Men Dancing

Eve's Jeff Cote, and we're talking about men dancing. And for the record, Julie, you're a woman and I'm a woman, Yet we're talking about men dancing. Why do we even decide to tackle this topic? I believe it all started with our male coworkers who we observed mostly head bobbing instead of dancing to music at our company holiday party. Yeah, and that sent us down a rubbit, all of thoughts on what it means for gods to move their bodies

to a beat. In this episode, Eves explores what it means to be a man taking on dance and talks with Emory University professor George Stabe. It was just great to do things to music, and it can feel really authentic and natural to do that. And if we can connect to something like oh, I can relate to this in one we or another, that's when magic happens. And Duke Universities Professor Thomas de France discusses race, identity and dance.

Black lives are expressed through culture and especially through music and dance. We love music and dance, we need it, we engage it. And finally, Eaves talks to a couple of regular Jo's are co workers Christopher Hessiadas, Dylan Fagan, and Jonathan Strickland to find out why they do or don't dance. But there's something subversive about about a bunch of men dancing, right. I mean, as we've we've mentioned

a couple of times men dancing. The reason why they we're even here talking about this is because the idea of men dancing together in American mainstream culture is noteworthy. Maybe you've seen awkward dads and viral videos trying sometimes too hard to do the latest dance craze, or fraternity members strolling in unison, or your brothers and uncles and cousins dancing at family reunions and wedding receptions. But despite how common dancing is and how long humans have been

doing it. Dancing is emotionally complex. It's the departure from normalcy, the rope movements that get us from A to B, and for men it can be super problematic. Only two years ago, ABC reportedly nixed idea of two men dancing together on Dancing with the Stars, and it may entertainment news when two guys share at the floor for the first time on the reality show early last year. Now DeMarco and Kio Mazepe dancing together starts here and ends there.

That's twelve seconds of two guys dancing together if you weren't counting. So people are uncomfortable with men dancing, especially with each other. Who cares? You might say, haven't we given enough space to men's grievances? They and all their problems have dominated history after all. But this men dancing is a matter of acceptance, of freedom, of expression, of equity, of living our personal truths, ideals we could all get behind.

And if you think about it, the actions and characteristics that make up gender can be considered their own performances. So what's it like to be a dancing man in a world that cares so much about upholding the mantle of masculinity. What's it like to swivel your hips and buck the authority of social norms and a culture that often rejects vulnerability and encourages conformity. A scene as basic as a man dancing can become a psychological labyrinth, and

we're going to enter it here. This is four ish when Janet Jackson's Pleasure Principle came out. It was my after school project every day to memorize that whole video, and my sister and I, if we could drink, we would have chugged champagne after we figured out this one scene where she was in front of a mirror doing all this intricate hand stuff that storage State the artistic director for State Dance and a senior lecturer in the dance program at Emory University in Atlanta. This is which

is wait. George was born in Tehran, Iran. At age nine, I was with my mother picking up our cousin from the ballet class, and I remember watching it and thinking, Oh, that looks fun. I want to do it. And I asked my mother can I do that? And she said no, boys don't do this. Years later, after getting a degree in political science in a stint at Georgetown's Law school doing legal research, impressive career choices that would appease his parents.

He says it was an impromptu duet at a freshman frat party that inspired him to take modern and ballet classes, and upon graduation from college, I remember distinctly telling my parents, I did this for you. Now grad school and dance is going to be for me. That didn't come without doubts, feeling embarrassed as a new dance professor in a room full of scientists, his mom telling family members he was a French professor. He went from being a stranger and

one strange and to another. But that was okay because he felt liberated in those moments when I'm just lost. It could actually feel like, I guess, a drug trip where you're completely not aware of stuff, or you are aware that I've completely abandoned and let go and I don't have to pull myself back at all, and that's

kind of crazy. Imagine a tantrum, like when you have that tantrum and the breakdown or laughing fit or a crying fit um where no one's around to see it in the most pristine, sublime way, that's kind of how I feel or like to go to. You know, it's not necessarily I want you to see my passion. I want to feel it myself, and if other people notice it, that's great to him. Dance class was a place with many doorways, a place to explore, make mistakes, and try

new things. But the line between introspection and perform a it's fine, you're taking all that emotion and putting it on the world stage in front of judgmental eyes. And even though it doesn't happen all the time or in every culture, George says that sometimes negativity can start to creep into spaces that aren't as accepting. There's only one clans left, but it happens to be the coolest one of all. That way dancing is for girls, well you

