What is it about dancing that makes it go with dying?
I was listening
to the B-52s yesterday, and got to the part in Rock Lobster where the lead singer
says something about "going down ... down ... down" and thought that if I were
dancing instead of driving at the time, I and everyone else on the dance floor
would be sinking downward, slowly, as if we were dying. (Or caught in a slow-
motion gravity surge, as if Jupiter were approaching slowly on the other side of
the Earth. But given the physics involved, dying seems more likely.) The next
realization was that there are a lot of fake deaths in dancing: ones that are a
response to words or volume in rock songs ("Shout" is another example), ones that
are part of a routine in competitive ice-skating, where for a while every pair had
a choeographed "death" at the end of their routines, ones that tell a story in
ballet or interpretive dance.
Why is that? Is it that dancing
symbolizes life and getting to triumph over death if only for the duration of the
dance? If so that's a mixed metaphor, because in the frock songs dancers generally
do come back to jubilant life, but in ballet and ice skating they usually stay
down until the piece is over. Then there's Ring Around A Rosy. There the symbolism
is explicit and has been discussed to death (er, sorry) but I've never seen an
explanation of why it would be something little kids would want to play, or that
adults would want them to play.
There are also any number of songs
about old couples (I can think of at least three offhand) and stories (another
one) where an especially lasting love is portrayed by showing how the now-elderly
lovers still love to dance together. In that case, I think, dance is both love and
life in comparison to age and approaching death.
And there are even
some examples of the opposite, where dance happens after death, though I'm not
sure whether they prove the point, disprove it, or are another animal entirely.
I'm thinking of things like old woodcuts where Death is shown dancing during
plague times or wars, and maybe of the Danse Macabre.
I had just
closed this essay when the lyrics of "Safety Dance" came to mind and reminded me
(via Emma Bull) of another related case -- the faery rings where the dancers will
never die, and where any mortal who joins them will not age.
I don't know whether the link between the two things means anything or not, but
they seem too closely linked not to. Life and death? The benefits of exercise? A
fossil of an old belief (that I've never come across otherwise) that no ones dies
while dancing? I still think there's at least a story in there - and I don't write
fiction so it's free for the taking.
The above train of
thought, you may realize, is a direct result of the gift of a
href="http://dichroic.diaryland.com/presurreal.html">mandolin. Rudder thinks
it's the best as well as most creative gift MBtW has ever given (we'll see what he
thinks after he hears me trying to play it!) which may be true, but I still say
there's a surreal element in it. (It's more a comment on me than on either male
that I consider "surreal" and "good gift" not to be mutually exclusive. Though the
same applies to at least one of them.) Speaking of little deaths. I broke a string
on the mandolin while trying to tune it. That was when I realized that instruments
with paired strings like mandolinae and twelve-string guitars have a major
advantage, in that an instrument with one broken string can still be played with
all notes present and accessible.