First we danced. Later we spoke.
For our ancient ancestors, meaningful movement and vocalizations— growls, sighs and the like —were the only communication strategies in their stone toolboxes. If Cavewoman grew annoyed at Caveman (as she surely she did every 28 days), she couldn’t use words to explain why she was stomping about, kicking rocks and rolling her eyes. Words were as unknown in her day as smartphones in the 1980s. Instead, she relied on her body movements and her repertoire of what evolutionary psychologists call meaningful utterances—those syllablic snapshots of our complex inner states. Like “awwww” and “f***!”
It is into this pre-language era that Dove Chocolate has sent me with the foil-printed promise “Solve arguments with a dance-off.” (I had recently decided —as I ate my way through a small gift basket of Dove Chocolate Promises — to follow each suggestion printed inside the candy’s 2 1/2 inch foil wrappers as a way to force me to randomly consider new ideas.)
I imagine Cavewoman by the fire, wolf-dog watching her as she skillfully dispatched her arms, legs and torso to convey her anger to Caveman. But me? Without my mouth, what will I “say” when argument time comes?
It comes on a Saturday evening in spring. Throughout the afternoon, my mood had been souring steadily as I slogged through pre-guest housework while my husband assembled a new lawn mower. Men do this —they grout bathroom tiles, paint basements, oil squeaky door hinges —as company strides toward the front door. But I do not understand the timing of it. And tonight, the timing exacerbates me.
“Let’s argue about this through dance,” I suggest and he agrees. I throw down a dust rag and take the stage in the kitchen.
My legs and arms flap out my message, but they yack more about plot than emotion. I do a “scrub the toilet” dance and a “vacuum the whole damn house, even the back stairs,” dance but I can’t allow my anger to linger in the spotlight. It’s simply too horrifying, too shameful. A toddler in a pink tutu can do an angry dance with nary a second thought, but by my age, thought and analysis have beaten the pink tutu out of me. I have learned to use my words and in doing so, my head has divorced my body, granting it visiting privileges only.
I finish and lean against the sink, panting near our dog George, who has been watching attentively. Then George and I both sit down while Alex responds briefly with a Three Stooges inspired dance.
Here’s what does not happen next: We experience the ancient magic of movement, enroll in a dance class, and became a happier couple, strengthened and gratified through honest communication.
Here’s what does happen: Alex and I glare at each other. George starts to cry.
“Mommy and daddy love each very much,” I explain to the dog. “Sometimes we fight, but we always make up.”
“Group hug!” Alex announces, and we move toward each other, arms outstretched. George stands on his back legs and joyfully joins in, his furry face seeking out each of our faces, his body wriggling in relief.
George understands meaningful movement. While following Dove’s promise has delivered Alex and me to a point of comic relief, I am skeptical that we could do it again. Is any sort of communication through dance possible for today’s mainstream humans?
When I seek out someone to help me answer that question I am led to Eric Wiertelak, neuroscientist by day, competitive ballroom dancer by night. Wiertelak happens to be one of the few behavioral scientists worldwide who specializes in what happens in our brains when we dance and when we watch others dance.
On a beautiful end-of-May day in Minnesota, he has agreed to tell me.
Ballroom Dancing and the Textbook of Pain
Wiertelak is the DeWitt Wallace Professor of Psychology and director of the neuroscience study program at Macalester College in St. Paul. To reach his office in Room 341 of Olin-Rice Hall, I walk across a drowsy, summer-semester campus, where the green lawn is interrupted by riots of purple catmint and crisp white tents, erected in preparation for an alumni reunion. When a cold wind gusts in, the trees tango, large branches cleave and I feel discomforted.
But Wiertelak himself is the opposite of discomforting. A South Side Chicago native, from a neighborhood called the East Side—I take his word for this—he looks as if he’d be as relaxed and at home in the White Sox bleachers as in his academic office, a 10 x 10 foot space classically crammed, after 25 years, with an estimated 700 books with titles such as “The Textbook of Pain.” (One of his favorites.)
When he isn't on campus teaching and studying the neural correlates of dance and dance performance, the professor is two blocks away at Cinema Ballroom, which, he tells me, is one of the nation’s most successful dance studios. I take his word for this, too.
