Why Is There Always Energy for Dancing?

Scrapbook of snapshots of Randy Martin, courtesy of Ginger Gillespie.

As a response to Randy Martin’s work, I want to locate this essay in the flux between two economies, one that is premised on the notion of scarcity and the other that is fed by a certainty of abundance. Martin was keenly attuned to these differences and analyzed most persuasively how dance responds to them with alacrity, inventiveness, and bold moves. During the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s, for example, Martin found in Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s/The Promised Land a deft and defiant morphing of allegations of scarcity into a proclamation of plenty (Martin 1996). More recently, he saw the nonvertical adeptness developed in b-boying and skateboarding as both a survival strategy and a political critique of our current conditions of precarity (Martin 2012). Always eager to connect dancing to diverse forms of social and economic exchange, Martin expanded enormously our understanding of dance’s functions and significance.

Here I will focus on a different but, I believe, central aspect of Martin’s overall concerns: the ability of dance to make manifest people’s capacity to mobilize. Martin found in his own experiences of dancing and watching dance a unique experience of empowerment. Most persuasively described in an early essay of his entitled “Dance as Social Movement” (1985) this sense of empowerment was collective, evolving slowly over the creation of a new dance work and involving a transfer of authority from choreographer to dancers as they collaborated on its making. This sense of empowerment could subsequently be conveyed to viewers as they watched the dancers realize their potential to act and their ability to work cohesively in performance. For Martin this coming together of people, actions, and purpose provided a palpable demonstration of what in Marxist social theory was referred to as “mobilization,” the process through which people collectively determine their own future and move decisively toward it.

In what follows I will locate this capacity of dance to mobilize within a larger framework of answers to the question, “why is there always energy for dancing?” I will argue that because of its exceptional capacity to impart a sense of mobilizing, the invitation to dance most often elicits a positive response. Not only is dancing something in which people most often willingly engage, but dancing also produces the energy to sustain itself as an activity. That is, dancing forges a kind of inexhaustible energy, an energy that far surpasses the amount of physical strength and endurance one would typically have to expend on any given task or activity. Dancing fuels the body more than it exhausts it, thereby defying the logic of thermodynamics and even calling into question the use of metaphors such as “fueling” and “exhausting,” the ones I have just invoked.¹

Of course, there are times when one is too tired to dance (dance marathons, for example), and there are dances that feel like drudgery or menial labor (stripping in clubs, perhaps, or performing standard routines in Las Vegas). There are also times when dancing becomes a form of defilement, degradation, and even torture, as when it was coerced by nineteenth-century slave owners in order to display the physical strength and vigor of slaves for sale on the auction block (Hartman 1997). Dancing, like any other activity, can be placed in the service of all manner of political and social agendas.

What if for the moment, however, we consider the ways that people seem energized by the prospect of dancing, responding to the invitation to dance by lighting up, expanding outward, and generally taking pleasure in being drawn into moving? They might be exhausted from working all day, distracted by worries about money, health, or friends. They might want to look cool and disinterested on the dance floor, but they do keep dancing, and at some point they really get into it. What if we focus on these ways that dancing makes people smile, perk up, and chuckle? How it channels...