Desperately into the dance: did punk ruin dancing?

So I was recently reading Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf when I came across this passage, which is part of the incredible section toward the end of the book when the main character - Harry Haller - attends a masked ball as part of his serio-comic "education" in the art of how to live and to stop being a morose bookworm stuck in his room or drinking himself into a stupor at a tavern frequented by other depressives:

"An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never known in all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and student - the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I had often heard it spoken of ... I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me of it and I had always treated it with a half-superior, half-envious smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile, that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads had been turned by a common enthusiasm."

Sounds like a rave - 1920s German-style. Yeah, for Harry this is all pretty revelatory and it becomes even more so - mind-blowingly so - toward the very end of Steppenwolf when he gets shown various facets of his own personality in a brilliantly phantasmagoric "Magic Theatre" sequence. It's heady stuff, for sure. But what about this general festivity business? The revelry of the ball shows Haller enjoying the whirligig of dancing in various rooms, almost, you might say, a bit like Fabric or similar multi-roomed superclubs. Earlier, the book makes quite a thing of Harry's inability to dance and how he's taught to do so by his saviour, Hermine. He's saved by dancing. Bookish, middle-aged Harry can't dance ("I've never learnt") and Hermine jokingly scolds him - "You can't dance? Not at all? Not even a one-step? And yet you talk of the trouble you've taken to live?" Hmm, are the middle-aged musos of my generation all Harry Hallers? Non-dancers who stumble about if - reluctantly, accidentally - they find themselves on a dance floor? Possibly. Or to narrow it down to one particular issue: is there a deeply-ingrained antipathy toward (or at least ambivalence about) dancing among the new wave/post-punk generation (my own)? I reckon there is, sort of. Back in the day, the punkish rejection of dancing was virtually taken for granted. Punk was anti-disco, overwhelmingly white, rockist and with macho tendencies. Stiff awkwardness not lithe bodily grace was the style. Jerkiness or the rigidity of pogo-ing - which had disappeared by the time I was going to gigs, but its anti-dance symbolism still resonated. As the years have rolled by things have barely changed. While there was the brief high-goth "chicken dancing" period (c.1983-84?) and the lure of "alternative discos" where the post-punk kids shuffled about rather self-consciously to Killing Joke's Eighties or got a bit more frisky to the B52s' Rock Lobster, these were really the exception to the no-dancing rule. Dancing still went against the grain of post-punk cool. Far better to just go to gigs and head-nod, foot-tap and sway around slightly (or just stand stock-still) to the Fall, the Jesus And The Mary Chain, the Go-Betweens, or ... whoever. Anyone who's persevered with the guitar-based, small-gig music scene will be able to report that nothing much has changed on the non-dancing front. The only discernible "dancing" these days is moshing, another form of anti-dancing which comes with its own annoyances if - as regularly happens - you end up with a human wrecking ball forcing non-participants to scatter for their own safety.

Anthony Perkins dancing with Silvana Mangiano in the film This Angry Age

But I think ambivalence rather than out-and-out rejection is probably still the main attitude here, which I'll come back to in a moment. But first, a quick flashback. It's late 1984 and I'm in wind-and-rain-lashed Blackpool for an off-the-cuff (read: very badly arranged/borderline chaotic) out-of-season weekend trip with a friend. We go to a pub. The jukebox plays the Psychedelic Furs' Pretty In Pink. This pleases us and we marvel at encountering a bit of "cool" music in an ordinary high street pub. We then discover a vaguely "alternative" disco, which is really anything but. However, at one point the Cure's recent big pop hit The Lovecats comes on. Blimey, do we dance? Or do we retain our semi-disdainful and supposedly punkish cool? Big hesitation - possibly for about er, seventeen seconds. Anyway, we plunge onto the dancefloor and - of course - we treat it as a joke. We bop about ironically, laughing at ourselves. We're too cool to dance, so we do it but we don't do it - having it both ways. Sheer ambivalence. How many post-punkers have behaved this way? Thousands, I reckon. True, the late-80s acid house/rave scene suddenly made dancing a serious - and very communal - proposition, but I think a lot of the people (like me) who'd been listening to Microdisney or Felt or the Railway Children never really threw ourselves into rave's luv'd-up let's-all-hit-the-dancefloor thing. Or rather we did - I danced at the Hacienda and other places - but only at a sort of reduced intensity. The same with hip-hop or indie-funk crossover stuff like the Happy Mondays or Primal Scream. Possibly it was an acutely age-determined thing. Someone I knew who was about three years younger than me enthusiastically bought into early hip-hop (Schooly D etc) saying to me, "yeah, it's the new punk, isnt it?" No, it was good, fresh and exciting, but to me it wasn't quite the new punk.

... which is not to say there's something extraordinarily special about punk, just that the culture's semi-rejection of dancing lingered on in the ecosystem for years. Decades. (Decades! Cue Ian Curtis's rigorously stiff, fist-pumping "dancing". Was this dancing or was it more akin to one of the epileptic fits he was unfortunately prone to?). According to Alan Lomax in The Land Where The Blues Began, there's a deep musicological-ethnographic history to how people who are not of African heritage struggle to move their bodies in a way which successfully interacts with the beats in music. Lomax reckons this requires the dancer to change their "sense of togetherness", ensuring that the beats have to "originate in the middle of the body" and not just in the dancer's arms and legs. If I recall correctly, I think he says elsewhere in the book that dancing involving pelvic movements (thrusts and so forth) is a quintessentially African or black way to dance, one which many white people don't find especially natural. Is this true? I couldn't say for sure but I think it's undoubtedly the case that hordes of (overwhelmingly white) punk-era people have remained lumpenly averse to any kind of properly supple and - dare I say it - suggestive ways of dancing. Their bodies have retained the tension and rigidity of punk. I reckon I'm still sort of unlearning this and making little half-attempts to loosen up, feel the rhythm and let the beats richochet off the centre my body (ker-pow). It's like being Harry Haller, reborn though dance:

" ... blindly, with bursts of laughter, we flung ourselves desperately into the dance once more, into the music, and the light began to flood the room. Our feet moved in time to the music as though we were possessed ... and once more we felt the great wave of bliss break over us ...".