February 25, 2022 • 26 mins
Why do our bodies react to rhythm?
From rain dances to raves, dance has been a social tool for sexual selection and community cohesion. Dessa explores the neuroscience of music and movement, learns how dance therapy is used to treat motor disorders, and takes a lesson in butoh - the Japanese form sometimes called the Dance of Darkness.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thing, get thing, get thing, thing getting thinet thinkt thing
think think think thing thing thinking think think thing thing. Okay,
my mom's side of the family has this little song
and we sing to kids. And I remember when my
youngest cousin, Jesse, was tiny, like maybe nine months old.
Somebody sat around a blanket and did the thinking think song,
and this wet mouthed, grinning kid starts dancing, like really dancing,
(00:24):
and all the women are freaking out because look at
this tiny thing breaking it down. I was a teenager then,
but I was legitimately taken aback, Like, how does this
brand new, soft little person know how to do that? Already?
She doesn't know any words yet, she can't walk. She's
like a cheese curd with arms and legs. So where
does she learn how to dance? And why does she
do it when we sing the Tinka think song? Why
(00:47):
indeed does music animate you or me? Why do we
toe tap or chair dance or just not along while typing,
I'm Dessa, You're listening to deeply human and in less
than half an hour you're going to have a basic
understanding of why people dance. So get ready to impress
everyone at the next raid with your shouted explanations. Oh God,
(01:13):
when you hear music that you like, there's a chill
that starts from your head and goes all the way
down to your feet and then it comes back up
the other side. And so that chill, that feeling, you
just take it and ride that right into the movement. Okay,
But then, if you are fortunate, you will experience that
(01:35):
point where you just completely leave your body. Everything gets blurry.
I'll see like um, kind of like an orange light.
Sometimes it's silver, and then it's like I'm at another
location in the room, and then I'm watching myself dance.
And that's the feeling that every dancer wants, you know,
(01:59):
like you want that feel. It doesn't happen all the time,
but when it does, it's the best thing that's happened
all year. Darien Parker is a dancer and instructor with
Comb Bay Center for African Diaspora Dance in New York,
and he is dancing like a cent of the time. Yeah,
(02:20):
even if I'm not teaching or performing, I'm always dancing
in my room or in my head. I'm always making
up choreography or imagining myself doing something or yeah, wait,
are you saying that, like in the way that I
might have a song stuck in my head, you might
have a dance stuck in your head? Oh yeah, all
(02:40):
the time. Darien may pose a particularly intense example, but
there's neuroscientific evidence that all human brains are inclined to
move when we listen to music. When people are simply
listening to music and yeah, not's moving their body. That's
still in their brain, we see that that there's motor
(03:03):
activation when they listen to music. Our motor cortex becomes activated.
So that's the part of the brain that is responsible
for the planning, control and execution of voluntary movements. So
even if we do not move, we are inclined to move.
Our brain wants to move. That's Edith van Dyke. She
studies the way that people interact with music at Ghent
(03:24):
University in Belgium, and her account of our brains dancing
in our heads reminds me of like an office space
when a good song comes on and everybody's dancing in
their chairs. It's just this automatic urge to move. Edith
says that our ability to process music might be built
in just like languages. So there's something in our brain,
(03:44):
that is their naturally that makes us respond to music,
but so also in the bodily way also moving to music,
there's evidence of the music acquisition module in our brains.
Research indicates that infants, as for the example of baby Jesse,
moved to beats well before they're a year old, which
seems to suggest it's innate, were predisposed to move to music.
(04:08):
On a personal time scale, you probably made your first
dance move before you can remember it. And on an
anthropological time scale, Edith says the dancing most likely started
with our species Homo sapiens, as opposed with other earlier hominids,
and dancing has likely been instrumental in binding us to
one another on the long term. Actually, something that has
(04:29):
been in dance at all times in our history is
the social aspect. So moving together can be regarded as
a sort of social glue you increase your social bonding.
Take for example, a rain dance. Probably there were a
lot of people in the communities who believed that when
(04:53):
times were hearts and there wasn't a lot of rain
and crops were going to fill, that's when you are
dancing to the gods, that it would start to rape
some people might have believed that, but it's initially started
from keeping the group together because in hard times, when
(05:13):
there's not enough foods, there might be starvation, which can
leads to fights, to wars and so on. So it
is key to keep the group together to bear all
of this together, social cohesion, motor cortex activation. I admit
that I sort of thought an evolutionary explanation of dance
was going to be mostly about sex, like you know
(05:34):
that whole thing. Dance is a vertical expression of a
horizontal desire that stuff, of course. Yeah, well, okay, when
you dance, it's a sexual display of fitness. You show
that you're physically fits, but also that you have a
good working brain because you can conceptualize about things. You
(05:55):
understand the music when you have good feeling of rhythm.
You could see it like that, moving in sync and
with style. Maybe the mark of a good mate. Okay,
no anyone who implied. But now let's turn back to
our dancer, Darien. His focus is on West African traditions
where specific dances are integral to the culture. So when
(06:19):
you talk about dance West African dances, it's done in
West Africa. You're talking about things that pretty much mark
every aspect of life, you know, So if someone passes away,
if there's a wedding, if there's a birth of a child,
if there's an initiation ceremony for a young girl or
(06:40):
for a young boy, pretty much all aspects of life.
