A Phenomenology of the Dance Floor
By Laureano Ralon Facchina*

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to take some upper-body motion workshops at the Martinez Dance Company with Ashkan of Los Rumberos. Among other things, I learned how to connect my upper body with my feet and how my feet should interact with the dance floor. As I was listening to his stories, I couldn't help relating his teachings back to philosophy. At risk of being boring, I would like to share this connection with you in hopes that, at least for some of you, it'll prove illuminating...

Lately, I've been reading a lot about Symbolic interactionism – a major philosophical perspective that is influential in many areas of sociology. Symbolic interactionism is derived from a school of thought known as American pragmatism – particularly from the work of George Herbert Mead, an American thinker who argued that people's selves are social products or constructs. In other words, for Mead, there is no self; human beings are not 'auto-poetic', but rather, their selves emerge from interactions with things and others in the world.
As a school of thought, Symbolic interactionism is consistent with another major philosophical movement, known as phenomenology. Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that deals with appearances; specifically, with how things present themselves to us in experience. As a philosophical movement, phenomenology stands in opposition to the 'rationalism' of modern thought, represented by Descartes and his infamous formula: “I think, therefore I am.” In sharp contrast with biologism, rationalism, and representationalism, Phenomenology argues that there's a real world out there, waiting to be discovered; and every act of thought is both directed and dependent on that world. In time, this world will reveal itself to us in and through experience and, in articulating the world out there, human beings will also come to define themselves as “datives of manifestation” - those to which the truth is revealed.

The point I'm trying to make is actually very simple. The world out there is real; it is not the product of our ideas and our imagination. There's something tangible out there, waiting to be discovered. We shape our environment and thereafter our environment shapes us.

So let's go back the way we came now: in one of the workshops I took with Ashkan, he spoke about the “essence of afro-cuban rhythm” and the history behind it. He spoke of the need to find something in our dancing that can help us achieve that level of involvement that Cubans tend to experience when they really get into it (it seems that some of them go as far as observing dances like Guaguancó almost as an element of their religious beliefs). In philosophical terms, the point Ashkan was trying to make is that there must be something out there (outside of ourselves) that connects us back to our dancing. Yes – it's about feeling; yes – it's about passion. But perhaps the biggest mistake that we make is to think that feeling and passion come entirely from within ourselves (“I think, therefore I am”), as opposed to seeing it as the result of an interaction with our immediate environment: the floor, the music, our partner in front of us. As a result, many of us find ourselves thinking too much, searching excessively for something that isn't so much inside but outside ourselves, in our immediate environment. Thinking is the worst enemy of spontaneity – or, in the words of german philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “Understanding stops action”.

So here's a lesson we can learn from the phenomenological movement and the symbolic interactionists: man and its environment (the music, the floor, our partner in dance) constitute a system or context. Man – the doer – is but an element in this system/context. Now, let's look at one particular example of how the elements of this system can interact with one another. An often overlooked example is the relationship and interaction between the dancer and the dance floor. We are sometimes so worried about the lights around us, the music, or the partner in front of us, that we tend to forget that things start from the bottom up. For example, the ways we are often taught to execute our basics usually has no regard to our environment. It's frequently thought of as something you do, something that comes entirely from you (“I think, therefore I am”?), whereas the basic step I learnt from Ashkan is one of involvement with the dance floor, one in which the dancer actually pushes against the floor in order to get something back from the ground that will resonate through his/her body and will result in a specific movement. Everything else follows from there: my arms, my hips, my shoulders – they all move accordingly, in response to that interplay between myself and the dance floor.

I hope you can at least see the difference as clearly as me. For the longest time, I thought that people who could really “shake it” were capable of doing so as a result of something they did – something that came from the inside (“I think therefore I am?”). As a result of this misconception, I often tricked myself into thinking that it was impossible for me to do it too, finding excuses such as “it's in his blood”, “he was born with it”, and other forms of non-sensical reductionism. The point is to try and exploit that interaction to the best of our abilities; to give to the floor so that the floor can give back to us. And this is something that can be learnt. For those who find their dancing dull and boring, I suggest they start rethinking their basic step and working from the ground up...