Dance Lest We All Fall Down - Margaret Willson [24]
We have invented so many ways to try and understand each other better, but I wished I could have seen John’s face as we talked, to have known what his eyes told me. Even more, I wished I could have felt the energy that came off his body, to have sat beside him, to have known what his body said. We have found no technology that helps to understand the communication of bodies, no technology that will dance with us, that can imitate what our bodies feel when they move and touch the world. Isadora Duncan once said, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” There is meaning inherent in all movement whether it is in exertion, in anger, or in affection.
In Brazil, during Carnival, almost everyone danced, from children to the elderly. If one could walk, one could dance. Indeed, one could not escape Carnival. The dancers possessed the streets. During my first Salvador Carnival, I danced for five days, sleeping hardly at all, and as the nights passed, I danced for them to come again. Only in the dust of the last dawn, as we stood crushed on the bus homeward, sharing sweat and the surface of our skin, only then did I understand what exhaustion was.
People said Carnival was a time when society turned upside down, when the boundaries of ethnicity, wealth, and class crumbled under the resonance of a multitude of drums. But the dance of Carnival held more meaning than that. It also embodied poverty, death, and annihilation.
One night during this first Carnival, I danced joyously with Ana and Andrea. In Salvador’s street Carnival, crowds of literally millions pushed you along the street, and you could not stop. If you didn’t dance in the same rhythm as everyone else, you got smashed. Lines, ten people wide, passed each other, all dancing, all wearing very little clothing. This was a time to flirt. Men and women watched each other as they passed in the varied currents. I would see a beautiful man, or feel his eyes on me, and we would approach. Dancing slowly toward each other, staring into each others’ eyes, promising everything, knowing we could not stop there in the street and could fulfill nothing. Then, as we passed, we would touch arms, and hands, feeling the slick of each other’s sweat, the crackling intensity of the hour.
I would then turn my eyes again to the flowing current to watch the people coming toward me, to find the eyes of another and, for another five minutes, fall into whatever they held. The music, the heat, the touching, the rhythm, all came together to create an intoxicant beyond any of the beer sold on the streets. To scream with pleasure. And dance on.
Sometime around midnight of this first Carnival, a police van tore into the crowd and twenty or more police descended upon a man dancing near by. One pulled the man off his feet and the others beat him. I heard his bones crack under the force of their batons. His girlfriend, or perhaps his sister, screamed and tried to run to his side. Her friends held her back, pinning her arms and holding her head so she wouldn’t bite them in her fight to escape. The man fell but the police kicked him long after he had ceased to move.
After they tossed his limp body into the back of the van, the police passed around a cloth with which they wiped his blood from their hands. I stood nearby, my body cold, the memory of his snapping bones a louder percussion than the blasting Carnival tune.
Andrea touched my shoulder. “Dance,” she said.
I looked at her and turned my head away.
“Dance,” she said. She began to push my hips with her hands.
“Didn’t you see that? What are