Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

10. Opening Up 100

— 100 — 10 OPENINGUP For weeks to follow, the story of Tom and Amy’s surprising anniversary announcement made its way through the communicative pathways of the dance. It had become narrative, of course, and it was imbued with values that would seem to fuse the moral world of its teller with the real events of the story, however extraordinary. Such, in fact, was the nature of much dance group talk. At Rapp’s after the dance, at parties, and at most any idle moment together, spirited talk was one of the invigorating pleasures of dance group life. Narratives were most always realist genres—gossip, rumor, and personal narrative—whose narrative momentum was propelled by a moral dimension situated not in the telling but in the told, in the narrated life. Indeed, dancers took great interest and pleasure in one another’s lives— in romance, success, health, adversity, adventure—particularly when they were recounted and given dramatic structure in talk. Dancers spent much of the week apart from one another, and talk served to bind the moments spent together. Particularly as other dance communities sprung up, dancers also traveled frequently, and talk would likewise bind them to their friends in other communities. The accumulation of sto- — 101 — Opening Up ries, in turn, linked narrated events to broader experiential categories, establishing public relevance for individual biography. On the dance floor, the accumulated excess of identity that had been ascribed in talk to a name was inscribed on the body of the community and of the individuals. In the contra line, with its intense yet contrived encounters, was there any way to avoid bringing biographical excess to bear on social bodies? Is “gauntlet” too strong a word for this? Is this not precisely how the dance counteracted loneliness and isolation, by incorporating the chronic excess of unembodied biography? This is how I experienced it: biographical talk interpreted raw experience and transformed it into terms that mattered, both of which were ultimately embodied on the dance floor as authentic identity and community. In this way also the ideals of the community were manifested dialogically— neither entirely as subjective experience nor as objective ideal, but at some point where the two converged. There was also a therapeutic aspect of dance group talk. It is useful to recall that the period of the dance was sandwiched between the postWWII and postmodern eras, both of which celebrated, for different reasons, individualism over community. Between these bookends arose the communicational paradigm in psychology, itself set between Freudian or behavioral individualism on the one hand and evolutionary psychology on the other. Thomas Szasz’s “The Myth of Mental Illness” and Gregory Bateson’s double-bind theory of schizophrenia had inspired the holistic psychology movement, which positioned the etiology of mental illness outside the individual. The political implications of these theories were well established, such as in the famous SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) Port Huron Statement of 1962, which pinpointed social alienation as endemic to the critical societal ills of the day (Roszak 1969: 57–59). Thus in the counterculture there was a prevailing belief that talk could heal both self and society, and dancers moved effortlessly and frequently into the roles of healer and subject. At the urging of another dancer, I became involved in Re-evaluation Counseling, a movement offering training in peer counseling, but this experience mirrored informal therapeutic talk that routinely transpired in the dance group. The most profound implication pertained to the — 102 — Old-Time Music and Dance dance itself: if the preponderance of social ills lay in the unbridged gulf between self and other, then dance, as an act of social conjugation, could have profound therapeutic and political effects. Indeed, many came to the dance with troubled pasts and found refuge in romance, friendship, and community. Having eschewed wealth, social status, and political power, many aspired to self-realization and found their most potent demons inside themselves. So therapeutic talk consisted often of finding common cause with others in the group. Indeed, it was an epiphany of relief to find others who struggled with obstacles to self-realization, sometimes as a consequence of submerged psychological wounds. It is difficult nowadays to grasp the rarity of this. In the 1990s, radio and television talk shows made these matters commonplace in public discourse, and the evangelical religious movement brought personal spirituality to a previously staid mainstream religious atmosphere. But in the...