Is there a word that, whenever you hear it, strikes fear
into your heart? A word that pierces you like an icy knife of dread? There is
for me. Perhaps you feel the same. It’s the word, “Freestyle!”
OK, I’m exaggerating, but let’s be honest, how do you
feel about the command to ‘freestyle’ in a public dancing context? I’m sure
there are many people out there and even some reading this blog who enjoy a casual
boogie with friends considerably more than me, and have a great deal more
competence in that area – but I’m also pretty sure a lot of people will understand
what I mean about the fear of publicly facing the demand to improvise. Soren Kierkegaard
famously said that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, and when I imagine
being shoved into the centre of a dance circle and being told to do whatever I
want, I know exactly what he means.
On the other hand, last summer I was helping run a
student camp in Eastern Europe, and the UK team were asked to perform some of our ‘cultural
dances’ for an international evening of entertainment. This led to a bit of cultural
soul-searching, and eventually the conclusion that we should do an easy-to-copy
dance routine to ‘Reach For the Stars’! We did a bit of practice, decided what
we were doing, and then in front of 50 or so students, we went for
it!
Now that experience felt weirdly like freedom. I was
doing exactly what I had been told to do by the more competent and enthusiastic
members of the group – and I was doing exactly what everyone else was doing –
but, contrary to what some of the most fundamental principles of postmodern
Western consumerism would tell you, that actually set me free! Free to go for
it, hurling my limbs into various moves, circling round with everyone else, singing
my heart out whenever I had a clue what the words were! All the people watching
and joining in filled my body and brain with adrenaline, but not with anxiety.
Why? Because freedom is not actually being allowed to do whatever I feel like. Freedom
does not equal unrestricted choice. That is a woefully inadequate idea of freedom,
because it’s based on a cruelly oversimplified idea of how humans work.
I wish I’d grown up where my mate Innes did in Scotland
where they understand this and so they learnt the moves to ceilidh dances in
school until they didn’t need anyone to tell them what to do they could just
announce the dance and everyone stepped and jumped and whirled each other round
in unison, to the rhythm of the music. That’s what dancing is meant to be like.
And it’s a lot closer to what being human is meant to be like than taking turns
to be shoved into the middle of the circle and trying to be funny or do the
worm. (Don’t hear me wrong – there’s a lot that’s great fun about non-organised
dancing, we did a lot of it at our wedding and it was EPIC. But aren’t the best
moments the ones where you’re dancing with other people and you realise you kind
of know what you’re all doing together? Or a song comes on that you know and
you can all sing along to every word?)
So dancing lesson for life number one is this: is it
possible that freedom is more than ‘freestyling’? Is it even possible that the
deepest kind of freedom comes from knowing the moves?
But what got me onto this idea in the first place was
actually something a bit deeper than that, which I’ve massively learnt by
experience in the last couple of years – so I’ll write about that soon as well.
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