Why We Forgot How To Dance
Perhaps white people can't jump or run - but once upon a time, we could dance.
There are a lot of things that White people stereotypically can’t do. We can’t run; we can’t jump; we can’t cook; and we can’t dance.
Some of those things make a lot of sense. But dance? From Sweden to Iran, every culture has a history of dancing. It’s as distinctly human as complaining about taxes. Yet when I traveled around Colombia and Brazil as a European, I realised pretty quickly that dance permeated those cultures in a way that it simply doesn’t in Europe. It’s true — white people really can’t dance. And in the spirit of total fairness, I’ll lump some East Asian countries into the “can’t dance” category as well (looking at you, Japan).
But once upon a time, we really could dance. This is the story of how we forgot.
Today, Europe has plenty of regional and folk dances, most of these look a little silly, if we’re being honest. These folk practices, like Morris dancing from England or Bavarian folk dances in Germany, tend to focus on synchronized movement and costumes over body control, creative engagement with the music, or the other things that we typically find impressive from dancing today. They continue on as a relic of our history, something that old men do at county fairs, or children do at school for a few days.
They are also thoroughly professionalised dances with strong performance scenes and international tours. What this means is that a single phenomenal dancer can entertain dozens or hundreds of people (while busting, for example), but this doesn’t reflect a broader cultural affinity with dance. Most Colombians can dance salsa to some extent; most Irish people can’t do anything close to real stepdance. And Irish stepdance and flamenco rely on elaborate costumes, years of training, and involve the sort of stiff, upright posture that looks good on a stage but doesn’t make social dancing easy or fun.
With the hunch, the loose arms, the everyday clothing, and the improvisational nature, I look at this and think “Huh — that’s an awful lot like swing or blues dancing”. Which makes perfect sense because, regardless of cultural origin, some things are just more or less comfortable for the human body.
It’s important to note that many or most of Europe’s “traditional” folk dances have gone through similar processes. When medieval English people danced around the village may-pole, they didn’t do so with ram-rod straight backs. The descriptions of most traditional European folk dances, from French bourrée to Polish mazurka to Norwegian halling, suggest much livelier and wilder dances than the versions we’re familiar with today. And you don’t have to take the word of chroniclers — you can see the “evolution” with your own eyes by looking at old video footage of dances in regions which were slow to industrialize. Compare this 1898 video of the Italian tarantella, for example, with a modern day version of the same dance:
When you reevaluate European folk dances by how they would have looked historically (especially if you imagine the dancers in everyday clothing), a lot of them look less dorky. Consider the Alpine schuhplattler, which involves lots of stomping and foot slapping. Visually, it’s not a million ways away from South African gumboot dancing, which is extremely technically complex and difficult. Today, schuhplattler is a relatively sedate affair typically rehearsed by middle-aged men. Historically, however, it was a much more vibrant dance, both improvisational and notoriously acrobatic.
Like so many of Europe’s folk dances, it eventually fell into the clutches of folklore and culture clubs which enforced strict dress codes. Once a youthful, spectacular affair, it has become a relic of the past. But if you imagine it being done by a bunch of drunk young guys in jeans in a bar, a lot of the silliness disappears, and you can’t help but think, “Wow — once upon a time, these people really could dance.”
It’s impossible to give a clear timeline of Europe’s disappearing dance culture, because Europe is a very big and diverse place. Northern Germans, for example, probably forgot how to dance generations before the southern Spanish or Neapolitans. But there are general trends that we can point to.
For a start, dance died in cities. This could be a little surprising to some, since we might associate the decline in mass dance culture with the Church and the sort of prudish attitudes that we associate with country bumpkins — you know, like the infamous town from Footloose.
But dance’s decline in Europe is closely tied up with the elevation of upper-class courtly dances in the late medieval period. With the Italian Renaissance came a new focus on studying the body, and on codifying art and knowledge. Rich people had always watched dancers for entertainment, but this is when we start getting instructional books written on things like fencing and dancing.
