Work Text:
Feminists have written their fingers to the bone about the pernicious effects of the Cinderella story, about the generations of little girls who grow up on Disney princess visions that culminate in sweeping around a ballroom in a pretty dress, waltzing with the man of their dreams. So ubiquitous is this vision of girlish aspirational fantasy, that I have had more than one thoughtful, intelligent white feminist react with puzzlement and disbelief when I state that, in fact, I did not grow up with such an ambition. That in fact, out of all the Disney princesses on offer for me to choose from, the one I mirrored myself on was Ariel, the mermaid, complete with green scaly tail and a Caribbean crab for a best friend.The sort of dancing done by Ariel underwater--a communal participatory event with friends and neighbors joining in to the beat of steel drums--reminded me of the idealized childhood dancing my father told me stories about. My six-year-old brain had not yet grasped the distinctions between the steel drums of Trinidad and the Cavaquinhos, Tamborim and Caixa of my father's Brazil. What it had noticed, though, was the very clear difference between the American music with violins and cellos that all the European princesses danced to in their ball gowns, and the music that they did not dance to. Old time jazz with scatting like what my neighbor Miz Jefferson listened to was left for the shiftless monkeys in The Jungle Book, or the gorillas in Tarzan. Living in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan in the last years of the 20th century, it was clear to me that the world of my parents was different from the world shown in the TV shows and movies around me, and that if I wanted to share in the magical splendor of the Carnival, the sambo, then the closest I could get to it was to be "Under the Sea".
The anthropological epistemology of placing oneself in the midst of one's study has already been discussed in dance studies (Keali'inohomoku 1970; Fraleigh, Horton and Hanstein 1999) to the benefit of such scholars as myself, who can build on the work of dance practitioners such as Marta Savigliano and Brenda Dixon Gottschild to use our ability to negotiate high context culture conversations to provide thick descriptions of performances as embodied somatic experiences that are as important as the visually interpreted experiences of an observer of dance.
-- From 'Preface: An invitation to the ball' (ix)
"Pai, me pegar agora!"
Sasha does not remember saying this, when she was three, jumping up and down with her hands waving above her head, reaching towards the massive mountains of her father's shoulders. Her father would laugh, and teasingly pull away, before bending down and swooping her up, up towards the ceiling till she was hanging limp and breathless, and then he would spin around and around, his hips swiveling in just the slightest emphasis to the inaudible two-four downbeats that accompanied all his movements.
Sasha does remember her father's perpetual music - feet tapping, fingers drumming, head bobbing. It used to bother her mother, she remembers, when she came home after a tiresome day of work to find Sasha banging her spoon against the refrigerator in imperfect but enthusiastic counterpoint to her father's saucepan tambourine.
"Speak to her in English!" Sasha also remembers her mother saying, sharper and more frequently as the bedroom fights got quieter and longer.
Sasha doesn't remember the day her Pai moved out, only that he was gone, and that when she would tell people he was in Brazil with the rest of her family, her mother would frown and jerk her by the hand and say, "Sasha, you're American now. Just, American."
Sasha remembers very vividly the day that she connected the relaxers and skin bleach in the bathroom with the sneer in the voice of the boy who pushed through their Double Dutch ropes with the taunt, "Yo' mama think she can get rid of her man and pass you for white, huh?"
She remembers going home and looking at herself in the mirror for a long time, a picture of her father and her mother together in her hand, trying to see what made it through to her eyes and skin, her nose and jawline, her hair and her hands.
As outlined in my epistemological methodology in chapter one, I feel that dance ethnographies, mirroring a vital corporeal choreographic technique, benefit from a scrutiny of negative space. In this case, the negative space consists of those socio-political environments where the absence of 'social dance' as defined by the competitive dancesport terminology is palpable, either by an endemic rejection of the term, or by a refusal to legitimize within the mainstream hierarchy of motion, such aesthetics that are 'disruptive' (Albright 1997). As Jane Desmond observes:
"In most cases we will find that dance forms originating in lower-class or nondominant populations present a trajectory of "upward mobility" in which the dances are "refined", "polished," and often desexualised. Similarly, improvisatory forms become codified to be more easily transmitted across class and racial lines, especially when the forms themselves become commodified and sold through special brokers, or dance teachers." (1997: 34).I would like to open my exploration of this political and emotive negative space with a portrait of a physical space that symbolizes, in my memory, the complex negotiations required to mark an embodiment as 'absent'.
