Three: dancing the blues

The weeks around Christmas and New Year are always too overwhelming to remember with much clarity. The days are hurried along by impatient children and exhausted mothers whose ideas for presents are rapidly running out, while the nights are blurred by bright lights and foggy air. Parties with fairy lights and supermarket mince pies punctuate these weeks but they are mostly all the same and will be the same next year and the year after. One party however, which had slipped unexpectedly into this year’s calendar, was not so predictable…

Huddled in the back of an uber with our coats tugged tightly around our shoulders, we arrived outside a square brick building devoid of any of the usual Christmas paraphernalia. No multi-coloured lights, glittery tinsel, or garish Santa pinups were anywhere to be seen. What sort of party was this? Suspicious, we pushed open the door and walked in.  

There was heat and there were people and there was music. A deep raspy voice and the strum of metal strings carried through the muggy air and everyone was dancing.  

For those of you unacquainted with blues dancing, as I was, here’s what I observed: 

illustration by Maia Hooper

Blues dancing is not what comes to mind when I think of a partnered dance. I think of the poise and elegance of a waltz, or the sharp lines of a tango. Two people moving through space with accuracy and direction, seemingly holding one another up whilst also appearing as though they could be separated and still maintain a perfect body shape. The frames of their bodies simply fit neatly together like puzzle pieces. But in Blues there is an earthiness in the way partners move. Knees melt, elbows are soft, and bodies seem to sink into each other as though they are relieved that the other person is there to hold them. It’s swampy but sexy, loose but close.  

From across the room I watched a man and woman swirling through thick air and blurs of bodies. They held each other with the understanding and trust of an old couple who’d been in love for decades, but they were young and they were strangers.  

They danced to the music but also to the beats and pulses of each other; their breaths, the relaxing and contracting of their muscles, the pushes and gives of hand to back or palm to palm. I watched a conversation spoken through the bodies of two people who want to know everything about each other but also already do. The man wore a faded flat cap and a soft linen shirt. The woman wore loose trousers and a spaghetti-strap top. He smiled as he gently spun her away, opening the space between their chests. She smiled as she stepped back toward him, closing the space again.  

The song ended but the pair remained close, breathing the last breath of their dance. They looked up and thanked one another for the vulnerable and beautiful time they had just shared, and then they slowly parted and were swept away into the fog of people.