2017

Kate Willich’s Dance Church

Dance Church, Seattle

Secular communities are a pet interest of mine, and my latest discovery is Dance Church, which operates here in Seattle and now in Portland, too. In Seattle, the talented Kate Willich leads people of all ability levels through synchronized dance in a large group, as she has been doing for seven years. The group started as a movement class, but her students soon enough told her that the community she was leading is a church, and she embraced that terminology. The way the “church” concept bubbled up from a secular dance class reminds me of the way that a spiritual “Temple” bubbled up out of the profane Burning Man festival. Dancing together makes you feel connected to other people the way that talking just can’t match. If my Unitarian church featured more dancing, that would be fine by me.

Before we humans could talk about world politics over coffee and share gossip over the fence, we danced together. Walking is something that we humans have to learn, but we are programmed to learn it. It’s the same with dancing. Toddlers are desperate to learn to walk, and adults love to dance. To be fair, not every last person on the face of the planet over the last hundred thousand years has loved to dance, and not every toddler has learned to walk. It’s just the norm, the behavior that the human genome is adapted to. Today, not loving to dance seems common. I know people who basically never dance. But I’m not sure we love dancing any less. What’s different is maybe not so much that we love dancing less but that we fear it more. One reason it scares us is that we don’t know how to do it, and that’s generally because we dance like no one else ever has. In primeval terms, dancing is about making music and moving rhythmically together. In most languages, there’s one word for singing and dancing. In many languages, that same word means ceremony or ritual. For our ancestors, being able to sing and dance was assumed, just like being able to walk is assumed. Dancing together is how our ancestors reminded each other that they were all equal and were all one. But today the culture has taught us that we are all individuals and that it’s shameful to do what other people are doing because that’s bowing to peer pressure. “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off?” The obvious answer is that it depends entirely on what happened to your friends. If twelve of them are down there in the water under the bridge yelling up at you that it’s OK, then yes, jump off! Today, people are expected to dance as individuals. But not too much as individuals, because if you dance funny, people will laugh. Singers, even professionals, are not expected to write their own songs, but amateur dancers are expected to invent their own choreography, ad lib. The unmet need for dancing in synch creates dance crazes, such as the Macarena or line dancing. Dancers are so grateful to have the choreography provided for them that they flock to these popular dance styles. Predictably, the elites mock the “simple” people who like dancing and don’t like choreographing their own steps. Meanwhile, the people who dance most frequently are often those who are part of a choreographed program. They do square dancing, contra dancing, exercise dancing, or otherwise follow a caller. You don’t see those dancers at the clubs, but you see them week after week at community centers and ballrooms.

Seattle has a chapter of Jerk Church, for eating and singing together; the Seattle Atheist Church, for intellectual discussion; and Dance Church, for dancing. The big thing that any regular church has that these secular communities lack is a multigenerational community. That’s a big ask.

Find out more about Kate Willich, her Dance Church, and more at her website: http://katewallich.com/#/dance_church

For more about how deep dance and music go in the human psyche, read This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin.