Dancing

“So are we just never going to talk about the fact that Kerri does jazzercise,” my friend asked his wife last week. I cackled when she recounted their conversation to me. I imagine it’s like having a friend who casually mentions that she’s in a weekend amateur séance club. You assume she is kidding the first time or two, but then you begin to notice evidence around her home of after-life communication efforts, and six months in you just have to nod along when she says she talked with great uncle Otto, as though you understood that this was an honest-to-god pastime this whoooolllle time.  

 I admit, Jazzercise is probably the least cool name a fitness community could choose, and while it is my conviction that the dorkiness ends there, I won’t try too hard to convince anyone of this. I need to save my energy for the dance floor because in the words of Whitney “I wanna dance with somebody”. I have been “jazzin’ around for 22 years now and I am proud of all the shoulder-rolling, hip-swiveling, shimmies and shakes I have offered myself (and the world) during that time and over the course of my life because each of those moves was evidence of my own bodily autonomy and delight. I don’t take this for granted.

I am so thankful that I grew up seeing people dance. My siblings would come home from high school and teach me “the snake” and the “harlem shuffle” when I was still in elementary school. And when my mother was at home she’d show us the moves of her day without hesitation as well. Maybe most importantly, I grew up going to weddings put on by people of color. They were raucous and wonderful. The rooms were full of the spirit animating freshly sated bodies bouncing and bumping around finding one another—reminding one another that we all somehow by some miracle were here together alive, awake, adorned even, in the midst of whatever existed and persisted beyond these holy doors.

Then, I went to a predominantly white Baptist college. I attended a lot of weddings there too.

They were…different than the ones I was accustomed to.

There was no booze, and (perhaps relatedly) markedly fewer grooves. I felt great about the lack of alcohol. It wasn’t my thing personally, and at the time it felt spiritually suspect. But no dancing? Why? How? And once more, why? I knew the occasional classmate who did not “believe in it,” of course, I suppose because it involved touching in a way that might unleash something sensual in an otherwise innocent youth. But most of my friends were fine with occasional intergender gyration parties outside of church. I know this because every month or so some fraternity threw a “barn dance” out in Middle-of-nowhere, Texas and we would all put on some boots, pile in a few cars, and scoot our little booties ‘round that shed until they kicked us out in the early hours of the next morning.

I suspect a lot of people were (and remain) convinced that sensuousness is synonymous with sinfulness since that was sort of a basic tenet of the version of faith we were so often being handed. And for that reason, many of the weddings I attended in my twenties were more dispassionate commitment meetings than they were embodied celebrations of life and of love.

I think some white evangelicalism seeks to neuter sensuality because if a body is bold enough to do something like wiggle when it could be working or “worshipping” instead, then that body might just wriggle right out from under the control of anyone seeking to master it. Dancing can of course be structured and rigid. It can be more hemming in than letting go, but so much dancing is weird and unwieldy. It is about saying yes to a body’s yearning to leap or twirl or caress. It is a reminder that even a worker needs to unwind. It is a declaration that sensuality is not in opposition to worship, but rather a manifestation of it.   

In the town where I grew up, the Methodist church put on middle school dances after each home-field football game. When it was time for the first one that I was eligible to attend I wrote a speech to recite to my mother to convince her that I should be allowed to take part in this important rite of passage. I delivered my plea early in the morning while she was still in bed and hopefully too tired to appropriately consider any mom-ish misgivings.

She said yes, probably with a caveat that I act like a lady or something like that and I sighed with deep relief. It seemed to me like I would actually die if I couldn’t go to these dances and at least watch what it was like to be the kind of person who trusted their body. After the first one when I surprised myself and got on the floor for a fast song, I assured my friends they would “never see that again”.  I suppose I said it because it was so important to me to be normal and if not normal, certainly to be good. But for whatever reason, I was never able to keep that promise. I don’t know if it was the family modeling, DNA, or the ancestors themselves shaking my limbs hither and yon, I just know that this was not something that crusty, creepy, self-satisfied men in pulpits were ever able to convince me not to do. Certainly not in order to be a better Chris-tee-un.

Sometimes in Jazzercise, I find myself crying with overwhelm

that music exists

that I have a body

that it moves

and that it's mine.

And maybe that seems crazy to you—like an amateur weekend séance might.

That’s ok.

But whether or not this same phenomenon happens for you, I hope that in this new year, you find yourself

animated

and amazed

and unashamedly embodied.

More than you ever have before.

 (And also,

 I hope you dance).