off, and since there was always a scarcity of girls, I was left to dance with the teacher, always. Oh, how I hated dancing with the teacher.
All the pairs would form a circle around the teacher and me and watch us as we danced. We would do the waltz in front of them, and while we danced the teacher would explain what we were doing, always yelling out, “Vasak!” for the left foot, and “Parem!”for the right. Then she would scream out numbers and say things like “Switch” and all sorts of other things, indicating what we were supposed to be doing. But honestly, I never knew what I was doing.
So I would dance with the teacher in front of everyone, never knowing what to do, never properly performing the dance. How did I get by? Well, I danced with the teacher. I never had to do anything because I always had the teacher there pushing me along as we waltzed or polkaed. I just followed her steps as we glided around the room, always her dragging me along. The teacher would always lead, and that was just another humiliation added to the list. Eventually I stopped going to Estonian dance class but it was my first introduction to the world of dance.
Four years later, I’m chilling in my friend’s basement and we’re getting ready for another kind of dancing — the high school dance. This was the first school dance I had ever gone to. I had skipped dances in previous years because of that overwhelming fear of dancing that has always lingered inside of me since the days of my Estonian school dance class. But my friend, who was also shy, thought of the great plan to drink a few beers beforehand. Lots of people drank before going to the dance and so would we. We would drink away our fear and show up ready to dance all night long.
The school dance was not being held in the typical high school gym but in a club downtown. We grabbed a cab, discussing all the way who we were going to dance with and who we might hook up with. The conversation was truly pumping me up, and bringing out the excitement I had for the dance.
The club had booths, a bar and a big crowd of people dancing. But it was dancing I had never seen. It wasn’t folk dancing; it wasn’t rahvatants, that’s for sure. It was a massive lump of people, mainly guys and girls paired off, the girl shoving her buttocks into the guy’s crotch, doing a dance called “bubbling.” Surprisingly it wasn’t just a couple of girls doing this, everyone on the dance floor was bubbling. Holy shit, I thought, I don’t know how to do that. I’ve only danced with my Estonian dance teacher. That kind of dancing looks intense. If the girl is shoving her rear end into my crotch, won’t I get a hard-on? I can’t deal with that, it’s too scary.
And what is this music! Rap, hip hop, reggae and techno! Where’s my folk music? More importantly, where’s Charles? They replaced an accordion player with a deejay dressed in trendy clothes. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting my school dance to be like my Estonian dance class, but I guess I never figured what it might actually look like.
I stood there against the wall of the club with my last remaining friend who wasn’t dancing yet. The other two had jumped into the mob and had begun. I looked into the sweaty crowd of people dancing. The four beers that I had danked, the drunken mindset I was in on the way to the club, those things were gone. Fear had sobered me up.
My friend and I decided we looked liked idiots just standing there at the wall, so we went to the bar where they were serving drinks — non-alcoholic, by the way. The booths surrounding the bar were filled with people — people who I believe were also too scared to dance. They were sitting or standing around, talking with all the other fearful people, so we joined them. Only problem is, you can’t have a conversation in a club, the music is just too loud to hear anything.
I was sitting at the booth with these two other guys who I didn’t really know, but we were all pretending to be getting along. My friend had disappeared. I didn’t know where he went, but, most likely, he got the courage to bubble. So there I was sitting with these two guys, pretending to be in a really awesome conversation, yet I couldn’t hear a single thing they were saying, and a girl came up to me and asked, “Why aren’t you dancing?”
Why aren’t I dancing? I don’t know, because I’m scared. But I couldn’t tell her that. Other than fear, why was I not dancing? Honestly, I have no idea. Because I didn’t want to get a hard-on while dancing? And let’s not forget rejection. But obviously this girl wanted to dance. She had come out of her way to ask me why I wasn’t dancing. She definitely wanted to dance.
“I have no idea why I’m not dancing,” I replied. “But do you wanna dance?”
Then this girl just gave me a smile implying that she did. She dragged me to the dance floor and I started to dance. And the most awesome part was, I didn’t get a stiffy.
After the song finished, I thanked the girl and we had a complimentary after-dance hug. Then, as a new song was beginning, I got up on my two left feet and asked another girl to dance.
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Descant 147 / Dance