should have gotten near earlier. Okay, steady board taking ballet doesn't make you any less of a man. That constant reminder that um like, oh you would be thought of as a sissy, or this is not a real career, or you must be gay, or all of these things do creep in and when you're gonna get your real job. Because the body, as it twists, spins twirls in jar rates is the focus. Dance can often reinforce or negate

perceptions about gender in sexuality. For men dancing at a party, whether they are married or single, it's amazing ritual in a way. And even in Greek culture, Persian culture, Armenian culture, there often be the men who danced together and then the women dance together, and then if they do I mean by gender, and if they do connect with different genders, it's in a sort of benign circle. So I think

it's almost like a peacock streading, you know. And I think you might even find that in country western lined. I think that happens there. I'm not very familiar with that, but I almost think there's like, hey, watch me do this fancy foot thing and TOAs my cowboy had around. I hope I'm not offending anyone, but I just don't

know that stuff. But I think it that's what it isn't if you go to clubs, it is that either the men or in the background just kind of watching and praying on the women there, or they're going to go out there and kind of show off a little bit. And in that respect, it's okay. I think the moment you put it on stage and put a weird costume on and try to express yourself in a different way other than sexually. Then it's a bit naughty, I guess, or not naughty but taboo. Sure, dancing is often visceral,

igniting hormones and firing up our most basic desires. But it isn't just a physical act. It's a process of learning and discovery. The body becomes a means of discourse. Movements become questions, gestures become demands, and interactions become statements. It peels back the layers of assumptions and perspectives that

we hold. You know everybody, and I don't. I see sometimes like just because if you let yourself connect to something abstract, you might find out more about yourself as opposed to being fed a story, kind of like those Hollywood blockbusters. You might want to go to see one because you don't want to to think so much. But when we're invited to think and explore uncomfortable territory, that's

what dance can do. And if you're patient enough and let yourself be in the room for the hour or so that you're watching the thing, that's when it speaks and not to mention bringing community together, to move together, to share stories through their bodies. It's so valuable. George is a pro. He's trained in the art of dancing, performs in front of crowds and as a dancer with the capital D. But sometimes the spotlight is on guys who aren't so well skillful. Could you describe your typical

dance style? Uh, I do the t rex. That's Donathan Strickland, the host of Ford Thinking. That's where you get a little the foe arms up and like you got your your hands kind of curled into fists and you're just sort of bouncing up and down a little bit to the beat. You're not really doing anything in particular because again, as I said, awkward, And here's an awkward dance story

recounting about Dylan, producer at how Stuff Works. When I was in college, I had a radio show with um my friend, and we had a green screen and decided we're going to make some promotional videos for our radio show and put it on Facebook. And I didn't know what to do, so we thought, well, how we dance, And so we'd danced for like three minutes at a time, and then we'd find a song that fitted we we

would not have a song beforehand. Um, So you know, there was one video that was Technotronics Pump Up the Jam, and that just like lined up perfectly, and so we put that there and I realized halfway through it I was really feeling it, and I did what I called the spitting dinosaur, which is like this, like it's more fluid than that, but Dylan's putting his hands behind his ears and waving them around. It was from growing up watching Jurassic Parks. The Jurassic period is great with the

frill dinosaur. The frill dinosaur that's that spits poison. Yeah, that, and I thought, hey, look look guys, it's the spit and everyone's like that. I like that movie if it works for you going in. Yeah, I remembered from my high school days, from my college days, where dancing, engaging in that activity was unless you were amazing, it was just considered something that was lame or stupid, or or you felt lame or stupid for wanting to do it.

But there's something subversive about about a bunch of men dancing, right. That's Christopher editor at How Stuff Works. As we've we've mentioned a couple of times men dancing. The reason why they we're even here talking about this is because the idea of men dancing together in American mainstream culture is noteworthy,

is not necessarily the standard mode of operating. So if you're already in a culture where you feel kind of set aside, whether it's nerd culture, gay culture, nerdy gay culture, uh, the act of dancing is you're embracing the fact that you're sort of accepting your status as an outsider and saying, you know what, let's celebrate this. Let's let's yeah, we'll be outsiders that uncomfortable territory. Those moments of surprise are a border something Thomas Defrance called slippage. It's the place

where things don't quite work. It's the if we think of it as a physical space, it's the spot on the ground where a literal slip happens. And it's also the remains of that slipping. When you slip, there's a slippage that's left behind. So I love this word because it's a it's a noun, but it's all so an adjective and and something of an adverb. It has all of these different balances, and it implies this this kind of place where things don't quite add up, something doesn't

quite shive the way you think it's going to. He's a professor of African and African American Studies and Dance at Duke University. Queerness and dance, to de France, is that slippery, unpredictable, and sometimes unsettling place between what we assume about gender and dance and how certain dances buck

