Hello from deep in the driver’s seat of my car, where I’m watching TikTok videos1 of Robyn’s return to stage and screaming along to Dancing on My Own because I’ve only just realized that this is what we talk about when we talk about embodiment.
Look, I’m not much of a dancer. Saying I’ve got two left feet does a dis-service to anyone who has a left foot, much less two of them. In fact, I’ve got some not-good, not-bad, just there memories of my first school dance in junior high school. My friend Debbie came up and asked me to dance and I said, “How?”
Nearly forty years later, I’m still trying to figure out how to dance anything other than the side-to-side shuffle, the bent-knee-bob a.k.a. the wave your hands like you just don’t care, and, thanks to my college roommate, a basic waltz2. Because even I can count to three. Mostly.
However. It took a long time for me to come to terms with dancing - on my own, with myself, in the dark, on the ceiling, wherever, because I didn’t realize how much our nervous systems find release in movement. Sounds obvious now, sure, but wind back the clock a few decades.
Embodiment is one of those squishy words that changes its meaning depending on the context in which it’s used and yet, the key is right there in the middle of the word: body. In teaching, embodiment means to bring something into your learning through the use of your body. In psychology, embodiment means to examine your nervous system through its effect on your body and to thereby change your mental state through changing your physical state. In spirituality, embodiment is the act of keeping our squishy little souls inside these delicate meat sacks. However you frame it, embodiment is the connection between our physical and higher selves. And when you break it down, in all these contexts and more, embodiment just means moving. You know, like dancing.
Speaking of squishy concepts, I have a soft, squishy place in my soft, squishy heart for all kinds of dance music.
In 1988, eighth grade, my musical taste began to fragment. On the one hand, my pre-teen brain soaked up every late 80s hair metal band, lite R&B act, or nascent hip-hop act Mtv could throw at me. I spent my time in class copying the logos for bands like Cinderella and Queensrÿche3 into my notebooks while my older cousins and friends gave me mix tapes with KISS, the Clash, or Led Zeppelin. Throw in some Amy Grant courtesy of Mom and some Johnny Cash via Dad and my burgeoning tape collection crossed genre boundaries like Hannibal going over the Alps4.
And then something strange happened. I was listening to the radio5 and I heard Captain James Tiberius Kirk. And then a laser or something. And then a beat that stepped right into my ear canals and never, ever left. Information Society was the first “electronica” band I got into. I remember not being able to find their full album at the store, but I could get the cassingle6 for the song “Walking Away.” The track begins with Kirk saying, “It is useless to resist us.” Indeed.
I didn’t get too far into electronica. My late-stage junior high school conversion to all things punk rock saw to that. But I still found space in my collection for bands like Utah Saints, the KLF, EMF, and, of course, Orbital.
In college, dance music wormed its way back into my ears once again via Mtv and the rise of Fatboy Slim and all things House and Big Beat, the sub-genres formed out of the splintering of electronica into a thousand different loops and synthesizer presets. Oh, and also by going to an actual dance club. Every week. For a year.
Dance clubs were always a weird thing for me because in high school, we would go across the border into Mexico occasionally. Ostensibly because there were dance clubs but, in reality, to drink and hook up. But dancing in these clubs never really held any appeal. They were too crowded, shitty music played through even shittier speakers, sketchy looking dudes always trying to pick up our girlfriends, and drinks so watered down they might as well have been driving.
But in college, the dance clubs played music I actually liked. Groove Armada, the Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, and Lo-Fidelity All-stars all rang out of the still shitty speakers but the drinks were better and the sketchy looking dudes were mostly people I knew from class.
Fast forward the next twenty-five years and a few countries and going to dance clubs remains a fun thing to do provided it’s not that often and it’s with people I like and a DJ I trust. I’m still not a great dancer but, assuming I’ve had some water, taken a preventative aspirin, and done some stretching, I can get through a few numbers before I have to go have a nice lie-down. This has led to some great memories:
Dancing to “Everyday I’m Shufflin’” in a deconsecrated church in Toronto, getting into a group dance to De La “Soul’s Ring Ring Ring” at a wedding chpael in rural England. More nights in more clubs than I can really remember in Tokyo’s various and sundry clubs, dives, and discos. It’s truly been a series of gifts throughout my life, one I’m only able to appreciate after the fact.
During the moment, getting up the nerve to dance, in public, where other humans might actually be able to perceive me, takes balls. Sometimes it takes some extra effort to dig those balls out of my guts and set them to swinging. And the thing I want to remember is that it’s always worthwhile.
Dancing is good for you. Physically. Mentally. Spiritually for all I know. But whether you can or can’t, whether you can do a do-sie-do or the Cabbage Patch, whether you can swing, shuffle, or slide, dancing does you, does me, a shitload of good. Resets the brain, releases the endorphins, sets free the serotonin. I have a hard time remembering that. But thank God Robyn’s on tour and my media streams are full of great dance tracks again. It makes it just that much easier to remember.
Not whilst driving, obviously.
Dan taught ballroom dance at a local hotel. He persuaded the rest of us guys to show up at his class with the simple phrase, “lots of girls there.” We went, we danced, we were conquered by the god damned two-step.
I may or may not have spent a significant amount of time first learning how to type an umlaut and then looking up which letter Queensryche actually used an umlaut on. Also, Operation: Mindcrime still slaps.
Slowly. Relentlessly. Spectacularly.
This was a long time ago, kids. Ask your parents. Maybe your grandparents.
Cassette Single. It was a whole thing.
The bit about finally coming to terms with dancing "on my own, with myself, in the dark" really hit. My wife and I have a similar ritual, though ours is more sedate: we play Wordle together every morning, which sounds nothing like dancing but is absolutely its own kind of daily embodiment practice. The same repetitive rhythm, the same small release when it clicks. Sounds obvious until you articulate it.
This framing around embodiment as literaly just movement lands so well. I've been going to smaller electronica nights lately and there's someting about how repetitive loops let the body take over without the brain micromanaging every move. The way basslines anchor everything while synths float above seems to carve out this space where dancing becomes less perfomance and more just existing in rhythm.