Getting In Touch With My Inner Astaire

Originally posted on June 21, 2008

I am certainly not what you would call a natural-born dancer, which explains my mother's patient efforts to teach me the simple two-step in our dining room before my first junior cotillion dance at age 13. I had great difficulty later in adolescence doing the various steps from the dance crazes of the early 1960s, let alone the classic cheek-to-cheek slow dances, and it wasn't until that I fell rather rapturously into highly percussive rock, Latin music and so-called World Music in my 20s that I found my body moving itself at dance concerts without having to prompt it. Or be led by my partner.

Although this could be categorized as hippy-dippy dancing and certainly nothing Fred Astaire would recognize, I was pretty good at it and subsequently have picked up a few other moves. No ballroom dancing in its grandest style, mind you, but I can do a fair semblance of a Cajun two-step swing dance although my left side has not completely recovered from a mild stroke a few years back, while my appreciation for ballet and ability to understand and write about it has deepened because of the Dear Friend & Conscience, who is a damned good classical ballet, jazz and modern dancer.

I have always wondered how my metamorphosis came about. What was it in my brain that freed the body of that shy 13-year-old from its shackles? I mulled this anew in reflecting on the marvelous Cyd Charisse, who recently pirouetted off to the great ballroom in the sky.

Neuroscientists have been of no help answering my questions until recently when they conducted the first brain-imaging studies of both amateur and professional dancers in an effort to understand how dancers navigate, pace their steps and learn complex patterned movements.

What they found is intriguing.

Image: "Dancers Practicing At the Bar" (1877) by Edgar Degas