Get Your Groove On

Been getting the urge to go dancing lately. I love to dance and if the music's right and the crowd's amenable I'll go all night. Coincidently, I've been reading Lewis Mumford's "Technics and Human Development" and I'm at a part where's he's conjecturing about what human gatherings were like in our early days before we had language capabilities. He believes that it was gestures and actions that helped our ancestors form nascent social organizations. Someone would get inspired and begin a sort of "Look at Me" dance; this was the start of us getting together and telling stories. Before language it was just our bodies moving and jumping around, arms flailing and feet stamping, pantomiming animals and acts of nature. This dance in turn became infectious and the whole group would pick it up, reinforcing emotions and bonding the tribe together.

In a past life I was a dancer - no, not that kind of dancing. Modern dance - Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, et al. I wasn't really all that good at it, they kept me around mostly because I could lift women and not trip over my own feet. I loved training with a dance troupe though. We would spend hours in intricate choreography, flowing and swaying in complex patterns across the floor. It got so you were acutely aware of everyone at any given moment in space, mostly so you wouldn't run into them as you sped past but interestingly it also seemed as if our bodies were merged in some fashion into one transcendent being - not all the time but often enough to keep us in awe. Mind you this was back when I had a dancer's frame, 15 years of inhaling corporate fumes has left me sadly in ill repair, it's only recently through yoga that I've found my own true inner body returning - hence the desire to shake some booty.

There are a couple of applications out there that I've been playing with lately, facebook and twitter and they remind me of dancing in some fashion. These are what are called social apps because they're all about people interacting with each other on the internet. They let us keep in touch through short little text messages that are updated frequently. These short sentences usually reflect a person's mood or tell of an action being taken, what they've just eaten or who their new friends are. I'm fascinated by this. It strikes me that perhaps these are our early days of information dancing. The dawn of digital tribal movements saying "Look at Me". Small pieces of our separate lives are being blended together to be watched on a web page. Where will this go? I'm curious, what happens as we intertwine our lives closer and closer albeit today only through the limited medium of writing but tomorrow? As we become more aware of each other is this a dance that leads us to feel more connected while speeding temporally by? Are we on the road, like my young dance troupe, where some day we bond momentarily as one and as dervishes whirl together in collective meditation fully aware of what each other is feeling and doing?