Students overlook the spirituality of ballroom dancing
John Medaglia
Issue date: 5/5/06 Section: Ed-Op
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Let's say you go out on a Saturday night to a club downtown. You approach and see the familiar sight of the 6-foot-8, 310-pound bouncer with a braided goatee and exactly 41 tattoos. You hear, or rather feel, the thunderous vibrations of many speakers from inside the building. After being patted down you enter the scene and are greeted by a bar on one side and an expansive dance floor packed with people. The males are usually wearing long sleeved shirts and long pants, and the females compensate by wearing the opposite. The dancing is essentially quasi-sex, and if the guys are not the friends of a group of girls, the girls will usually turn him away and use their girlfriends for protection.
Don't get me wrong, I love the clubbing scene myself. It's a specific type of energy and population that you can't find elsewhere, and it's a great time to just go out and forget everything else in the world. What I'm here to share with you today is my perspective on the other side of the scale- the lost arts of the dance.
"Lost" might not be the best term- maybe "elusive" is better. I hesitate to call most of what goes on in the clubs "dancing" because it really just gives off a different vibe. I mean this mostly in regards to how the men move with the women- close, sweaty, and bobbing back and forth while grabbing flesh. Again fun, but there are other places for that. No, the dance is truly another art entirely.
I think most people know the dance when they see it. It's when a man and a woman are hand in hand, moving to the rhythm of the music, turning and gliding across the floor in tandem, locking eyes in dramatic flirtations, moving closer and farther from one another as the dance unfolds. The type of dance that every woman and man thirsts to know- the woman often finds it beautiful and attractive, the man often jealous of the men that get the attention for it (though hopefully they learn to like it once they get over that). I speak of the ballroom dances- tango, foxtrot, waltz, salsa, meringue, swing, rumba ... the list goes on.
Don't get me wrong, I love the clubbing scene myself. It's a specific type of energy and population that you can't find elsewhere, and it's a great time to just go out and forget everything else in the world. What I'm here to share with you today is my perspective on the other side of the scale- the lost arts of the dance.
"Lost" might not be the best term- maybe "elusive" is better. I hesitate to call most of what goes on in the clubs "dancing" because it really just gives off a different vibe. I mean this mostly in regards to how the men move with the women- close, sweaty, and bobbing back and forth while grabbing flesh. Again fun, but there are other places for that. No, the dance is truly another art entirely.
I think most people know the dance when they see it. It's when a man and a woman are hand in hand, moving to the rhythm of the music, turning and gliding across the floor in tandem, locking eyes in dramatic flirtations, moving closer and farther from one another as the dance unfolds. The type of dance that every woman and man thirsts to know- the woman often finds it beautiful and attractive, the man often jealous of the men that get the attention for it (though hopefully they learn to like it once they get over that). I speak of the ballroom dances- tango, foxtrot, waltz, salsa, meringue, swing, rumba ... the list goes on.
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