I Took a “How to Dance at the Club” Class

My first thought is that the room—a high-ceilinged loft in a Bushwick warehouse, a section of it draped with sheer fabrics and glowing with blue light—is dark, but not nearly dark enough. I can see the tiny design on the shirt of the person across the circle from me, which means they can clock the same small details on me; I feel exposed, and we haven’t even started dancing.

I am here, as are a dozen other people, to learn how to dance at the club, or Dancefloor 101, as the colorful Instagram flier suggested. According to recent headlines, this is a much-needed endeavor, with young people in particular either unable to let loose or nostalgic for bygone eras of more ferally “getting crunk.” “Suddenly Everyone Is Scared to Dance at Concerts and Clubs,” the Wall Street Journal declared last year, blaming a new fear of “looking goofy” on camera. So when the flyer asked, “want to move but don’t know where to start?” I thought, Yes, feeling sheepish at even acknowledging that impulse. For so many people, dancing comes naturally, but for so much of my life, I have tried to resist the wiggle and the shimmy and the bop, writing dancing off as something not for me. 

See, integral to my family lore is the idea that I can’t dance. When rhythm doesn’t evade me, it’s the coordinated motion; even a box step hates to see me coming. “When everyone went left, Bettina went right,” my mom has often said, retelling a story from a school performance when I was child. While I appreciate this as a metaphor for my desire to go my own way or my ability to resist societal pressures, it, coupled with the psychic trauma of awkward middle school dances, has made moving my body to music in public a mortifying act; that I go to so many concerts at which moshing and jumping are the preferred movements is no coincidence. And yet, the body wants what the mind tries to resist: I do, often, feel the music and want to let it move through me. I want to dance in a room with other people, even if it feels embarrassing to acknowledge that, much less do it.

And so, here I am, embarrassing myself. In this loft in Bushwick, I’m trying to see if dancing intuitively is, however unintuitively, something that can be learned. First, the instructor—a dancer and puppeteer who wears neon colors and is described as specializing in “expressive storytelling and tomfoolery”—teaches us about “catching the beat,” as the DJ in the corner gets to work. This, I breathe with a sign of relief, is something I can generally do. The beat, the instructor says, is the collective experience, connecting us to everyone else in the same space. There is a lot of talk of energy: of putting it into spaces through dancing, or of sucking it out by standing still on the dance floor.

We’re to catch the beat in our heads first, and then send it down our bodies, part by part. I can feel it in my head and then kick it to my shoulders and then to my hands and hips. It’s when we’re instructed to connect the beat between body parts that I feel the familiar breakdown, like the glitch if I try to pat my head and rub my stomach. I feel like a robot: unnatural, my body parts too clunky. Can everyone see this? I think, though of course it does not register to me that other people might be thinking the same thing. We then go over how to time our movements to the beat: riding it, versus being “in the pocket” of it. Moving my shoulders and arms, I feel the nuance.