Last year I learned the basics of contra, waltz, salsa, and a tiny bit of bachata. I had a few hours of lindy hop exposure before my powerful dislike propelled me away. I estimate I spent 45 hours and $500 on dance in 2024.
Starting this week I’m taking west coast swing and Argentine tango, which I believe are somewhat more difficult styles.
The fact that I’m doing this is kind of surprising. I’m not good at dance, I dislike doing things I’m not good at, and touching strangers I haven’t vetted for personal compatibility makes me uncomfortable. I mildly prefer not to hug my friends, even, so looking at tango videos while deciding whether to learn it was hair raising. They’re really up in each other’s space. There was unnecessary neck touching. I’m prudish in a couple narrow ways, and partner dance jostles one of those ways hard.
When I reflect on why I’m doing it, I get two answers:
- When I hit hour ~10 of salsa, I got a hint of what it would be like to be good at this, and it felt… directly good. I dutifully played piano for years as a child without ever getting the oh, it would feel good to be good at this. Writing doesn’t give me that either – the rewards are cerebral and diffuse. Painting is closer, but it still doesn’t feel good to be good exactly – painting is feels good to do, and to have done well, but in the moment of exercising my skill I’m not me, I’m a computational process smeared out over the canvas. But dance opens up a new kind of high I can chase.
- I enjoy being mildly uncomfortable. I also meta-enjoy that I enjoy mild discomfort – it makes my life more interesting, compared to the earlier phases when I avoided all discomfort. When I’m dealing with the discomfort of touching a stranger, I can glimpse a state of being where I no longer find it uncomfortable – which means I’d be a meaningfully different person. Some fundamental, usually-unnoticed tension between me and the rest of the human species will be gone*. I’m okay with this tension, but I see it would feel slightly better to be without it, and also the process of exercising power over myself to change would be enormously satisfying. Many types of even neutral transformation are fun.
(* Relevant-feeling sidenote: one of my first reactions to contra dance was, “huh, I think it would be quite difficult for someone to pogrom people they had contra danced with? I think this was an activity that put the participants on non-massacring terms with each other without their ever speaking to each other. Not that it was salient that we might massacre each other before the dance. It’s just that the background mental variable shifted by dancing seems best described as ‘psychological barrier to mass violence’.”)