When I was thirteen, my friends and I would walk home from school across a parking garage, skirting the highway opening on to the George Washington bridge, up and down the sloping roads passing Dominican hair salons and bodegas, past genteely decaying brownstones through the stoops and sidewalks and ball court that we called 'our neighborhood'. This walk, from school to home, was an exercise in what Judith Butler terms the regulative discourses of performativity, in which we were both upholding the iterability of our identities, and subverting the disciplinary techniques that the dominant narrative attempted to inscribe on our bodies.
-- From chapter two: 'Ballcourts and Ballrooms: the politics of competitive sports and social dance' (53)
"Get'cho ass movin', girl!"
Sasha remembers being yelled at every day by Shavonda, who used eighth grade study hall to primp herself in order to be the first one outside the school doors. Sasha would make the motions of hurrying up while trying to wait for Elena, who would be walking while trying to read a book, to the detriment of her own and everyone else's feet.
They would reach the chain links fencing in the basketball court and Shavonda would lean casually against it, turned three quarters away so that she could keep an eye on the players while they could keep a hopefully equally admiring eye on her backside. Elena would plomp down on the asphalt, her crossed legs functioning as a book holder from which she could occasionally look up to make cryptic and retrospectively perceptive observations about school politics. Sasha would be the one standing facing Shavonda, and tall enough to look over her shoulder through the chain links.
The boys would take their shirts off in the months leading up to summer vacation, and Sasha would see an Impressionist painting blur of brown skins rendered glossy by sweat, punctuated by highlights of white smiles and mauve-tongued grimaces. Shavonda would nudge her excitedly when the boys stopped their game to saunter faux-casually to the water fountain near their vantage spot, flexing nascent pecs and talking trash about each other's mamas in manly one-upmanship. But Sasha actually preferred to watch them when they were dribbling the ball between their opponents' knees or squinting in preparation for a lay-up, adjusting the crotch of their underpants or sucking a bruised finger in complete unselfconsciousness; too occupied in being in motion to care about being observed.
And sometimes LaRhette would team up with her twin brother in the game, taller and more graceful than any of the boys, her breasts heaving in her sports bra as she sprang towards the backboard for the return shot, her legs long and smooth and muscular under her shorts. Those were the most enjoyable games.
Afterwards, they would walk back home via the corner of 172nd and Fort Washington, because Carlos's crew would always be practicing in the basement boiler room before their evening work shifts, and even though Shavonda didn't really care about watching the same ten steps being done over and over and over again until they matched the imagined perfection of synchrony in Carlos's head, she agreed that the boys doing them 'was mighty fine'. Eventually Shavonda would wander off to flirt with the wannabe MCs arguing about whether Kanye was ever real enough to be called a sell-out, and Elena would sit down next to the harmless crackhead who made her home on the front steps, and Sasha would be left to watch on her own.
Sometimes she would twitch a hand or pop a shoulder in ghosted imitation of the moves in front of her, but she didn't try to join in. The girls who practiced with the b-boys were hardcore – they were the first to arrive and the last to leave and they did pushups on their water breaks. Sasha's mother disapproved of kids "wasting their time shaking their lazy asses to trash music full of cuss words and disrespecting women," and Sasha was careful to return home before her mama got done with work, sitting at the kitchen table with her homework open in front of her, and the radio turned on to some melodious Spanish ballad, which was the only way to get any language somewhat resembling what her Pai might have sounded like into the house.
Sasha would never dance when her mama was around, but sometimes her pencil would tap the clave out – 1-2-3, 1-2.
