So You Think You Can Dance?

Summer time in Jackson: the air outside feels like a convection oven, the local theaters show nothing but cookie-cutter blockbusters, and all our favorite television shows go on hiatus. As a result, we’re forced to watch alternatives we would otherwise avoid, including So You Think You Can Dance, a sort of American Idol for dancers.

I’m hooked.

To be more specific, I have a new appreciation for many varieties of dance. Prior to the show, I was unaware of the differences between, say, hip-hop and pop. I knew the words “Fox Trot” (the electronic organ my parents bought me years ago had “Fox Trot” as a pre-programmed rhythm setting), but I had never seen one. I had no idea how difficult it would be for a ballroom dance champion to perform modern choreography.

I am amazed at how quickly real “stars” may be distinguished from mediocre performers, even by folks like me, who know very little about any genre of dance.

I am also a bit jealous of how in touch with their bodies these young dancers are. Their medium of expression, after all, is flesh and bone and muscle. They are comfortable with and centered in their physicality in a way I never have been and never will be.

I grew up in the conservative branch of the Church of Christ. We did not dance. Any. Ever. This rule has relaxed in recent times — I’ve heard my nieces, for example, talk of dancing — but in my day, dancing was strictly taboo. “If you talk to unwed mothers,” our minister told us (as though he ever had!), “they will tell you their first step on the road to sin and shame was taken on the floor of a dance hall.”

Dancing, we were told, was “sex, standing up with clothes on,” and any form of movement to music, apart from tapping one’s feet to the pounding rhythm of a hymn, was a grave and grievous sin.

One day, when kids insisted that dance wasn’t about all about sex, our youth leader (a mortician) suggested that we have a dance. “We’ll let all the boys dance together in one room, and all the girls can dance together in the other.”

Most of the kids responded to this with winces and shudders. (Not me. Frankly? I thought guys dancing with guys was a great idea.)

“You see?” our youth leader said, smiling smugly, “sex is involved, isn’t it?”

Sex is certainly involved in the dances done on So You Think You Can Dance — in fact, because of the show’s emphasis on (heterosexual) partners, almost every dance they do becomes an embodiment of the eternal quest of the male for the female. (This, despite the fact that some of the dancers — Benji comes to mind — would obviously much rather be dancing with Dimitri than their assigned female partners.)

I wish I could join them. I wish I had learned, early on, how to lose my self-consciousness and let my body be guided by music. I wish I could, just for a moment, be possessed by some pure, rhythmic archetype and be transformed into an expression of taut, sexual energy.

But, alas, I took my religion too seriously as a kid, and, unlike my contemporaries, I never sneaked out to the prom or the “dance hall” or the disco. I never learned to dance … and today, as a result, I’m permanently “dance retarded.”

Still … I confess that, after watching the show, I am prone to walking a little more lightly while taking Chelsea on a stroll. Sometimes, in the privacy of my own kitchen, I will pirouette. And, yesterday, I surprised myself by performing a little modern dance routine, clumsily and awkwardly, in the living room.

I do not think I can dance … but I wish that I could.