Dance With Me

Ballroom Dancing and the Promise of Instant Intimacy

Julia A. Ericksen

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780814722664
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814722985
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Click here to listen to Julia Ericksen's interview about Dance with Me on Philadelphia NPR's "Radio Times"



Rumba music starts and a floor full of dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Rumba is an erotic dance, and the mood is hot and heavy; the women bend and hyperextend their legs as they twist and turn around their partners. Amateur and professional ballroom dancers alike compete in a highly gendered display of intimacy, romance and sexual passion.



In Dance With Me, Julia Ericksen, a competitive ballroom dancer herself, takes the reader onto the competition floor and into the lights and the glamour of a world of tanned bodies and glittering attire, exploring the allure of this hyper-competitive, difficult, and often expensive activity. In a vivid ethnography accompanied by beautiful photographs of all levels of dancers, from the world’s top competitors to social dancers, Ericksen examines the ways emotional labor is used to create intimacy between professional partners and between professionals and their students, illustrating how dancers purchase intimacy. She shows that, while at first glance, ballroom presents a highly gendered face with men leading and women following, dancing also transgresses gender.

1
The Purchase of Instant Intimacy

ALTHOUGH PHOEBE, A diminutive woman in her sixties, had studied ballroom dance for over twenty years, dance had never lost its glow. She explained, “I don’t have a social life. I only have a dance life. … I sacrifice everything for it; friendships, family, they come second.” Phoebe had always loved to dance, and as a teenager, she had persuaded her father to pay for ballet lessons, after having, as she put it, “taught it to myself really.” She resumed these lessons in adulthood, and at one point, the instructor began to teach the class something he called “ballroom performance.” This involved teaching the students a choreographed number. They learned no technique, just steps, which bothered Phoebe because she wanted to dance correctly. Phoebe had also been taking private ballet lessons with the same teacher, she said, “for no particular reason, except to get better and because I loved it.” She decided to change the lessons to half ballroom and half ballet “to learn how to do it right.” Her teacher upped the ante:

He asked if I knew what a dance competition was, and I said, “No.” He told me, and he said, “There’s a division called ‘Newcomers.’ You dance with a teacher, and it’s for someone who’s only danced three months. You have to do only three steps in each dance.” He wanted to know if I might be interested in that, and I said, “Yes, it sounds like fun.” He then said, “Well, good, because it’s in three weeks, and I’ve already signed you up.” … I was … just sold. … Ballet class you get to perform in front of the mirror and whoever is in the class, but this is performing.

Phoebe’s passion for ballroom competition continued. She described herself as being “as serious as any professional.” She was currently on her fourth teacher and planned to compete about six times over the coming year at some of the bigger competitions. Dance provided meaning and happiness in Phoebe’s life. She lived in a small apartment with only her cat for company and worked in a demanding but tedious job. On a lesson day, she said, “I’m always in a good mood, because this is my joy. It’s what I’ve waited all day to do. I wake up in the morning, and my first thought is, ‘Is this a dance day, or is this not a dance day?’”

Phoebe practiced a double consciousness about the intimacy involved in the student-teacher relationship. She wanted to be the favorite student of every teacher, and she had had crushes on each of them. However, she added, “I know that it’s a crush. It’s not ever been real.” A previous teacher had had about “seven students, but a core group of four,” and, she said, “we all fought for his attention.” Phoebe added, “I think it was so immature, when I look back on it. We were all adults in our forties. … ‘Who’s the favorite?’” When this teacher retired, Phoebe thought that she would never “want to dance with anybody else.” However, she quickly discovered, “It’s not him at all. It’s the dance that I love.” The hope for a perfect dance relationship was important in framing Phoebe’s desire for closeness, but, in turn, the desire for intimacy helped create her love of dance.

Phoebe’s commitment to dancing, and her desire for the connection that dancing provided, positions ballroom dancing as an example of what sociologist Viviana Zelizer has called “the purchase of intimacy,” that is, an understanding of intimacy as inevitably mixed with economic activity in the modern world.¹ Intimacy, just like any commodity—a pair of shoes, a bag of potato chips—can be bought and sold. However, because we view intimacy and commerce as incompatible, people carefully negotiate the connections between the two. While we can see the economic basis of commercialized intimacy, such as sex work, we do not always recognize that close personal relationships, such as courtship and marriage, also depend on a complex set of economic entanglements. The dance world is somewhere between these two—more obviously commercialized than marriage but more genuinely close and personal than sex work.