In the course of my field research for this book, I have had numerous conversations with competitive dancers who compare what they do against the standard of ballerinas. The (female) ballet dancer in pointe shoes and a tutu seems to be the pinnacle in the hierarchy of dance social capital. Although popular culture often mocks for comic effect the 'stiff and stuck-up' white ballet dancer who cannot 'get down' and 'let it hang' with the black (and very rarely, Asian or Latin@) hip hop dancers, the pervading assumption still seems to be as my Chinese-American ballet mistress teacher put it—"Ballet is the root technique. With it, you can do any kind of dance." Of course, privileging a certain technique as 'universal' or 'fundamental' leads very quickly to an essentializing and flattening process that tends to value diversity only as far as it assimilates or adds value to the dominant vocabulary.A motif I shall use throughout this chapter to illustrate the relationships I will be tracing between ballet, hip hop, and the competitive dance genres, is the commentary surrounding that potent and problematic region of a dancer's anatomy – the hips. Placement and use of the pelvis is probably the most instantly recognizable signifier of a dance's Africanist or Europeanist aesthetic, and the trajectory of social dances from their lower-class, black and brown African diasporic roots to the regulated, rich, white European classrooms they are codified in shows an accompanied straightening up of the hips, a journey towards verticality by the torso. As Brenda Dixon Gottschild trenchantly points out, while the grassroots traditions of dances like the Tango, the Rumba, the Charleston and the Lindy have an established aesthetic of an outthrust butt, a 1950s manual from the Arthur Murray Dance School admonishes students not to dance with the hips protruding backward. "Emphasizing the buttocks," she observes, "indicates an unacceptable—read "black"—aesthetic standard. (2003: 148)".
-- From chapter five: 'Kicking Ass: the pedagogy of policing race and appropriating sexuality' (103)
"We got our asses busted and stuck in detention all semester because of you, Danjou!"
Sasha remembers how furious Ramos was with Danjou the day that everyone who was part of the afterschool jam in the gym got busted because he brought his Rastafarian cousin along who went and lit up, and only LaRhette's smooth talking and Danjou's own painfully earnest apologies to Ms. James prevented it from becoming a police thing.
Danjou hunched over defensively, and Sasha remembers how detention stretched before them for the entire year, bleak and claustrophobic, when they—she and Ramos and Eddie and Big Girl—had made such meticulous plans about forming their own crew, a new kind of crew that did some funky spoken word stuff along with the usual beats, like the Def Poetry Jam people.
Ramos had spun off into his own wild, melodramatic world then, chilling very pointedly with E, and barely saying a word to Danjou, who had started out school as an outsider from New Orleans anyway, and who smiled at her shyly in class but never initiated a conversation.
Sasha remembers asking Danjou back to her house to practice their tango routine, and the rough, tender way he danced with her all afternoon, hands never slipping once from Pierre's prescribed positions.
Her mother had come home early, that evening of all evenings, and Sasha chose to be defiant and invite Danjou to stay for dinner. He had been scrupulously polite; grabbing her on the way to the bathroom to wash his hands to ask in an urgent whisper if her mother was the kind who got offended if the food wasn't completely finished and you hadn't accepted fourth servings, or if she preferred guests who didn't reach for the last helping in the dish.
That night her mother had started talking about black men, and the dangers of dating them, and how awful it was to be stuck raising a child on your own, especially if its daddy ended up in prison, and Sasha bit her tongue until one too many asides about 'niggers with thick lips who have nappy-headed brats' that prompted her to erupt into a flurry of venomous words of her own, most in defense of a father whose Portuguese-tinted phone calls grew more infrequent and irrelevant year after year.
Sasha remembers storming out of the house that night and walking over to Big Girl's, who pulled her on the bed and under the covers, and draped a solid, warm arm around her to keep the sobs from escaping. When Sasha woke up that morning, she let her hand slip down to touch one of Big Girl's breasts, eyes fearfully watching the other girl's face the whole time, ready to feign the guileless innocence of sleep. Her nipple protruded from the thin tank top like a marble and Sasha could see the areola through the fabric like a flower, so much browner and bigger than her own.