those notions. You know, your little niece who you've never seen really move, suddenly bust bust the dance out at the birthday party with all this fierce power and energy, and maybe she slides to the floor in a vogue astraw like. There's something queer about that moment because it surprises us. And that's what I mean by queer when I use it in terms of queer gesture. It's the physical movement that suggests something really unexpected, so emboyant probably

and also unusual and non noormative. We need queer gestures in our lives because they remind us that there's there's more to learn, there's more to do, there's explorations to have among each other and with ourselves, that we're not stuck in our jobs and stuck in our kind of every day now is that we have the capacity to express and explore corporeal rature your body telling a story, and that's what that phrase means, telling a story with your body without words, but through gesture and doing it

in a queer way, in a way that surprises the people who are receiving a story or witnessing your dance. Queer corporeal gesture is a way to narrate our possibility. It's a way to perform how we can surprise ourselves and keep learning things. Think of it as a sort of resistance or subversion of norms, but it's more than

just a statement. It's surviving through expression. I think that concept is really important when we're thinking in any way about African American expressive, expressive arts and black lives in the United States. There's a way that how our lives are organized and circumscribed. Things almost work, but they don't quite.

And this is why I think we have this amazing social justice movement right now, because we're still trying to deal with the legacies of the path that have created this um circumstance where it's very hard for Black Americans to kind of find ourselves and find our way forward, and especially for our youngest, our youngest family members, um are always having a hard time figuring out how to

be a black person. In the concept of the US for Black men in America, he says, a lot of dance is simply about navigating how to exist, and there's

science to back that up. Some research says that because there's evidence of humans dancing in cave paintings from thirteen thousand years ago, it has a genetic basis that dance likely popped up around the tom Homo sapience did and is linked to good social communication, a hand equality to have when your survival depends on bonding, and community support. Black Americans have also always had to monitor our physicality. We turned that into dance, and we've always turned that

into dance. In the nineties twenties we called it eccentric dance, and now in the twenty tens, there's a form of movement called bone breaking, and this is a physicalization of a kind of shifting body, a body that can do unusual things. So we're turning that need to corral or physicality in order to survive in a relatively hostile environment and hostile daily environment, and we turn that into expression and turn it into dance. And that's what we see

in bone breaking. We see this this kind of physicalization of how to be shifty and odd with the body to suggest something really unusual and and expressive a creator. No, he's not talking about actual bone breaking. It's a social dance, which is one that involves group participation that has roots in bed mooin and dance battles. Dancers can tot their limbs into apparently impossible and painful poses, dislocating their shoulders and realigning their arms, pushing the limits of their bodies

and creativity. In this case, pain depicted is pain internalized, and that coping through movement isn't just limited to dance floors or social dance. It can extend into other realms of expression, like protesters who raise their hands in an outcry against Michael Brown's shooting, or celebratory end zone dances on the football field. We have a penalty marker on the field. Here's John Perry's fun Sports from like conduct

of the excessive celebration of her twenty two. That penalty will be forced there Go Defrance calls this the policing of black culture. Or imagine the opposing postures of President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama when they met in the Oval Office. Legs spread, lips taught back stiff, our brows furrowed. Our bodies often betray our thoughts even when we don't say, let alone understand them. But dance

isn't passive. It's a deliberate channeling of emotion that takes courage and audacity, a willingness to be outside of the everyday experience. As Defrance puts it, an impulse to dance is a desire to speak with the primal, essential language, and it's not easy to be bare stripped to our essence when our identities are exposed. The great things about Black social dance is that it always challenges the space

for jender nor maturity. It always does so even if we have Chicago steppanding, which is built upon two roles leader and a follower, Well, in Black social dance, that follower role done an awful lot of leading to. So we can call these roles masculine and feminine, or the male role or female role, but in practice that's not

really how they play out. There's always going to be places where um, the female role or the feminine spaces leading the interaction, and there's going to be places where the woman, if you will, is shining and she's going to do something really extraordinary and amazing. So this is one of the reasons we love social dance so much.

