On Dance as Social Technology
From Trinidad to Tolstoy to Tulum
An irony of our time is that the more developed we become, the more we return to a paleolithic lifestyle of our protohuman ancestors. This is the first in a series of posts that will explore this trend.
In her book, Dancing in the Streets A History of Collective Joy, Barnard Ehrenreich collects a number of illuminating passages taken from Captain Cook to Charles Darwin, highlighting the 18th and 19th century reactions to the ritualistic dancing of primitive peoples they encountered in their expeditions. These dances were witnessed from Fiji, to Australia, to Africa, and in every case described as “barbarous”, “fiendish”, and “sensual”. An account from Trinidad depicts “drunkeness bursting forth in yells and bacchanalian orgies.”
Ehrenreich cites anthropologist Erike Bourguinon, who found that “92 percent of small-scale societies surveyed encouraged some sort of religious trances, in most cases through ecstatic group ritual”. From all accounts these rituals were shocking to the Europeans of the time.
Since Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, our society has changed, and where dance among the aristocratic elite demonstrated a subtle romanticism as demonstrated in Tolstoy’s presentation of Vronsky and Karenina or Austen’s depiction of Darcy and Bennet, elite dance today, from the Mirage in Brooklyn to Silencio in Paris veers far closer to the ecstatic, if not the orgiastic, nature of its original primal form.
The mediators of today’s form of dance directly reflect these Dionysian energies. The genres of music are literally called “trance” or “jungle”. The drugs called ecstasy or otherwise are the same hallucinogenic compounds as used in earlier shamanic rituals. The culmination of modern aristocratic dance is a descent into the loss of self.
Dance is a profound aspect of the human experience, and its character reveals the subconscious nature of its society. The form of dance popular among cosmopolitan international elites today, namely clubbing infused with psychedelic drugs, is more reminiscent of the jungles of Bali or coves of Trinidad than it is the halls of St. Petersburg or the ballrooms of Derbyshire.
Descriptively, I think this is an uncontroversial claim, and I think it matters normatively. In the case of the 19th century aristocracy, the ritual of dance was deeply imbued with meaning - meaning as conveyed through the demonstration of taste in clothing, grace in dancing, and the apprehension of subtle verbal and non-verbal cues to facilitate the sorting of romantic partners and friends.The cynic reduces these subtleties to zero-sum status games, but these subtleties served as a valuable social technology, not just for their facilitation of assortative matching, but for their dispersion of physical aesthetics to its participants. Importantly, the exhibition of social graces took place in physical settings in which multiple generations of a society were present, thereby facilitating the peaceable transition of status from old to young.
Consider Natasha Rostova, the young debutant in War and Peace to whom the prospect of her first ball “was so splendid that she hardly believed it would come true”. To her, the ball imbues a poignant, if girlish, romanticism in which she “tried to assume the majestic air she considered indispensable for a girl on such an occasion.” The beauty of this romanticism carries meaning across generations such that the hostess “recalled the golden, irrecoverable days of her own girlhood and her own first ball.”
Contrast this with the modern night life of high society, the same social cues of fashion and taste exist, but the aesthetics are otherwise inverted. Rather than an ascent up the “the brightly illuminated stairs between the flowers” to reach an elevated ballroom, the modern clubgoer descends to reach the dimly lit underbelly of the club. Where the architecture of the first manifests a literal ascent towards an Apollonian light, the latter preordains a descent into darkness. The darkness isn’t evil, so much as it is representative of the embrace of a subconscious dionysianism. It should come as no surprise that the society which creates higher, nobler ends is that which seeks ascent into brightness in the midst of the night.
The proponents of modern dance culture would likely emphasize the loss of individual ego that leads to a collective communion and a literal shared consciousness in its more profound club and festival settings. I believe this literally occurs, and I believe it is powerful, but I also doubt its ability to effectively cohere that group. After day breaks in Tulum or the effigy is burnt in Black Rock city, what is there to show by way of lasting change and progress for the revelers beyond a fleeting psychedelic unity?
As stilted as a 19th century dance hall might seem to a modern audience, I believe it was a far more effective medium for transmitting social technology. Equally it would require a delusional conservative to suggest a literal return to that 19th century medium today. What then, might a constructive, Apollonian form of dance and nocturnal celebration look like in the modern age?