The dance is very much an articulation of the philosophical system,
you know, of the people. Can you explain that what
does that mean? A dance that I'm teaching now is
a traditional dance for the Malnqua people, and this is
a dance in which young girls mark their right of
(07:02):
passage into womanhood. So there's one movement done, for instance,
in which you reach to the sky, you come into
your body, and then you put your arms behind you,
and you keep doing that and repetitions the sky, come
into your body with your arms behind. So essentially what
you're communicating is I take blessings from God, I bring
(07:26):
them into my body, and then I scattered them throughout
the earth. And then I take what I scattered throughout
the earth, I bring them into my body and then
I give it back as an offering unto God. And
the ma Linqua people believe in that kind of constant
flow between k of the ethereal, the personal, and then
the rest of society. So yeah, that one movement you
(07:49):
kind of expressed that aspect of ma Linque philosophy behind
Sky come Into and West African traditions. The body's movement
is also the adduct of a really tight relationship between
the dancers and the musicians who play with them. Like
I've heard drummers bragging did you see the way I
made him rip his own shirt? Okay, that does not
(08:11):
refer to a dancer who like tears his shirt down
the middle like some cheesy adonis. It's essentially about dancing
a shirt into pieces. So if a drummer notices that
a particular move seems to strain a dancer's garment, the
drummer will get the dancer to do it again and
again and with more and more intensity until the fabric
just can't hold. Drummers are very very observant, skilled people,
(08:40):
and they're like magicians. And I remember one time I
was dancing to Mama die Kata, who is known as
like the pre eminent master drummer of Guinea and dancing
God Rest his soul. But I had the privilege of
dancing in a class where he was playing the lead
and he had had two drums strapped together and he
(09:02):
was playing them at the same time. And I will
never forget this, the way his eyes were in tuned
to what my body was doing. And it was the
first time in my life that I have ever felt weightless,
like I was doing all these complicated things, but I
didn't feel anything. He was making my body move. Just
(09:24):
feel like being merryonetted. Almost. Yeah, it kind of does
feel like being merrionetted, but it's actually something even more
transcendent than that. It's like you feel nothing. The drummers
can move the dancers, and it's a two way street.
The dancers can influence the drummer's performance too. The goal
(09:45):
in West African dance or the styles that I do,
is to have a perfect connection with the music and
the live musicians. There has to be kind of like
perfect synchronicity between you and the musicians. That conversation has
to be fluid. When that is the case, you will
feel a physical kind of healing of your body. When
(10:15):
I was in my early twenties, I helped teach a
salsa class, which makes me sound like a way better
dancer than I am. Essentially, I would just show up
early and learn the moves from Don, the real instructor,
so that he could demonstrate them to the class with
the help of a female lead. And Don was this
gay dude who, by his own description, would go dancing
(10:37):
flaming like butane, and so to make it look like
we had chemistry when we danced in front of an audience,
he'd sometimes whisper threats like um he would say, I'm
going to cut you the nature of a dip, and
I'd giggle, and that would sell our rapport to the crowd. Anyway.
I remember struggling to get this really flashy spin. It
(10:58):
was a fast double turn that involved ducking under the
dude's arm, and it was awesome. It was super hard.
I asked Don to slow it down. I'm real cerebral,
and I wanted to talk through each step one by one,
and he just flatly refused. You can't learn it that way,
he said, you gotta feel it. Just let the music
guide you, close your eyes and humble your mind to
(11:20):
your body. How old were you when you started performing
as a musician in dance classes? Nineteen when I played
dance for a dance studio do you remember the first day? No,
and what instrument did you play piano? And what kind
of stuff did you play on the piano. Dance teacher
(11:42):
was a French lady. She liked the Greek movie Sober
of the Greek. She got fixed safe and I sat
played different versions of the Greek. That is Craig Harris.
He's loved music and rhythm since he was a kid.
He studied composition and even though he grew up to
pursue a totally different career path, he always wrote music
(12:02):
for dance on the side. But then something started to
change in Craig's body. H In around two thousand six
or two thousand five. I had weird imbalance and strange
kind of heavy body feeling, and it was a mystery
(12:23):
that no one could diagnose. It's like everything has weights
on it. My body feels a little heavier, so anything
you do is a little harder, a little more work.
There was also a marked stiffness, a sense of rigidity.
It would be like, um, if you're really cold. Then
a tremor in his left hand. Craig went back to
(12:45):
the doctor. He's a German doctor and he's very straightforward,
and he said, well, I'm sorry to tell you this,
but I'm afraid you have Parkinson's. Parkinson's disease is a
progressive nervous system disorder that affects movement, and it can
make everyday motions difficult. People with Parkinson's might not swing
their arms when they walk, or have difficulty writing or
(13:07):
making facial expressions. Movement can be especially difficult to initiate.
