If you can’t dance, how can it really be a revolution? Three films showing how “movements of freedom” can liberate and inspire change
Click on gif above, or here, to see full video of “Movements of Freedom”
Emma Goldman’s famous phrase - “if I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution” (actually a paraphrase) - is cited by many when they want to connect culture, conviviality and fun to the sometimes grinding business of protest and activism.
Yet we’ve always wondered at A/UK whether this is the wrong way round - and that friendliness, frolics and fun might well be the starting point for a truly humanised politics, rooted in rich and real relationships.
We’ve found a few films that make an explicit connection between the pursuit of dance, and the opening up of perspectives and freedoms in communities and individuals. If we find a way to possess and express our bodies, what other powers of self-determination and autonomy might we discover?
Above - in a brief animated gif, but here as a full version - is a trailer for a forthcoming documentary by dancer and filmmaker Hattie Worboys, titled Movements of Freedom. The premise is simple: children in deprived communities as disparate as Hackney and New Orleans, Mumbai and Rio show each other their dance moves down video-conferencing apps. And then they adapt what they see to their own neighbourhoods and circumstances (Worboys explains the method here).
The result is a beautiful, elemental piece of filmmaking, where children’s responsiveness and improvisation is an inspiration to any watching adult.
“My home is my shoes”
And at the other end of the age scale, how dance both rejuvenates and centres you. From Aeon:
When Will Gains tap dances, he can feel his childhood in Detroit, hear the music that played at the clubs where he danced as a young man. Now an octogenarian living in England, Will dances because the music is still alive within him, and because he loves the sound his shoes make as they scratch and tap the ground.
He says: ‘I don’t dance. The shoes do the dancing.’ My Home Is My Shoes, Will is a brief portrait of a man with a unique connection to music, a natural storyteller who recounts a life in dance by dancing.
Dance Dance Revolution
And finally, an explainer on the societal power of dance, also from Aeon:
Every culture dances. Moving our bodies to music is ubiquitous throughout human history and across the globe. So why is this ostensibly frivolous act so fundamental to being human?
The answer, it seems, is in our need for social cohesion – that vital glue that keeps societies from breaking apart despite interpersonal differences.
The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) theorised that ‘collective effervescence’ – moments in which people come together in some form of unifying, excitement-inducing activity – is at the root of what holds groups together.
More recently, Bronwyn Tarr, an evolutionary biologist and psychologist at the University of Oxford who is also a dancer, has researched the evolutionary and neurological underpinnings of our innate tendency to bust a move.
Drawing on the work of both Durkheim and Tarr, this Aeon Original video explores that unifying feeling of group ‘electricity’ that lifts us up when we’re enthralled by our favourite sports teams, participating in religious rituals, entranced by music – and, yes, dancing the night away.
More of Aeon’s archive on dance here.