Dance and Intimacy

Ballet dancers who know the choreography can partner any number of dancers in a role,² but ballroom dance partners learn together. This appears to require an intimate connection, something we think of as developing slowly by means of personal revelations and increasing mutual dependency. Yet, in ballroom, the emotional connection of the couple develops quickly. From the first lesson, the teacher’s warmth and apparent pleasure in the lesson create a feeling in the student of being special. Furthermore, dance professionals learn to display an emotional connection with their professional partners as well as their students, whether or not they feel it. In addition, dance involves a physical connection not normally available outside a sexual relationship.³ Dancers hold one another. They sweat together. Becoming comfortable with this can be difficult but pleasurable. Dance intimacy, then, involves a quick intimacy, a public display, and a physical connection. I call this “instant intimacy.”

Instant intimacy is not only about the speed with which the relationship develops; it is also about physical closeness. Inside the dance studio, on the competition floor, and on the social dance floor, partners touch, hold hands, hug, and kiss with seeming abandon. Partners do bodily favors for each other, like massaging a sore back or pinning a pair of pants that have come unstitched. These same dancers, particularly if there is an age disparity between teacher and student, behave more formally in public spaces, only relaxing their guard in the safety of the dance space.

Zelizer examined the way couples negotiate the economic implications of long-term familial relations. She looked at court records of cases involving fights over the appropriate economic rewards for intimate caring to see the ways that couples combine economic transactions and intimate relationships and the stories they tell to explain the intermingling of the two. I am interested in intimacy and its portrayal in relationships that are ephemeral, not lasting. I argue that the attractions of instant intimacy are a feature of a world with high divorce rates and late average age at marriage. In such a world, many people organize their lives around short-term relationships, forgoing the demands of more encompassing connections. Furthermore, even long-married persons often wish for a safe variety in their intimate life, one that is emotionally satisfying but limited.

Phoebe explicitly purchased emotional connection. Her income was between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars per year, and she spent most of it on dance. Because she did not earn enough to cover both her day-to-day living expenses and dancing, her savings were dwindling. Although she was an extreme case, she was by no means unique in her willingness to put dance first. Zelizer notes in her book on money and its social meanings that money is not entirely fungible; that is, individuals segregate according to use.⁴ Phoebe recognized her dancing as an extravagance but was frugal in every other aspect of her life.

Phoebe’s teacher and competition partner was a highly ranked professional. Although he worked as an independent teacher and did not have to share his fees with a studio owner, Phoebe’s lessons were costly.⁵ When asked how much she spent on dancing, Phoebe became nervous, saying, “Oh, dear, I don’t want to go there. … I don’t want to figure it out. … I’d rather be ignorant.” In order to pay for competitions, she cut corners wherever she could. Where most student competitors eat hotel food, often with their teachers as part of the competition package, Phoebe took food with her and ate in her room.⁶ She stayed at the competition only on the days she was competing, which saved on tickets to the evening shows and on hotel bills but meant that she rarely got to watch the professional competition. She danced in one style only—American smooth—so she could usually confine the dancing to one day and use one dress at a time. She was spending about two thousand dollars per competition, which is less than most students pay. She attempted further economies, such as selling her old dresses—a difficult feat because many students have dresses to sell, and fashions change quickly. She had resolved not to buy new dresses but found this decision difficult to sustain. When she started dancing with her current teacher, the pressure to spend increased:

Each one’s different. This one’s incredibly controlling. … I always have somebody do my hair, because I can’t do it, but I did my own makeup, and the first few times he didn’t say anything except, “You need more makeup.” I went, “I have so much makeup on.” “That’s not even makeup.” I put more on, and the last time, he said, “I don’t like your makeup. … It doesn’t look professional. I want you to have it done.” I went, “It costs more, come on.” He went, “No, I really insist.” So I had someone do it, and he was like, “See what a difference it makes? How many people came up to you and said how terrific, how beautiful you looked.” … I make mine a little more natural looking. When you’re older, I think you look better if it’s more natural looking. … I love black, and I had a black dress made. … This teacher, when he finally saw it on me … wasn’t very enthusiastic. … I saw a dress … that I really loved, and it’s red. … We tried it on, and he said, “It’s much too big. It can’t be fixed. My partner can make it for you.” We copied that dress, only we made it a lot better. … The back has three little scoops, and she said, “We could make the back open completely if you want.” I went, “Oh, I kind of like my back still.” She came back three days later and said, “No, he says it should be closed.” … I was just imagining him saying, “Oh, no! She’s too old.”

Here we see the way in which money was the medium used to secure a relationship but also the way in which the relationship influenced Phoebe’s decisions about money. Phoebe wanted her teacher to care about her but worried that he viewed her as old. She interpreted his autocratic behavior as evidence of his interest, and she let herself be talked into wearing more makeup than she found flattering.