In late stage Parkinson's, people can experience freezing, rendering someone
temporarily unable to move or walk at all. People sometimes
describe it is feeling glued to the floor. There's no cure,
but medication can help treat Parkinson's symptoms, and rhythm can too.
(13:31):
Music can actually help people lock into a more natural
walking gate, taking longer, more confident steps. There's even a
new smartphone app that uses ankle sensors to collect data
on the gate of Parkinson's patients and then plays music
at a tempo designed to keep them moving smoothly. Craig
enrolled in a dance class designed for people with Parkinson's disease.
(13:55):
I talked to one of Craig's instructors, Maria Walsh from
Motion Pacific Dance, and she said that If a dancer
freezes midstep in class, introducing a little bit of rhythm
can help break the hold. She'll have them home a
little rhythm, then try to stomp it and eventually walk
to it again. Craig doesn't suffer from freezing, but he
does notice that dance eases his symptoms. I moved a
(14:18):
little easier and lighter, and I felt a little lighter
psychologically but physically too. Dance is both therapy and a
way to elevate my spirits. It seems to have the
effect of making things more fluid physically and mentally for me,
and rhythm holds the same magnetism for him that it
(14:38):
did as a teenager. It feels like pretty much the
same as it does when you don't have Parkinson's. You know,
it just feels good. So how exactly do music and
dance therapy help people with conditions like Parkinson's. Back to Edith,
our Belgian researcher for a bit of neuroscience. Keeping the
beat is believed to be hardwired in her brain too,
(14:59):
So we actually we see that our neurals the connections
in our brain that they can synchronize their firing to
musical beats. When we move, we tend to synchronize in
certain ways to music. We tend to connect to the
sounds and to the vibrations and so on. A research
(15:24):
suggests that when we listen to a song, some of
our brain waves can actually sink to the tempo. Are
synapses fire and time with the music. Okay, a quick
reminder here that the phrase it's all just vibrations man,
is not allowed on this program. If all of a
person's brain waves were perfectly aligned, it wouldn't mean they
were enlightened. It could mean that they're having a seizure.
(15:46):
So let's just keep it empirical. But yes, it is
pretty awesome that our brain waves are believed to align
with what's on the stereo, and that neurological alignment may
be part of what prompts us to dance. The electrical
impact is passing through the parts of our brain responsible
for movement are already dialed into the tempo, which maybe
(16:07):
why it is really challenging to dance out of sync
with the beat. I'm not dancing to the music. I
can sometimes jump in rhythm with the music. I can
go against it. I can completely forget about the music
and do something else. Is it difficult to avoid the
(16:28):
temptation to dance to be just because that's kind of
maybe naturally what we're inclined to do. Yeah, it's interesting,
I think it is. I think it takes training and
retraining too long to do that. This is Vangeline. She
specializes in a form of dance called Bhutto. Bhutto is
an art phone that came from Japan in the nineteen fifties.
(16:49):
It's an avant garde art phone and it's kind of
like the dance of the subconscious, exploration of the unconscious.
Photo is sometimes called the dance of darkness, and it
is unlike any dance you've ever seen. Tatsumihi Jakata, one
of the choreographers who created Bhutto, would sometimes fast before
performances for a dramatic, emaciated look. He and other dancers
(17:12):
would often cover their bodies in bone white paint before
taking stage. I'd only run across Bhutto once years ago,
having accidentally stumbled across a YouTube link, and in it,
the body of a tall, hairless man painted lunar white
falls down a stone staircase. He pieces himself back together
at the bottom, moving with so many tightly controlled, isolated movements.
(17:36):
It's as if there were tiny rotors spinning in each joint.
He doesn't look human. He looks like a first failed
hybrid of machine and man, able to suffer but not survive.
And one gets the sense that the kind thing to
do would be to find a rock and put the
thing out of its misery, but also that you'd never
be able to summon the grit to do it yourself. Booto.
(17:57):
It's it's just intense man. She was purely Japanese. Then
it moved to Europe in the seventies, and then it
exploded all over the world. Vangeline is from France, but
she studied in Japan and Mexico. When I asked about
the aesthetic of bhutto, it seems like I just sort
of missed the point. It's also much about how it
(18:18):
looks as how it feels. So if you're watching you
budo performance, probably you you're having some kind of people
have very violent response. They hate it, they love it,
they go into a deep trance, they relax, some people leave,
and I really offended. Like I think when it began,
(18:39):
people were fainting when they were watching bud So there's
that kind of visceral response from the body when you
actually watch it, Bhutto often moves faster or slower than
the way we do in our normal lives, and it
incorporates some gestures and expressions that aren't really allowed in public.
And when you think about it, we've got a pretty
narrow band of just and expressions that are allowed in public.
(19:02):
Like if a person blinks too frequently, that might be
enough to weird you out. Let alone, twisting or bending
their torso, or curling and unfurling their toes. There's a
lot that's just off limits. All day long, we watch
people moving a certain way in the way that society
has kind of taught us to move walking down the street,
(19:23):
Like right now we're talking to each other, were standing
in a specific way. So if I start doing movements
that are a little bit strange or different, or that
are considered scary or possibly sexual, or you know, outside
of the realm of what's socially acceptable, then that immediately
provokes the viewer. So there's that aspect to bule of
(19:44):
that da and consciousness of the body brings types of
movement that we're not really accustomed to seeing in public.