Danjou's nipples, she remembers, were much smaller, and delicate, when he finally took off his shirt in front of her. Danjou needed to be pushed, she discovered; he would retreat and retreat until he was sure someone had followed him all the way down to the place he felt secure in, and then whoosh! He would punch, or pirouette, or pounce as though the world had exploded and he was chasing after it. Practice sessions at Danjou's house contained more practice and less sex more because of him than her; his insecurity about how he compared to Ramos in class took priority over her need to discover more and more ways to touch and be touched.
This is how I would want my daughter to lose her virginity, Sasha remembers thinking, as she lay sprawled with her knees splayed open, and Danjou whispering "T-A-NGO" into every crevice and crease of her body.
Ramos kept getting more and more sullen, and Sasha remembers how practicing with him became brutal as he kept adding turns and kicks and show-off break-out routines that she was expected to magically anticipate and keep up with.
The night after the competition when they took Pierre and Caitlin and Tina (she remembers asking, and finding out that Morgan said 'she was busy') to a party in Eddie's cousin's basement apartment, Sasha remembers how she and Ramos popped and locked their old routines on the floor, and how Danjou slid in, grooving and top rocking like he was born to be a part of them, and Sasha thought, 'This is it'.
She pulled Ramos in close to her, hips sliding together like snakes, and whispered, "Look, I know. I know you just want to dance with me, you don't want to fuck me." Ramos looked at her with the same kind of terror that she suspected existed in her eyes on some mornings, and she hugged him hard. "I'd share him with you, if I could," she added, and he laughed and bit back, because Ramos always played offensive, "Yeah, but would he share you with LaRhette? Don't think I didn't see you looking."
"I can look all I like as long as I don't touch," Sasha remembers stammering, and Ramos grinned like a cholo and dipped her down almost to the floor and drawled, "You dance fly as I do, girl, and they'll all come running to touch you."
In her seminal case study of Tango, Marta Savigliano meticulously laid out the capitalist marketing tactics the dance was subjected to as it was used to reinforce the dominant imperialist politics of its adoptive practitioners. She used the emotional imagery present in the physical dance to serve as the metaphor by which the theorized economic and cultural 'dance' between the "uncivilized" tango and "civilized" economic powers resembles a subversive struggle in which "the colonizer dominates with desire [and] the colonized resists with passion" (1995: 76). In this manner Tango transitioned from the Argentinean political commodity of passion, and "was incorporated into the world economy of passion" (ibid 82)".This relationship of economic domination is not accidentally mirrored by the rhetoric surrounding the Latin dances in competitive dance. I am tempted to offend my copy editor by putting the term "Latin" in quotes throughout, because as a catch-all phrase for what in actuality is a panoply of dance traditions from nations across two continents and several islands, with drastically diverse political, social and economic histories, the term serves to illustrate, much as Edward Said pointed out about the "Orient", what White Euro-America thinks about itself.
The absence of any perceptible number of racially self-identified Latin dancers does not lessen the necessity for the term to serve as a mirror from which Whiteness can define itself. As Juliet McMains' study of 'brownface' in dancesport noted:
"The ballroom Latin dancer borrows some of the passion and sexuality associated with Latin dancing without forfeiting the class and racial privilege by which ballroom dancing is defined. Neither the white dancers in bronze paint nor the English dances with Latin names become the racial Others they refer to. They maintain their white privilege even as they trade in the exotic characteristics associated with Latin culture." (2001: 57)-- From chapter eight: 'Tangoing with Marx: Economics, colonialism and capitalism on the dance floor'(Kean 2017: 259)
"You should move to Brooklyn. Be closer to the studio, and all of us."
Sasha still remembers how exquisitely painful it was to get a token of appreciation or acceptance from Morgan, not because she would take it away, but because she would manage to always follow it up with the revelation of some new and unforeseeable arena in which to court social failure in.