In turn, those arts have to start developing fixed rules and teachable standards. If you have a professional dance troupe performing for the king, you don’t want some backwards peasant offending him by improvising a suggestive hip thrust. And if the king wants exciting performances every week or even every night, he needs full-time professionals with schools. The most famous dance to emerge from this period is ballet, which emerged from the Medici court in Italy before spreading to France and reaching new heights under Louis XIV.
Peasant dances didn’t die overnight once ballet was invented. And ballet was only one of many courtly dances of the period, and didn’t become the dance we recognise today until centuries after Renaissance Italy. But slowly and surely, people in the cities began to look down on peasant dances, preferring to admire the elegant, gentle dances of the upper-class: the quadrille, the waltz, and so on. And of course, people in cities are busy, and more conscious of their appearance and social status — so they dance less and in a safer fashion, preferring subdued, rehearsed movements. Often, they prefer to watch rather than dance at all.
In the countryside, people kept dancing — but the countryside got emptier as people moved towards the booming industrial economies of the cities. And as dance became synonymous with the peasantry, it also became synonymous with poverty and backwardness. A similar dynamic also emerged between the European powers, and their colonies. Being stiff and motionless became the mark of a good European gentlemen, while rhythm and free-spirited movement were sneered upon as the hallmarks of the undisciplined colonials.
And of course, you can’t talk about a decline in European dance culture without talking about the Protestant Reformation. The medieval Catholic Church was fairly tolerant if dancing, even encouraging it in religious processions like carnivals.
The dour fanaticism of the Protestant Reformation, by contrast, would see town dances banned outright by Oliver Cromwell in England, and prohibited at weddings, taverns and festivals in Calvinist Geneva. From the Netherlands to New England, from Quakers to Southern Baptists, war was waged against “Popish revelry”. Dancing on Sundays, dancing with the opposite sex, showing dance steps to children, and teaching dance as a profession were all punished and discouraged. Even in the 1950s, when Elvis Presley scandalized White American audiences with his hip thrusts on stage, these social taboos retained some force.
A lot of those factors have diminished in recent generations. Very few white people live in Protestant theocracies anymore; we no longer have peasants that are bought and sold with the land they were born on; we no longer have kings that host elaborate ballet spectacles every evening.
But dance isn’t making any dramatic comeback in Europe, North America or Australia. Dancing is hard, and people who work desk jobs and can’t touch their toes stay away from dancing not out of contempt, but shame. In today’s Britain or Germany, people stand awkwardly in clubs, afraid to move their hips. “Oh, I was never great at dancing”, they might chuckle.
The same people are probably also not particularly good at cooking, driving, or using computers, but do all of those things on a daily basis, accepting that they are essentials of life. Of course, some people cook better than others, but we all have to, don’t we? For most of history, all humans have treated dance the same way — simply being bad at it wasn’t a good reason not to. And if you have no natural talent for cooking but cook every day for 30 years, you will be a wonderful cook compared to the bloke who has refused to cook his whole life.
Instead, dance for us white folks has become something like triathlon, or building model railroads: a hobby for obsessives, rather than one with broad appeal. There are casual runners and swimmers, but when did you last meet a casual triathlete? When I ask Americans or Europeans if they can dance, I usually get one of these two answers:
1) Oh, no, I’ve always had a terrible ear for music, and my body is so stiff! Nobody would want to see me dancing
2) I love dancing! I did 15 years of ballet, modern and contemporary dance as a child, and then ballroom dancing at college, and now I dance tango every weekends and go to festivals and workshops when I can!
That’s not how humans are humans to work. We’re all supposed to run, swim, cook, sing, paint, and dance. These things don’t have to make money or impress an audience on TikTok to have value.
I have a distinct feeling that when you're talking about "white people", really you mainly mean those in northern Europe, the US/Canada, and Australia/New Zealand (and also the white South Africans). Latin Americans, especially in such countries as Argentina and Uruguay, are also whites (i.e. those who don't have so much Amerindian or African ancestry if at all), but are much more akin to people in southern Europe than to those in the regions mentioned in the previous sentence.
The point being that southern Europeans and especially Latin Americans, I dare say, know how to dance these days more than northern Europeans, North Americans, or Australasians (plus South African whites).