I went to Vangeline Studio to try it for myself.
It's a single room in Brooklyn and a building near
the train. Soft rubber mats on the floor fit together
like puzzle pieces, and a sign on the door says
(20:05):
no shoes. Okay, full disclosure. I find Vangeline almost pathologically likable.
You will hear that in my voice while we are dancing,
and I am not sorry. She is just so likable. Yeah,
And you can totally use the mirror because it's there.
The mirror is awesome. Is that helpful or is that?
(20:25):
I like the mirror? Vanity is good? Why not? At
first Vangeline said I could move anyway I wanted. We
were just going to experiment with rhythm. Okay. So the
first one is you just try to move with the beat. Anything.
Now I'm going to try it to move against the beat, okay, okay,
(20:54):
so no, because it's home. It's really hard, man. It
is so hard. It's like patch your head and rub
your tummy hard. Your body just does not want to
do it. Also, it became clear how impoverished my own
inventory of movements is. I was reusing moves already like
half a minute in, but Vangeline was doing all sorts
(21:16):
of stuff simple steps to like zombie vibes. You can
have very tiny tremors and movement that in Japanese they
call faint soft fructuations, like something's passing through your face,
one little movement of your fingertip, and then you can
go from macro to micro, and you can go from
(21:36):
the very exclusive to total stillness. I'm not sure I
would have been bold enough to try bootle with just anyone,
but Vangeline was so compassionate and also really smart. She
made me feel comfortable enough to risk looking foolish. And
if Booto's aim is to invite the full scope of
our humanity to the dance, well, fear and foolishness, they're
(21:58):
surely part of it. There was is also just a
joy contagion. Vangeline is electrified by bhutto, and I was
near enough to catch some sparks. YEA, thank you so much.
The effort it takes to dance against the beat in
(22:19):
a form like bhutto is evidence of just how sensitive
we are to rhythm. We are primed for music, so
for instance, just nature sounds or sounds on the streets
or something can become musical to you. That, of course
was Edith. Again. I make my living as a musician,
and when I'm in the van with my band and
we're stopped at a red light waiting to make a turn,
(22:40):
I have noticed on more than one occasion that all
of us are like grooving to the clicking of the
turn signal. Edith says, there's another theory about why we're
compelled to dance, one that's totally different from anything we've
heard so far, and it has to do with our
appetite for control. Well, there is a thing called agency.
(23:00):
That's a theoretical idea about the fact that when you
feel in control of things, it makes you feel good.
It's motivating, it's fun. So you're kind of imitating your music,
but it can also feel as if you are creating.
It's because you're dancing more strongly, fiercely, and so on. Yeah,
that's something you can clearly have when you're listening to
(23:23):
music and you play the musical director. That sense of
agency all over, so you act as if you are
making the music yourself, which feels awesome. What do you
mean when you act as a musical director. You're talking
about like air guitar. Yeah, I was talking about like
a director of a symphonic orchestra. But yeah, air guitar
(23:43):
is exactly the same, of course. Yeah. For all her
knowledge about the complex neurological and psychological underpinnings of dance,
Edith has a pretty simple takeaway message. We should all
dance more. People who think that it's just some past
time are so wrong, because it's much more than that,
and it can help us in so many ways. I
(24:07):
sort of dance almost every morning when my kids are up,
everybody's downstairs. I usually shower a little bit later than
the rest. I put on my music and I danced
in the bethroom, and I usually come down for breakfast
in the way more positive states than when I got off.
(24:28):
If we can all get over our self consciousness, dancing
just feels good, and we do it because it connects
us to one another like social glue. We sometimes dance
because it's sexy and proves we are too. And dancing
has become folded into our big cultural rituals. The first
slow dance at weddings ringed by wet eyed spectators, the waltz,
(24:49):
the new dresses and borrowed car for prom, the doofy
Congo line, at a work party that started ironic and
ends up awesome. We dance because our bodies are built
to move to music, and maybe also because shredding and
air guitar solo feels red. Well. You know that end
of program sound as well as I do. But we
(25:12):
cannot shut down this show about music and dance without
a killer dance jam. We used to call that stuff
boots and pants music when I was a kid, because
you know, boots and pants and boots and pants and boots. Okay,
we're not technically allowed to use commercial music on this program,
but that will not stop us. I hit up my
friend Laser Beak to ask if he could hook me
up with a Dink a Dink dance remix, and oh
(25:34):
my goodness, did Beaks a legend God come through? DNC
ding ding? Come on? Are you hearing man? This is
gonna own the club circuit Ma York to Miami, Pop
of the Summer Guarantee. Deeply Human is a BBC World
(25:57):
Service and American Public Media co production with I Heart Media,
and it's hosted by Mesa. Find me online, Tessa on
Instagram and Tessa Darling on Twitter. This one's for you, baby,
Jesse Hey, I just want to see you dance for
(26:28):
me on the next Deeply Human, why is the human
animal modest? We're so modest, in fact, that we can
be reluctant to undress even to save our own lives,
say in a case of exposure to a biotoxin. Join
me next time to find out why you are not
(26:49):
naked and neither of mine.