On the dance floor, it would be perfect. Morgan would watch as she partnered Ramos - the two of them the only ones to continue with lessons thanks to Pierre's work-study offer. Morgan would offer suggestions and corrections with the smooth friendliness of a diva coaching a child actor, and occasionally she would even offer Travis up for practice, like a favorite doll.
And sometimes, when classes were over and Tina would kick back with them and gossip about old competitions and classic moves, Morgan would even get up and demonstrate, using Sasha as maneuverable furniture. Morgan would lead more often than not so that she could ridicule the incompetent partners she was bitching about, but Sasha had no problems being the follower.
When Morgan first kissed her, Sasha remembers her first words being an incredulous, "But... you can't be gay, you're so beautiful!" Which had been, fortunately, the most appropriate faux pas she could have made, because Morgan's lips curved into an indulgent smile, and then deigned to kiss her again.
"Is Travis gay too?" she had asked, far more fascinated by the sudden revelations in this shiny exotic world than by what she had just had confirmed about herself.
"As a maypole," Morgan had drawled, "but he's got a hopeless crush on Pierre, and before you ask, he's not into slumming it, so no romantic double dates with Ramos."
"Ramos wouldn't want to dance with him, let alone date him," Sasha had answered automatically, but wished a second later she had shut Morgan up with a kiss instead.
Even though Morgan had an apartment of her own and a suite at her parent's house in Long Island it seemed like there were never enough times and places where they were allowed to make out.
"You can't be gay and be the sexiest Latin dancer on three annual Dance magazine covers," sneered Morgan, as though Sasha was attempting the feat, instead of juggling a job and college and Ramos's Def Dance crew while continuing with Pierre's classes because he seemed so eager to have at least one of the old dungeon crowd hang in and Morgan's world was shiny and exciting and fun like a rollercoaster as long as Morgan was along for the ride.
So Sasha remembers carefully scheduled 'date nights' where Morgan would tell the waiters it was fine to bring the dessert menu since it was a 'girls night out' or they would go to a club and Morgan wouldn't let any of the men dance with her because "she's just getting over a bad breakup and I don't need the hassle of having to pick her up at 3 in the morning after her rebound fling with one of you sleazebags" or they would go to a show and Morgan would try to persuade her during the intermission to quit her performance studies major and focus on ballet and jazz and a voice lesson or two because with her body and looks she could make it Broadway easily: "Ambiguously ethnic gets cast so easily these days".
Sasha tells people it was an inevitable break up because few relationships can survive grad school on the other end of the continent, but it wasn't. Because she still remembers the sting and fizzle of something cracking inside her the weekend Morgan took her home to meet her parents as, "an up and coming dancer I'm mentoring whom Pierre spotted in some ghetto high school and who'll probably end up getting cast in a ton of music videos: she's so fabulously exotic."
Morgan's mother had smiled delightedly and said, "Oh, I do admire all you Latin women with your natural tans. Maybe you can give Morgan a tip or two about the music!" And she had then proceeded to punctuate every third sentence directed at Sasha with Castilian Spanish until she had to respond, "I don't speak Spanish, actually. My father is a cafuzo from Brazil."
"You must get your lovely face from your mother, then," Mrs. Fischer had tinkled, and because Sasha was tired, and uncomfortable, and sick of what mirrors told her about her mother and her face, and angry that Morgan wouldn't even sit on the same sofa as her, she answered, "Well, my mother is Black."
And it would have still not been the heart-crumpling thing that it ended up being, Sasha remembers, if Morgan's mother had not said, complimentarily, "Oh, well, don't worry dear, we would never have known!"
And if Morgan hadn't, later that night, snuck into her guest bedroom and in a rare moment of genuine tenderness and afterglow kissed her eyes and whispered, "Don't worry about what Mother said, you fit in with all of us just fine. We all think of you as White."