Mr. Try Something New
If I was looking for a person who successfully squared off with the middle-age question of “Now what?” I could do no better than Wiertelak. For starters, he describes himself a Mr. Try Something New, which strikes me as a splendid framework for middle age. At age 44, he started playing the violin. At age 48, he was divorced and, from the sounds of it, rather bored. I don’t pry but he volunteers the story of how in a single night, he became a changed man, a dancing man.
“I went to a conference in Rio de Janeiro that year, and had been thinking, I don’t have enough interests. I go to work, stuff like that,” he said.
“The first night after the academic sessions, the neuroscientists were told to gather in the lobby at 9 p.m. for an excursion. In the lobby, our hosts had been completely transformed. Lab coats gave way to heels and dresses. The men, too, had been transformed. They all looked like they were ready for an elegant evening out while the rest of us looked prepared for an on-campus faculty event.
“They put us in what seemed like 45 cabs and we took off across Rio, through tunnels, over mountains and through valleys. We slammed to a halt in the warehouse district.”
Inside a building, the scientists were seated at a table that wrapped around a stage and drank caipirinhas —the Brazilian national cocktail — while they waited for the show to begin. Or so Wiertelak thought. For when the music started, a stranger tapped him on the shoulder.
They were there to dance, not to listen.
Many frenetic sambas later, Wiertelak’s life had taken a sharp turn. When he returned home to Minneapolis-St. Paul, where he noted that the population density is 1/15th that of Rio, he felt he was living life in the slow lane. In short order, he popped into the Cinema Ballroom for a peek, enrolled in a dance class, started to compete nationally, earned the newcomer of the year award, and met the woman who was now his wife and dance partner.
What struck me most about his story is this: when a stranger tapped him on the shoulder, the professor said yes.
Can I “Talk Angry” to My Spouse Through Dancing?
“Not much research has been done in the neuroscience of dance,” Wiertelak tells me. This announcement does not stun me. Still, I want to get a handle on what we know thus far and what anyone can expect in a dance-off. My questions are basic and to the point of the Dove Promise.
“Instead of speaking, can I communicate with my husband by dancing?” I ask Wiertelak.
“Yes,” he says. “Dance is a fundamental form of human expression. Basic messages about your mood and thoughts — an ability that came out of our ecological niche and evolutionary past — can be transmitted between two people.”
Among the first researchers to suggest this were Steven Brown and Lawrence Parsons, who conducted the world’s first neuroimaging study of moving dancers, then told the world of laymen about it in a 2008 Scientific American article. The scientists had slid amateur tango dancers into PET scans and, under its all-knowing eye, asked them to dance from the waist down. (I don’t know why they thought is was important to note that the dancer were amateurs, but they did.)
When the experiment ended, the researchers announced their findings: while dancing, a teaspoon-sized piece of brain lights up, located near your temple and called Broca’s area. So what? you may ask, and here’s your answer: Broca’s area is associated with the evolution of communication. Dancing isn’t just merrymaking, it’s the first cousin of words and gestures. Your limbs have something in common with your mouth, in that they are your brain’s messengers. Remember that next time you open your arms to greet a friend or shake your fist angrily in the air.
What Happens to My Brain When I Watch My Spouse Dance Angry?
Next I asked Wiertelak, “What happens in my brain when I watch my husband dance angry? Is anything lost or gained by watching him move, instead of listening to him talk?
Wiertelak responds as if he fields this question every warm, spring afternoon. “Dancing will tell you if your are looking at physical or emotional pain,” he says, and this announcement really does stun me. Thanks to something called mirror neurons, we are more than casual observers when we carefully watch others move.
We’ve all seen mirror neurons in action. They are why an avid baseball fan, who’s most strenuous exercise has been hailing the beer vendor all afternoon, reacts as if it was he himself who hit his team’s winning home run in the bottom of the ninth. Mirror neurons prompt us to calm a crying baby, smile back at a smiling friend, sob at the end of a movie, and even identify with a character who we have come to know only through the printed pages of our book.
Quite simply, if mildly troubling, mirror neurons connect your brain to the brains of others. This is the cellular foundation of empathy.
Because the people who discovered mirror neurons deserve a moment of our time, a quick trip to their lab is in order, this time to the University of Parma and the lab of neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti. In 1996, Rizzolatti and his colleagues were trying to figure out what happens inside a monkey’s brain when he grasps something. What neurons fired up? they wondered. By accident, they discovered something else entirely, something remarkable: the same neurons fired not only when the monkey performed the action himself, but when he watched another perform the same action, including watching a person take a peanut.