Thing, get thing, get thing, thing getting thinet thinkt thing
think think think thing thing thinking think think thing thing. Okay,
my mom's side of the family has this little song
and we sing to kids. And I remember when my
youngest cousin, Jesse, was tiny, like maybe nine months old.
Somebody sat around a blanket and did the thinking think song,
and this wet mouthed, grinning kid starts dancing, like really dancing,
(00:24):
and all the women are freaking out because look at
this tiny thing breaking it down. I was a teenager then,
but I was legitimately taken aback, Like, how does this
brand new, soft little person know how to do that? Already?
She doesn't know any words yet, she can't walk. She's
like a cheese curd with arms and legs. So where
does she learn how to dance? And why does she
do it when we sing the Tinka think song? Why
(00:47):
indeed does music animate you or me? Why do we
toe tap or chair dance or just not along while typing,
I'm Dessa, You're listening to deeply human and in less
than half an hour you're going to have a basic
understanding of why people dance. So get ready to impress
everyone at the next raid with your shouted explanations. Oh God,
(01:13):
when you hear music that you like, there's a chill
that starts from your head and goes all the way
down to your feet and then it comes back up
the other side. And so that chill, that feeling, you
just take it and ride that right into the movement. Okay,
But then, if you are fortunate, you will experience that
(01:35):
point where you just completely leave your body. Everything gets blurry.
I'll see like um, kind of like an orange light.
Sometimes it's silver, and then it's like I'm at another
location in the room, and then I'm watching myself dance.
And that's the feeling that every dancer wants, you know,
(01:59):
like you want that feel. It doesn't happen all the time,
but when it does, it's the best thing that's happened
all year. Darien Parker is a dancer and instructor with
Comb Bay Center for African Diaspora Dance in New York,
and he is dancing like a cent of the time. Yeah,
(02:20):
even if I'm not teaching or performing, I'm always dancing
in my room or in my head. I'm always making
up choreography or imagining myself doing something or yeah, wait,
are you saying that, like in the way that I
might have a song stuck in my head, you might
have a dance stuck in your head? Oh yeah, all
(02:40):
the time. Darien may pose a particularly intense example, but
there's neuroscientific evidence that all human brains are inclined to
move when we listen to music. When people are simply
listening to music and yeah, not's moving their body. That's
still in their brain, we see that that there's motor
(03:03):
activation when they listen to music. Our motor cortex becomes activated.
So that's the part of the brain that is responsible
for the planning, control and execution of voluntary movements. So
even if we do not move, we are inclined to move.
Our brain wants to move. That's Edith van Dyke. She
studies the way that people interact with music at Ghent
(03:24):
University in Belgium, and her account of our brains dancing
in our heads reminds me of like an office space
when a good song comes on and everybody's dancing in
their chairs. It's just this automatic urge to move. Edith
says that our ability to process music might be built
in just like languages. So there's something in our brain,
(03:44):
that is their naturally that makes us respond to music,
but so also in the bodily way also moving to music,
there's evidence of the music acquisition module in our brains.
Research indicates that infants, as for the example of baby Jesse,
moved to beats well before they're a year old, which
seems to suggest it's innate, were predisposed to move to music.
(04:08):
On a personal time scale, you probably made your first
dance move before you can remember it. And on an
anthropological time scale, Edith says the dancing most likely started
with our species Homo sapiens, as opposed with other earlier hominids,
and dancing has likely been instrumental in binding us to
one another on the long term. Actually, something that has
(04:29):
been in dance at all times in our history is
the social aspect. So moving together can be regarded as
a sort of social glue you increase your social bonding.
Take for example, a rain dance. Probably there were a
lot of people in the communities who believed that when
(04:53):
times were hearts and there wasn't a lot of rain
and crops were going to fill, that's when you are
dancing to the gods, that it would start to rape
some people might have believed that, but it's initially started
from keeping the group together because in hard times, when
(05:13):
there's not enough foods, there might be starvation, which can
leads to fights, to wars and so on. So it
is key to keep the group together to bear all
of this together, social cohesion, motor cortex activation. I admit
that I sort of thought an evolutionary explanation of dance
was going to be mostly about sex, like you know
(05:34):
that whole thing. Dance is a vertical expression of a
horizontal desire that stuff, of course. Yeah, well, okay, when
you dance, it's a sexual display of fitness. You show
that you're physically fits, but also that you have a
good working brain because you can conceptualize about things. You
(05:55):
understand the music when you have good feeling of rhythm.
You could see it like that, moving in sync and
with style. Maybe the mark of a good mate. Okay,
no anyone who implied. But now let's turn back to
our dancer, Darien. His focus is on West African traditions
where specific dances are integral to the culture. So when
(06:19):
you talk about dance West African dances, it's done in
West Africa. You're talking about things that pretty much mark
every aspect of life, you know, So if someone passes away,
if there's a wedding, if there's a birth of a child,
if there's an initiation ceremony for a young girl or
(06:40):
for a young boy, pretty much all aspects of life.