The effect of competitive social dancing might seem relatively contained to a specialist, fringe demographic, but its ripple effect on social dances at large permeates every production, consumption, and discussion of the manifestations of participatory movements."The hegemonic power of these deeply embedded colonial paradigms relies on pervasive and redundant articulation, and the ballroom has provided one of many venues for their performance. Similar conceptual frameworks also structure practices in local political organizations, academic institutions, and corporate contexts, ultimately aiding in the naturalization of these categories as they are performed on the dance floor." (Bosse 2007: 41)
And yet, social dancing has always been a multi-channel means of communication, and resistance and subversion is as inherent to its practice as is assimilation and dominance.
-- From 'Conclusion: A Savage Reclamation' (Kean 2017: 304)
"Dang, I always forget how beautiful they are."
This is what Sasha remembers: a close cropped head and a tremulous smile and eyes luminous with tears as the man turned at her involuntary, "I know," breathed out five seconds after it had ended and everyone else stood up to give the obligatory standing ovation that 'Revelations' always commanded.
She remembers a shared cab, and an impromptu stop at a bar that led to blisters caused by three unexpected hours of dancing in inappropriate shoes.
She remembers the minutiae of difference (birth control and aftershave and body hair and semen) being swept away by the secrets of shared scars. (Poverty and police and code-switching and the corrosive tears of white women.)
She remembers making one of those 3am existential breakdown phone calls that are only explicable in the first fizz of infatuation to Jess Bindra, whose transition in Sasha's life from unexpectedly long-lasting rebound fling to platonic dyke best friend had been accompanied by soap opera histrionics performed by two sets of hand-wringing mothers. Sasha remembers when the tide turned from tears to laughter-induced hiccups; as Jess sighed, "Well, look at this way. You may be letting down the Lesbos, but at least you're sticking it to Whitey, innit. God, you know what our mums are going to say? 'What's the point of being a bisexual if she's going to end up with a black man'!"
She remembers hastily snatched long distance phone calls that turn into brief coffee break meet ups that turn into hurriedly scrawled post-it notes saying 'need milk, feed the fish, i love you'.
She does not remember, cannot possibly remember, all the dancing.
She remembers the day she realized that and did a little dance of glee right there in the hallway, her page proofs slipping out from her hands like the shards of light falling from a disco ball.
The librarians at UCLA, NYU and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library were unfailingly helpful and unflaggingly resourceful in helping me track down obscure and out of print material, I would like to especially thank Barbara Gordon for her truly fearsome research skills. Angela Carvelli helped me negotiate through the 'series of tubes' and wrangle video technology.Various academic colleagues, peers and correspondents helped me construct a stronger thesis with their constructive critiques and generous commentary: Jasvinder Bindra for her important discussions on the gendered terminology of sports, Eva Rodriguez for personal testimony as a Black Latina ballerina, Nita Callahan for going over the manuscript and providing essential input about the linguistic implications of Latin cultures, Deeba Resham for many trans-Atlantic IM sessions about the role of the fantastic in Orientalism and cultural appropriation, Elgin Smith and his The Lil' Saints Crew for the comparisons between competitive hip hop and social dance, Willow Rosenberg, self-proclaimed 'Janeite' for helping me negotiate the world of Ren Faire dancing and providing me a title for the book.
My students at NYU have educated me about many things besides the pop culture references they so kindly translate for me, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to theorize dance with them in a city that embodies performative movement so innovatively, so spectacularly and so pervasively.
I owe a very personal and emotional debt to Pierre Dulaine, who introduced me to the world of competitive social dancing, and who could not have been more proud and supportive as I went on to challenge and critique it. His program, Dancing Classrooms, provided me with a great deal of research material, and its administrative officer, Tina Swanson, was extremely patient with the many inquires I have made over the years. I must also acknowledge the role that Morgan Fischer has played in my developing understanding of what it means to be a competitive dancer.
Without an emotional support system, there would be no nourishment for the intellectual pursuits of academics, and I would like to thank Elena, Ramos, Egypt, Liyah and Chenille for their friendship and honesty in helping me keep it real.
And finally the last words of gratitude, like the last dance, are always saved for Derek, who after sleepless night shifts of medical internship never once turned down a request to promote scientific research by hitting the clubs.
Sasha Kean
New York City, 2016