Davidson students can’t dance. I’m not talking about the fact that court parties sometimes resemble fish markets wherein half-dead seafood flop around angrily and breathlessly for life. I’m speaking a bit more metaphorically/pretentiously here.
Like a good Davidson traditionalist, I decided to take Swing dancing this fall for a multitude of reasons. A) I really didn’t want to do a “real” PE. B) I wanted to learn the Charleston to impress people at frat parties. I’ll never quite be a good swing dance partner because I like to lead, not follow–the ultimate feminist conundrum, no? However, I learned a lot more than just the swing dance three-step. I learned more about the Davidson culture through one of our heralded cultural staples.
I’m not breaking new ground by saying that Davidson students really have no concept of how to let loose–that we’re insecure, inferiority-complex ridden, stressed-out overachievers. The subject has been beaten to death and while arguably this may be more of a ubiquitous fact amongst high-achieving, socially awkward academics than it is a unique Davidson niche (one which is conveniently not listed on MyCollegeGuide as an attraction), it’s still pervasive. So pervasive in fact, that it affects how we dance.
I come from a long-line of confident Armenian belly-dancers who frankly don’t give a d@$# about how they look dancing. I grew up doing weird gyrating, chicken-esque, dance moves on our kitchen table to my dad’s 70’s funk music and my grandpas throaty Armenian tunes. Every wedding I went to growing up was an extravagant showcase in how to do whatever the hell you wanted on the dance floor as long as you didn’t step on Nanny’s toes.
I’ve always been taught that dancing is something you don’t think about–you just do it and you have a grand ole’ time about it. But at Davidson, where all we do is think, where all we do, rather, is over-think, dancing becomes, like most things here, a measure in measuring up.
The first few classes I wasn’t expecting the boys to pick up the complicated dance moves with ease and grace. I expected to be awkwardly disjointed. I expected to get my toes stepped on. I expected to be twisted and turned painfully. I expected that we would all not know what the hell to do. That didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that people were upset with themselves for not knowing IMMEDIATELY how to swing dance, as if we were supposed to come into a beginning level class with an advanced knowledge of a dance that hasn’t existed popularly for a few decades. Eventually I found myself feeling as though I was somehow a bad dancer, and that like every other class at Davidson, this one was showing me how inept I was as a person. That attitude can be rather infectious here.
Granted, my fellow “swingers” and I have since moved past this as a group and are pretty comfortable around each other now.(Shameless plug here, but I highly recommend everyone take this class if they have the chance to. The instructors, Mandy and Drew are really amazing and I could go on and on about the values of knowing the Charleston to break awkward silences.) But the lesson stands. Dancing isn’t about thinking, so thinking too hard about dancing inherently, makes it harder to dance.
And though maybe this is a bit of a stretch, if we can apply this belief to our own lives then maybe, just maybe, if we trust our ignorance, if we accept that we’re bad, but do not evaluate ourselves on what we are, but rather what we can become, maybe we won’t all feel so down when the little things here hit us. When we get a bad grade or the professor corrects us in class or any of the other million reasons we mentally insult ourselves for at Davidson, hopefully we can remember that these are just moments of growth. Maybe we can trust ourselves to dance, knowing that we may fall, or step on other people’s toes (even Nanny’s), and that’s all ok. Because after all, isn’t life just one long, complicated dance? We might as well give ourselves a break.
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