The dance is very much an articulation of the philosophical system,
you know, of the people. Can you explain that what
does that mean? A dance that I'm teaching now is
a traditional dance for the Malnqua people, and this is
a dance in which young girls mark their right of
(07:02):
passage into womanhood. So there's one movement done, for instance,
in which you reach to the sky, you come into
your body, and then you put your arms behind you,
and you keep doing that and repetitions the sky, come
into your body with your arms behind. So essentially what
you're communicating is I take blessings from God, I bring
(07:26):
them into my body, and then I scattered them throughout
the earth. And then I take what I scattered throughout
the earth, I bring them into my body and then
I give it back as an offering unto God. And
the ma Linqua people believe in that kind of constant
flow between k of the ethereal, the personal, and then
the rest of society. So yeah, that one movement you
(07:49):
kind of expressed that aspect of ma Linque philosophy behind
Sky come Into and West African traditions. The body's movement
is also the adduct of a really tight relationship between
the dancers and the musicians who play with them. Like
I've heard drummers bragging did you see the way I
made him rip his own shirt? Okay, that does not
(08:11):
refer to a dancer who like tears his shirt down
the middle like some cheesy adonis. It's essentially about dancing
a shirt into pieces. So if a drummer notices that
a particular move seems to strain a dancer's garment, the
drummer will get the dancer to do it again and
again and with more and more intensity until the fabric
just can't hold. Drummers are very very observant, skilled people,
(08:40):
and they're like magicians. And I remember one time I
was dancing to Mama die Kata, who is known as
like the pre eminent master drummer of Guinea and dancing
God Rest his soul. But I had the privilege of
dancing in a class where he was playing the lead
and he had had two drums strapped together and he
(09:02):
was playing them at the same time. And I will
never forget this, the way his eyes were in tuned
to what my body was doing. And it was the
first time in my life that I have ever felt weightless,
like I was doing all these complicated things, but I
didn't feel anything. He was making my body move. Just
(09:24):
feel like being merryonetted. Almost. Yeah, it kind of does
feel like being merrionetted, but it's actually something even more
transcendent than that. It's like you feel nothing. The drummers
can move the dancers, and it's a two way street.
The dancers can influence the drummer's performance too. The goal
(09:45):
in West African dance or the styles that I do,
is to have a perfect connection with the music and
the live musicians. There has to be kind of like
perfect synchronicity between you and the musicians. That conversation has
to be fluid. When that is the case, you will
feel a physical kind of healing of your body. When
(10:15):
I was in my early twenties, I helped teach a
salsa class, which makes me sound like a way better
dancer than I am. Essentially, I would just show up
early and learn the moves from Don, the real instructor,
so that he could demonstrate them to the class with
the help of a female lead. And Don was this
gay dude who, by his own description, would go dancing
(10:37):
flaming like butane, and so to make it look like
we had chemistry when we danced in front of an audience,
he'd sometimes whisper threats like um he would say, I'm
going to cut you the nature of a dip, and
I'd giggle, and that would sell our rapport to the crowd. Anyway.
I remember struggling to get this really flashy spin. It
(10:58):
was a fast double turn that involved ducking under the
dude's arm, and it was awesome. It was super hard.
I asked Don to slow it down. I'm real cerebral,
and I wanted to talk through each step one by one,
and he just flatly refused. You can't learn it that way,
he said, you gotta feel it. Just let the music
guide you, close your eyes and humble your mind to
(11:20):
your body. How old were you when you started performing
as a musician in dance classes? Nineteen when I played
dance for a dance studio do you remember the first day? No,
and what instrument did you play piano? And what kind
of stuff did you play on the piano. Dance teacher
(11:42):
was a French lady. She liked the Greek movie Sober
of the Greek. She got fixed safe and I sat
played different versions of the Greek. That is Craig Harris.
He's loved music and rhythm since he was a kid.
He studied composition and even though he grew up to
pursue a totally different career path, he always wrote music
(12:02):
for dance on the side. But then something started to
change in Craig's body. H In around two thousand six
or two thousand five. I had weird imbalance and strange
kind of heavy body feeling, and it was a mystery
(12:23):
that no one could diagnose. It's like everything has weights
on it. My body feels a little heavier, so anything
you do is a little harder, a little more work.
There was also a marked stiffness, a sense of rigidity.
It would be like, um, if you're really cold. Then
a tremor in his left hand. Craig went back to
(12:45):
the doctor. He's a German doctor and he's very straightforward,
and he said, well, I'm sorry to tell you this,
but I'm afraid you have Parkinson's. Parkinson's disease is a
progressive nervous system disorder that affects movement, and it can
make everyday motions difficult. People with Parkinson's might not swing
their arms when they walk, or have difficulty writing or
(13:07):
making facial expressions. Movement can be especially difficult to initiate.
In late stage Parkinson's, people can experience freezing, rendering someone
temporarily unable to move or walk at all. People sometimes
describe it is feeling glued to the floor. There's no cure,
but medication can help treat Parkinson's symptoms, and rhythm can too.