Neurologically, Monkey See was Monkey Do.
Back in Minnesota, Wiertelak tells me that he has a dance lesson at Cinema Ballroom in 90 minutes and appears eager to get his body moving, for on his laptop he calls up a video of two award-winning ballroom dancers and together we silently watch it. “Dance is is an approved Olympic sport,” Wiertelak tells me when it’s done. “They just haven’t found the room. You’d have to kick off another sport, like curling.”
I thank Wiertelak and walk back across campus, the trees now still and the scent of catmint hugging the green grounds.
Time for Some Happy Feet
Before leaving St. Paul, I stop at the Cinema Ballroom which, as the name suggests, has its own evolutionary story. The old theater marquee juts out over the sidewalk, held in check by by two thick cables. Today, its 50-some lightbulbs outline black letters that read “Midwest Lindyfest. Home of the happy feet.”
I open the door and walk in. Behind me, I hear the door open and a middle-aged couple bolt in, wearing smart-outfits and looks of rapture. The door opens yet again, and again, and soon about 40 sunny-looking folks aged 14-70, have taken to the dance floor.
They freeze for a moment then the instructor calls out. “Five, six, here we go! Slow slow quick quick. Slow slow quick quick.”
The merry mob moves in unison. I am thinking I want to be one of them when a svelte man dressed in black and named Issac Flath approaches me. Flath tells me he the author of “Midwest Lindyfest. Home of the happy feet” and that last year, in his late 20s, he quit a high-paying job to work a significantly lower-paying one in the world of dance. He states that he does not regret moving from an income bracket that allowed him to pretty much buy whatever he wanted to a lower one which —I’m just guessing here — does not offer a generous benefits package. Who am I to judge? I am 58 years old and seeking council from strangers who write Dove Chocolate candy wrappers.
“Do you want to learn a few steps?” Flath asks me. “If you wait just a bit, I could teach you when these dancers are done, which will be in about twenty minutes.”
“Oh…wow…maybe!” I sputter enthusiastically and when Flath turns his back, I slip out the door and drive to Walgreens, where I purchase detergent. Tonight I will do my laundry.
Twenty minutes later, however, I re-enter Cinema Ballroom’s door and tentatively seek out Flath. The music is playing and he holds his right arm out stiffly and leads me to the dance floor.
Slow slow quick quick. I feel inexplicably joyful. Can fellow dancers sense my metamorphosis? I am free…I am discovering a new me… I am…being led off the dance floor? OK, I’m a little ungraceful but c’mon!
Flath has stopped dancing and has held his right arm at a stiff 90-degree angle. Long before the song ends, he escorts me off the floor.
1. Dance 2. Speak 3. Text with Emojis
First we danced. Later we spoke. I suspect this is where some of our problems began—when we started yacking. Our bodies transmit much of the emotional part of our messages and without them, we have to willfully, consciously insert emotion in our spoken words, typed emails, jabbed-out texts. Just as often, we consciously leave it out. Emotion is not always welcome or deemed proper.
This, I believe, is the new territory being staked out by emojis, surrogates for our body movements and meaningful utterances. If you doubt it, consider this: Oxford Dictionaries named one emoji (the face with tears of joy) its 2015 Word of at the Year. Millions of times a day, emojis are summoned to be electronic bellhops for our arms, legs, torsos, and faces, toting tone and emotion beside our words. One linguistics professor even claims that learning how to use emojis can improve our relationships. In his book “The Emoji Code,” Vyvyan Evans states that emojis are a fundamental form of communication in the digital age because they clarify our mood and thoughts. (Lest you think Evans is an outlier hoping to cash in on a fad, as did I initially, you should know he is one of Britain’s leading experts in language and communication and editor of Language and Cognition, published by Cambridge University Press.)
It makes sense and it’s discomforting. Our words first wed with our bodies. Now they are coupling with emojis in what will be a second marriage, an affair, or an open marriage. I know I sound bitter, but you’ll never solve an argument with an emoji-off. How can your dog watch that?
I exit the Cinema Ballroom, home of the happy feet, and know it is time to open another Dove Chocolate Promise.