Phoebe was explicit about her ambivalence over the commercialized nature of the intimacy she obtained from dancing. On the one hand, she described what she greatly valued:

all the different kinds of relationships you can have with your teacher. You can be friends. You can flirt. … I used to tell [one], “Oh, my God, you’re so gorgeous,” but it was more to relax him. … He would say, “I know they’re all looking at my butt.” He could talk about it. You’re exploring the pro/am relationship, and I feel it can be a beautiful thing. It can be very supportive and very caring, and maybe it crosses the line.

Yet Phoebe worried about the commercial implications of her feelings:

“It’s just a job,” I remind myself. “They’re getting paid for this. …” For me, it’s a passion, and I don’t want to exaggerate what they feel for me. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they—“Well, I like her, but it’s still just a job.” I always have to tell myself, “Maybe it’s not a friendship. … It’s just a job, and hopefully for them, it’s a pleasant job.” They usually say, “I love teaching. I love what I do.”

Here we see the dilemma for teachers and students. Most teachers declare that teaching is more than just a way to make money and that they care about students and their performances. While it is clear that many do, students can never be certain, because they live in a culture with an apparent disconnect between caring and commerce.

Phoebe attempted to reassure herself that her teachers genuinely cared by putting considerable effort into creating friendships with them that extended beyond the dance floor. She despaired of her current teacher, who had proved resistant to her overtures. If she asked him to have lunch with her at a competition, he would “take a rain check.” She fondly remembered the teacher over whom she had fought. She told me, “He preferred to be with us. He really didn’t want to be with his colleagues. He would say we protected him. … We’d just talk about everything in the world; music, show business, politics.” That is, Phoebe knew his feelings were genuine.

Phoebe noted,

I would have trouble having that kind of conversation with some of the others. … Some are not very knowledgeable, or very educated, or they come from different cultures nowadays. … It has always been important to me to have a personal relationship with the person though. … I want to break that barrier, and I’m not happy until it’s broken. … The best way to do it is to show them how interested you are in their career, and I usually am. … I also like to find out about their life, their past. … You start sometimes even talking about your personal life. They may even ask little by little. You don’t talk during lessons, because that would be a waste of money. … At competitions, some include you afterwards, some don’t. It doesn’t hurt my feelings.

The former teacher had been born and raised in the United States, whereas the new teacher was an ambitious immigrant from one of the poorest countries in eastern Europe, so breaking down the barriers had proven difficult. However, Phoebe kept trying.

Intimacy, Gender, and Commerce

Ballroom dance always draws attention to two types of human bodies: male and female.⁷ For many students and audiences, the gendered nature of this dancing is part of its attraction. Phoebe’s husband had died shortly after she started. Male companionship was important to her; her main source came from dance lessons, always carefully calibrated in dollars. She described the dance relationship as one of equals. Although she understood that the man’s role is to lead and the woman’s is to follow, she argued that “the woman does fifty percent.” She even noted that “there are certain times when you’re leading the motion.” She saw smooth dancing as “simply a love story of a man and a woman, whether they’re fighting or flirting or playing or seducing.” However, she liked the idea of “ceding something to them” because she saw it as “very feminine.” In this way, dancing helped maintain her gender identity.

While the performance of ballroom appears traditionally gendered, in reality gender plays out in complex ways. Masculinity in American society has been conceptualized as an endeavor that requires the approval of other men.⁸ Men who dance professionally, however, transgress this understanding, because, while other men may be an important audience during a performance, male teachers spend most of their days relating to and pleasing women. The intimacy rules that male teachers follow involve a mix of traditionally gendered and transgressive behaviors.

In contrast, professional women dancers must tread a fine line between telling male students what to do and showing them how to take charge. Some men find it difficult to be taught by a woman, which is one possible reason that there are many fewer male students than female. In addition, the flirting that is a part of studio life has a different and potentially more dangerous meaning when the student is male and the teacher female, rather than the other way around.

The idea that money can buy intimacy helps explain why Phoebe looked to the commercial dance world for a dose of romance.⁹ Phoebe desired personal, but nonsexual, physical relationships with handsome young men, and she was willing to pay for them. At the same time, she was quite brutal in her description of the limits of these relationships, noting the emotional labor she undertook to achieve a closer connection.¹⁰

Romantic love is regarded in our culture as indispensible for true happiness.¹¹ For those who have not found it,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Passion
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Photographing Emotion, by Jonathan S. Marion
• Introduction: Entering the World of Ballroom
• 1 The Purchase of Instant Intimacy
• 2 The Thrill of Performance and the Agony of Competition
• 3 The Economics of Ballroom
• 4 Feeling the Dance, Showing the Magic
• 5 The Tan, the Hair, the Makeup: Embracing the Look
• 6 Taking the Lead: The Male Dancer
• 7 Beyond the Glamour: The Female Dancer
• 8 The Music Hasn’t Stopped: The Aging Dancer
• 9 Connection Is Key
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Photo Section