(13:31):
Music can actually help people lock into a more natural
walking gate, taking longer, more confident steps. There's even a
new smartphone app that uses ankle sensors to collect data
on the gate of Parkinson's patients and then plays music
at a tempo designed to keep them moving smoothly. Craig
enrolled in a dance class designed for people with Parkinson's disease.
(13:55):
I talked to one of Craig's instructors, Maria Walsh from
Motion Pacific Dance, and she said that If a dancer
freezes midstep in class, introducing a little bit of rhythm
can help break the hold. She'll have them home a
little rhythm, then try to stomp it and eventually walk
to it again. Craig doesn't suffer from freezing, but he
does notice that dance eases his symptoms. I moved a
(14:18):
little easier and lighter, and I felt a little lighter
psychologically but physically too. Dance is both therapy and a
way to elevate my spirits. It seems to have the
effect of making things more fluid physically and mentally for me,
and rhythm holds the same magnetism for him that it
(14:38):
did as a teenager. It feels like pretty much the
same as it does when you don't have Parkinson's. You know,
it just feels good. So how exactly do music and
dance therapy help people with conditions like Parkinson's. Back to Edith,
our Belgian researcher for a bit of neuroscience. Keeping the
beat is believed to be hardwired in her brain too,
(14:59):
So we actually we see that our neurals the connections
in our brain that they can synchronize their firing to
musical beats. When we move, we tend to synchronize in
certain ways to music. We tend to connect to the
sounds and to the vibrations and so on. A research
(15:24):
suggests that when we listen to a song, some of
our brain waves can actually sink to the tempo. Are
synapses fire and time with the music. Okay, a quick
reminder here that the phrase it's all just vibrations man,
is not allowed on this program. If all of a
person's brain waves were perfectly aligned, it wouldn't mean they
were enlightened. It could mean that they're having a seizure.
(15:46):
So let's just keep it empirical. But yes, it is
pretty awesome that our brain waves are believed to align
with what's on the stereo, and that neurological alignment may
be part of what prompts us to dance. The electrical
impact is passing through the parts of our brain responsible
for movement are already dialed into the tempo, which maybe
(16:07):
why it is really challenging to dance out of sync
with the beat. I'm not dancing to the music. I
can sometimes jump in rhythm with the music. I can
go against it. I can completely forget about the music
and do something else. Is it difficult to avoid the
(16:28):
temptation to dance to be just because that's kind of
maybe naturally what we're inclined to do. Yeah, it's interesting,
I think it is. I think it takes training and
retraining too long to do that. This is Vangeline. She
specializes in a form of dance called Bhutto. Bhutto is
an art phone that came from Japan in the nineteen fifties.
(16:49):
It's an avant garde art phone and it's kind of
like the dance of the subconscious, exploration of the unconscious.
Photo is sometimes called the dance of darkness, and it
is unlike any dance you've ever seen. Tatsumihi Jakata, one
of the choreographers who created Bhutto, would sometimes fast before
performances for a dramatic, emaciated look. He and other dancers
(17:12):
would often cover their bodies in bone white paint before
taking stage. I'd only run across Bhutto once years ago,
having accidentally stumbled across a YouTube link, and in it,
the body of a tall, hairless man painted lunar white
falls down a stone staircase. He pieces himself back together
at the bottom, moving with so many tightly controlled, isolated movements.
(17:36):
It's as if there were tiny rotors spinning in each joint.
He doesn't look human. He looks like a first failed
hybrid of machine and man, able to suffer but not survive.
And one gets the sense that the kind thing to
do would be to find a rock and put the
thing out of its misery, but also that you'd never
be able to summon the grit to do it yourself. Booto.
(17:57):
It's it's just intense man. She was purely Japanese. Then
it moved to Europe in the seventies, and then it
exploded all over the world. Vangeline is from France, but
she studied in Japan and Mexico. When I asked about
the aesthetic of bhutto, it seems like I just sort
of missed the point. It's also much about how it
(18:18):
looks as how it feels. So if you're watching you
budo performance, probably you you're having some kind of people
have very violent response. They hate it, they love it,
they go into a deep trance, they relax, some people leave,
and I really offended. Like I think when it began,
(18:39):
people were fainting when they were watching bud So there's
that kind of visceral response from the body when you
actually watch it, Bhutto often moves faster or slower than
the way we do in our normal lives, and it
incorporates some gestures and expressions that aren't really allowed in public.
And when you think about it, we've got a pretty
narrow band of just and expressions that are allowed in public.
(19:02):
Like if a person blinks too frequently, that might be
enough to weird you out. Let alone, twisting or bending
their torso, or curling and unfurling their toes. There's a
lot that's just off limits. All day long, we watch
people moving a certain way in the way that society
has kind of taught us to move walking down the street,
(19:23):
Like right now we're talking to each other, were standing
in a specific way. So if I start doing movements
that are a little bit strange or different, or that
are considered scary or possibly sexual, or you know, outside
of the realm of what's socially acceptable, then that immediately
provokes the viewer. So there's that aspect to bule of
(19:44):
that da and consciousness of the body brings types of
movement that we're not really accustomed to seeing in public.
