Just Dance.

MANY OF US the 1984 movie Footloose. A brash, edgy rebel (played by Kevin Bacon) moves to a small town and learns, to his dismay, that a prim minister (John Lithgow)—father of a brash, edgy daughter—rails from the pulpit against the evils of dancing, which is accordingly outlawed, and so on.

What you may not know is that the real-life basis of the movie is something that happened a few years before (1980) in my adopted home state of Oklahoma—in Elmore City (population 700), about halfway between Oklahoma City and the Texas border, where dance had been forbidden for eighty-two years until the Elmore City High School class of 1981 petitioned to hold a junior prom. And yes, it was the local clergy who led the opposition: “No good has ever come from a dance,” said the reverend of the United Pentecostal Church in nearby Hennepin. “When boys and girls hold each other, they get sexually aroused. You can believe what you want, but one thing leads to another.”

Fair enough: boys and girls (and sometimes boys and boys, or girls and girls) often do get excited when dancing, especially when dancing the tango or lambada. However, let me assure you that there’s nothing wrong with dancing—it doesn’t leave a carbon footprint—and it does make you feel a lot better about being alive on this gorgeous planet of ours.

As for puritans like Lithgow’s minister or the real-life Rev. Johnson of Hennepin, I’ve noticed they’re mostly an isolated phenomenon; in most cultures, the joys of dance tend to be integrated into every facet of life (witness the feverish dancing at Greek or Jewish weddings and even funerals).

A few years back, my partner and I were taking an evening stroll in Beijing when we spotted some thirty-five people doing a line dance on the sidewalk—what we later learned was probably a Confucian Yi (or “row”) dance—a kind of physical meditation that seemed as natural as breathing. Pedestrians either paused to watch or join before going their separate, more contented ways.

As for squeamish he-men who worry that dance is effeminate, I urge you to Google the haka—the ceremonial Maori war dance adopted by a New Zealand rugby team, meant to strike terror into the hearts of their opponents.

When I brought my dance company on a teaching junket to West Africa, the gender breakdown was about 80 percent male, 20 percent female, roughly the opposite of what we usually encounter here in the United States. For any class of mine, we gather in a circle and learn one another’s names with the help of a physical gesture or move that each person makes and that the rest of us must imitate whenever that person’s name comes up. As if to attest to the many athleticism of dancing, one student announced his name—“Amadi!”—and did a perfect standing backflip.

I’m reminded of my Halloween dance in seventh grade, when I had what was arguably my first-ever Dance Attack—a kind of euphoric fit that comes over you and makes you bust moves you didn’t even know you had. As at most middle school parties, the dance floor was deserted until a few brave girls ventured forth while the boys stood against the wall chewing their nails. Since I preferred playing with girls even then, I joined that vanguard on the dance floor and was soon the red-hot center of a frenzy, until suddenly, without thinking, I nailed a perfect backflip (just like Amadi!)—the only one in my life, before or since.

So you never know what’s going to pop out of people. Since 2007, I’ve traveled to various cities and recruited volunteers for my Bolero project, which entails three or four weeks of intensive rehearsal for a collaborative fifteen-minute dance to Ravel’s music—a kind of seminar in choreographic recipe-building. Since these are non-dancers of all ages, I’m less interested in teaching the rigors of technique than in discovering aspects of their individual personalities.

During my first Bolero NYC, a lovely white-haired woman named Mary Wade—with whom I have a standing monthly lunch date unto the present day—seemed a little constrained until I handed her a red boa, which she tugged alluringly over her shoulders: “the Mary Moment” it came to be called, as in “Let’s take it from the Mary Moment, then we’ll go all the way to the bottom.” Nobody was more surprised than Mary herself that, given half a chance, she could be as charismatic as Marlene Dietrich.

Amid the ebb and flow of a global pandemic, dance is a perfect way to reconnect with others—à la certain of my friends who make a point of meeting at their favorite dance club every week or month, or (more likely in Oklahoma) at a country-western bar for line dancing and two-stepping.

For my part, I can assure you that a dance class is the perfect way to make new friends. At the beginning of my Bolero sessions, people tend to be a little apprehensive—What will he make us do? What if I’m no good? What if these other people don’t like me?—but invariably we relax and laugh and exchange contact info at our final potluck dinner. That goes for me, too—hence my long attachment to Mary Wade (among others).

As for the prom controversy in Elmore City more than four decades ago, it was settled by the five-person school board: with the vote tied 2-to-2, the board president, Raymond Lee—father of a junior class officer—succinctly settled the matter with three words: “Let ’em dance.”

The rest is history: Elmore City’s first-ever prom was front-page news from here to China, and so was noticed by Dean Pitchford (about to win the best-original-song Oscar for his title track to Fame), who immortalized the furor in his Footloose screenplay. And the beat goes on: thirty years later, Elmore City hosted its inaugural Footloose Festival with a boffo dance on Main Street—forty students decked out in vintage 1980s prom regalia—that I would have been proud to choreograph myself. I call that progress.

POSTSCRIPT: We note here that in at least sixteen state legislatures elected officials have introduced bills banning drag performance—one of the great styles of entertainment—in public places. In Tennessee, one such bill has been signed into law. Other state bills are pending as of press time.