Compared with most of the issues that the venerable American civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel takes up, this one may seem like the ultimate in urban frivolity: Late last month, he joined hundreds of hip-hoppers, salsa dancers, Lindy Hoppers and techno-heads boogying along Fifth Avenue to protest New York City’s 80-year-old restrictions on dancing in bars.
But disputes over who can dance, how and where, are at least as old as civilisation, and arise from the longstanding conflict between the forces of order and hierarchy on the one hand, and the deep human craving for free-spirited joy on the other.
Conflict over public dancing has a long history — one that goes all the way back to the ancient Mediterranean world. The Greeks danced to worship their gods — especially Dionysus, the god of ecstasy. But then the far more strait-laced Romans cracked down viciously on Dionysian worship in 186 BC, even going on to ban dancing schools for Roman children a few decades later. The early Christians incorporated dance into their liturgy, despite church leaders’ worries about immodesty.
The Catholic Church did not succeed in prohibiting dancing within churches until the late Middle Ages, and in doing so perhaps inadvertently set off the dance “manias” that swept Belgium, Germany and Italy starting in the 14th century. Long attributed to some form of toxin — ergot or spider venom — the manias drove thousands of people to the streets day and night, mocking and menacing the priests who tried to stop them.
In northern Europe, Calvinism brought a hasty death to the old public forms of dancing, along with the costuming, masking and feasting that had usually accompanied them. All that survived, outside of vestiges of “folk dancing”, were the elites’ tame, indoor ballroom dances, fraught, as in today’s “Dancing With the Stars”, with anxiety over a possible misstep.
To the secular opponents of public dancing, it is always a noxious source of disorder and, in New York’s case, noise. But hardly anyone talks about what is lost when the music stops and the traditional venues close.
Facing what he saw as an epidemic of melancholy, or what we would now call depression, the 17th-century English writer Robert Burton placed much of the blame on the Calvinist hostility to “dancing, singing, masking, mumming and stage plays”. In fact, in some cultures, ecstatic dance has been routinely employed as a cure for emotional disorders.
The need for public, celebratory dance seems to be hardwired into us. Rock art from around the world depicts stick figures dancing in lines and circles at least as far back as 10,000 years ago. Dancing to music is not only mood-lifting and community-building; it’s also a uniquely human capability. No other animals, not even chimpanzees, can keep together in time to music. Yes, we can live without it, but why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate our own communal pleasures out of music and dance?

IHT