[Tango-L] NYT: Dance, Dance, Revolution?

Tue Jan 15 21:20:13 EST 2008

FYI.  About dancing and antiquated cabaret laws.  We should all be 
dancing tango in the streets! :)

THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 3, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Dance, Dance, Revolution
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

COMPARED with most of the issues that the venerable civil liberties 
lawyer Norman Siegel takes up, this one may seem like the ultimate in 
urban frivolity: Late last month, he joined hundreds of hip-hoppers, 
salsa dancers, Lindy Hoppers and techno-heads boogying along Fifth 
Avenue to protest New York City’s 80-year-old restrictions on dancing in 
bars.

But disputes over who can dance, how and where, are at least as old as 
civilization, and arise from the longstanding conflict between the 
forces of order and hierarchy on the one hand, and the deep human 
craving for free-spirited joy on the other.

New York’s cabaret laws limit dancing to licensed venues. They date back 
to the Harlem Renaissance, which had created the unsettling prospect of 
interracial dancing.

For decades, no one paid much attention to the laws until Mayor Rudolph 
Giuliani, bent on turning Manhattan into a giant mall/food court, 
decided to get tough. Today, the city far more famous for its night life 
than its Sunday services has only about 170 venues where it is legal to 
get up and dance — hence last month’s danced protest, as well as an 
earlier one in February.

Dust-ups over dancing have become a regular feature of urban life. Dance 
clubs all over the country have faced the threat of shutdowns because 
the dancing sometimes spills over into the streets. While neighbors 
annoyed by sleepless nights or the suspicion of illegal drug use may be 
justified in their concerns, conflict over public dancing has a long 
history — one that goes all the way back to the ancient Mediterranean world.

The Greeks danced to worship their gods — especially Dionysus, the god 
of ecstasy. But then the far more strait-laced Romans cracked down 
viciously on Dionysian worship in 186 B.C., even going on to ban dancing 
schools for Roman children a few decades later. The early Christians 
incorporated dance into their liturgy, despite church leaders’ worries 
about immodesty. But at the end of the fourth century, the archbishop of 
Constantinople issued the stern pronouncement: “For where there is a 
dance, there is also the Devil.”

The Catholic Church did not succeed in prohibiting dancing within 
churches until the late Middle Ages, and in doing so perhaps 
inadvertently set off the dance “manias” that swept Belgium, Germany and 
Italy starting in the 14th century. Long attributed to some form of 
toxin — ergot or spider venom — the manias drove thousands of people to 
the streets day and night, mocking and menacing the priests who tried to 
stop them.

In northern Europe, Calvinism brought a hasty death to the old public 
forms of dancing, along with the costuming, masking and feasting that 
had usually accompanied them. All that survived, outside of vestiges of 
“folk dancing,” were the elites’ tame, indoor ballroom dances, fraught, 
as in today’s “Dancing With the Stars,” with anxiety over a possible 
misstep. When Europeans fanned out across the globe in the 18th and 19th 
centuries, the colonizers made it a priority to crush the danced rituals 
of indigenous people, which were seen as savagery, devil worship and 
prelude to rebellion.

To the secular opponents of public dancing, it is always a noxious 
source of disorder and, in New York’s case, noise. But hardly anyone 
talks about what is lost when the music stops and the traditional venues 
close. Facing what he saw as an epidemic of melancholy, or what we would 
now call depression, the 17th-century English writer Robert Burton 
placed much of the blame on the Calvinist hostility to “dancing, 
singing, masking, mumming and stage plays.” In fact, in some cultures, 
ecstatic dance has been routinely employed as a cure for emotional 
disorders. Banning dancing may not cause depression, but it removes an 
ancient cure for it.

The need for public, celebratory dance seems to be hardwired into us. 
Rock art from around the world depicts stick figures dancing in lines 
and circles at least as far back as 10,000 years ago. According to some 
anthropologists, dance helped bond prehistoric people together in the 
large groups that were necessary for collective defense against 
marauding predators, both animals and human. While language also serves 
to forge community, it doesn’t come close to possessing the emotional 
urgency of dance. Without dance, we risk loneliness and anomie.

Dancing to music is not only mood-lifting and community-building; it’s 
also a uniquely human capability. No other animals, not even 
chimpanzees, can keep together in time to music. Yes, we can live 
without it, as most of us do most of the time, but why not reclaim our 
distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate our own 
communal pleasures out of music and dance?

This is why New Yorkers — as well as all Americans faced with anti-dance 
restrictions — should stand up and take action; and the best way to do 
so is by high stepping into the streets.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of “Dancing in the 
Streets: A History of Collective Joy.”

-- 
Carol Ruth Shepherd
Arborlaw PLC
Ann Arbor MI USA
734 668 4646 v  734 786 1241 f
http://arborlaw.com

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