I went to Vangeline Studio to try it for myself.
It's a single room in Brooklyn and a building near
the train. Soft rubber mats on the floor fit together
like puzzle pieces, and a sign on the door says
(20:05):
no shoes. Okay, full disclosure. I find Vangeline almost pathologically likable.
You will hear that in my voice while we are dancing,
and I am not sorry. She is just so likable. Yeah,
And you can totally use the mirror because it's there.
The mirror is awesome. Is that helpful or is that?
(20:25):
I like the mirror? Vanity is good? Why not? At
first Vangeline said I could move anyway I wanted. We
were just going to experiment with rhythm. Okay. So the
first one is you just try to move with the beat. Anything.
Now I'm going to try it to move against the beat, okay, okay,
(20:54):
so no, because it's home. It's really hard, man. It
is so hard. It's like patch your head and rub
your tummy hard. Your body just does not want to
do it. Also, it became clear how impoverished my own
inventory of movements is. I was reusing moves already like
half a minute in, but Vangeline was doing all sorts
(21:16):
of stuff simple steps to like zombie vibes. You can
have very tiny tremors and movement that in Japanese they
call faint soft fructuations, like something's passing through your face,
one little movement of your fingertip, and then you can
go from macro to micro, and you can go from
(21:36):
the very exclusive to total stillness. I'm not sure I
would have been bold enough to try bootle with just anyone,
but Vangeline was so compassionate and also really smart. She
made me feel comfortable enough to risk looking foolish. And
if Booto's aim is to invite the full scope of
our humanity to the dance, well, fear and foolishness, they're
(21:58):
surely part of it. There was is also just a
joy contagion. Vangeline is electrified by bhutto, and I was
near enough to catch some sparks. YEA, thank you so much.
The effort it takes to dance against the beat in
(22:19):
a form like bhutto is evidence of just how sensitive
we are to rhythm. We are primed for music, so
for instance, just nature sounds or sounds on the streets
or something can become musical to you. That, of course
was Edith. Again. I make my living as a musician,
and when I'm in the van with my band and
we're stopped at a red light waiting to make a turn,
(22:40):
I have noticed on more than one occasion that all
of us are like grooving to the clicking of the
turn signal. Edith says, there's another theory about why we're
compelled to dance, one that's totally different from anything we've
heard so far, and it has to do with our
appetite for control. Well, there is a thing called agency.
(23:00):
That's a theoretical idea about the fact that when you
feel in control of things, it makes you feel good.
It's motivating, it's fun. So you're kind of imitating your music,
but it can also feel as if you are creating.
It's because you're dancing more strongly, fiercely, and so on. Yeah,
that's something you can clearly have when you're listening to
(23:23):
music and you play the musical director. That sense of
agency all over, so you act as if you are
making the music yourself, which feels awesome. What do you
mean when you act as a musical director. You're talking
about like air guitar. Yeah, I was talking about like
a director of a symphonic orchestra. But yeah, air guitar
(23:43):
is exactly the same, of course. Yeah. For all her
knowledge about the complex neurological and psychological underpinnings of dance,
Edith has a pretty simple takeaway message. We should all
dance more. People who think that it's just some past
time are so wrong, because it's much more than that,
and it can help us in so many ways. I
(24:07):
sort of dance almost every morning when my kids are up,
everybody's downstairs. I usually shower a little bit later than
the rest. I put on my music and I danced
in the bethroom, and I usually come down for breakfast
in the way more positive states than when I got off.
(24:28):
If we can all get over our self consciousness, dancing
just feels good, and we do it because it connects
us to one another like social glue. We sometimes dance
because it's sexy and proves we are too. And dancing
has become folded into our big cultural rituals. The first
slow dance at weddings ringed by wet eyed spectators, the waltz,
(24:49):
the new dresses and borrowed car for prom, the doofy
Congo line, at a work party that started ironic and
ends up awesome. We dance because our bodies are built
to move to music, and maybe also because shredding and
air guitar solo feels red. Well. You know that end
of program sound as well as I do. But we
(25:12):
cannot shut down this show about music and dance without
a killer dance jam. We used to call that stuff
boots and pants music when I was a kid, because
you know, boots and pants and boots and pants and boots. Okay,
we're not technically allowed to use commercial music on this program,
but that will not stop us. I hit up my
friend Laser Beak to ask if he could hook me
up with a Dink a Dink dance remix, and oh
(25:34):
my goodness, did Beaks a legend God come through? DNC
ding ding? Come on? Are you hearing man? This is
gonna own the club circuit Ma York to Miami, Pop
of the Summer Guarantee. Deeply Human is a BBC World
(25:57):
Service and American Public Media co production with I Heart Media,
and it's hosted by Mesa. Find me online, Tessa on
Instagram and Tessa Darling on Twitter. This one's for you, baby,
Jesse Hey, I just want to see you dance for
(26:28):
me on the next Deeply Human, why is the human
animal modest? We're so modest, in fact, that we can
be reluctant to undress even to save our own lives,
say in a case of exposure to a biotoxin. Join
me next time to find out why you are not
(26:49):
naked and neither of mine.
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