It gets it gives us a chance to explore alternative ways of being, to explore, for you know, really powerful men to explore our feminine sort of abilities, and for women to explore their power if those are hard of what masculine and feminine um contained. So Black social dances are always kind of getting into that space where it's not one or the other, but it's a both and

course defined tradition doesn't come without backlash. Take Elvis, a performer who was controversial for different reasons in different circles. I had no idea that this performance of round was going to call it such a round. I still can't figure out what round. To his fans, he was a rebellious, pioneering sex symbol. To his detractors, his dancing was inappropriate or even animalistic, and too many black people, Elvis the pelvis was yet another symbol of appropriation, acclaimed for moves

he seemingly lifted from black artists like Jackie Wilson. The problem wasn't the invitation, per se. The problem was Elvis getting cultural credit for elevating a sexualized performance style that black artists had already been doing. And we're shamed or simply I'm recognized. For historian Eric Lott says in the book Love and Theft quote, what appears, in fact to have been appropriated were certain kinds of masculinity. To put one of the cultural forms of blackness was to engage

in a complex affair of manly mimicry. The Elvis debate goes deeper, as he's perhaps one of the most contentious figures of so called edginess or unorthodoxy and performance. But there's another huge factor that causes people to get riled up when dance questions norms, the way that norm ativity or gender normalcy is about being afraid, being afraid of

the unknown or the unexpected. I mean, the only reason to be afraid of something is because you're not sure what it will mean for you in some in some weird way, although that happens a lot less than social dance. He points out, we're at a party, for example, the excitement of the moment of dance is most important. Think of popular dances you may have seen go viral, quant ETCETERA.

Flamboyance doesn't get much flak. It's often celebrated and for black folks, especially to Francis, dancing is like air and water. It's always been a part of life. We danced at the high school reaunion. We dance at the graduation party. We dance at the birth, we dance at the coming home. We dance. Dance is important to us. We dance in church. Um. We even have movement things that we executed in times

of morning. There's a way that music and movement are important to our practice of morning as well, so for us dances everywhere. He mentions the Nicholas brothers who jumped, twisted, and tap danced their way into people's hearts from the stage and screen in the early nineteen hundreds, and he talks about the high energy, dramatic street dance styles crumping and clowning, which grew out of the desire for an alternative to gangs and violence and for an outlet for aggression.

During the aftermath of Rodney King's beating in Los Angeles, in if I hadn't start from him, I would be in jail for sure, or I would have got caught up in something that I would have him killed. Very early in my life because I was around a drama in violent but dance and always kept me away or sent nigger time from ritualistic and ceremonial dance like the hula tow line dancing to country Western music, dance holds a mirror to the social climate as a sign of

the times. Dance can be as important to cultural documentation as records of war, policy and technology. It's an uninhibited declaration of self, showing us as we are, for who we are in every fleeting moment. As father of modern American dance, Ted Sean, who performed with an all male dance company throughout the US in the thirties and forties, put it, you see, a peter can paint something that it goes on the wall, or a sculptor makes something and it stays there. But this is the most ephemeral

art you see. You do it, and it's born and dies in the very second you're doing it. We engage it. We let it be unusual, we let it be weird, we let it be queer, and we learned from it. We need society, yet so many of us feel left out and yearned to be understood and recognized. When you're struggling to be seen, especially when you're part of a marginalized group, asserting your existence through dance can be cathartic,

powerful and pleasurable. And for anybody, dance can be a means of release that they often don't get to or want to say with words, for fear of being embarrassed, moralized, dismissed, or simply ignored. It gives men a chance to be genuine, creative, and present. And what more do we need now than open and honest communication. Maybe try dancing sometime. There's something about when you finally get out there and everyone around you is encouraging you that really, um, it's one of

the best feelings. It's just like yeah, like when you get that head and no, like yeah, yeah, I like that, Like look what you're doing, Like yeah, like what you're doing too. And you don't have to dance with anybody.

You can just dance by yourself. You know, if you're a guy and you're not sure if you like to dance, going to a go into your bedroom, closed the door, put on hot Pants by James Brown, the the song and or the article of clothing, and and see if you you know and and just try dancing a little bit and moved to the beat. And if you dig it, keep doing it. And if you feel like you want to test it out, go to and go to another town where there's a dance club and go dance are

and see what happens. Or go crash a wedding where you don't know anyone and try that and uh yeah, do not actually take that. Thank you to Eve's Jeff Cote, who wrote and produced this episode. You can find more of her work on Eve's jeff cote dot com. Thank you to Thomas de France and George Stabe for the political and personal breakdown of dance. And thank you to Dylan Fagan, Christopher Hessiadas, and Jonathan Strickland for bearing your

dancing souls. The Stuff of Life is written an executive produced by me Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by Noel Brown, and editorial oversight is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagin and Head of Production Jerry Rowland. This episode also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs, and Dylan Fagan. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, you can call into our podcast line at one eight four four hs W Stuff.

We'll be doing a wrap up episode at the end of the season and we want to hear your voice in it, so leave us a message. You can also find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email us at the Stuff of Life at how staff works dot com.