Dance over.

Last week, my daughter (11) and I both performed in our civic ballet company school's annual "dance concert." She is not quite old enough yet to be embarrassed by me, but I know it's coming. Anyway, it was an Experience and we all know that those are supposed to be good for you.

The ballet mistress of the company stood up before the program began and explained why she prefers to call the year-end performance a "concert" rather than a "recital." Though I was a bit too anxious about the prospects of a) having to get up on stage myself and b) watching my daughter dance to pay very close attention, what drifted down to the level of my comprehension was this: a recital implies that the performers are simply reproducing by rote a set of skills they have learned whereas a concert implies that they are part of a collaboration (music, choreography, other dancers) that produces, for a fleeting time, a work of art. I thought that was pretty deep philosophy given the audience (mostly little girls and their families) and the context (small town ballet).

Almost as soon as I had stepped offstage, I had to pack my bags and switch mental gears in order to head off for the great annual pilgrimage of medievalists to Kalamazoo, Michigan; there, on the campus of Western Michigan University, we gather for our annual confab where we get to completely geek out without any concern about who we're potentially embarrassing for four whole days. I always go to "the Zoo" with a mixture of dread and eagerness -- it is inevitably intellectually stimulating, but also overwhelming, and inevitably I end up saying things I later regret (there is a 5 o'clock ritual of gathering in one of the common areas to drink box wine and gab), and there is just so much talk.

But since I was there right on the heels of the ballet "concert" and the thing about ephemeral and collaborative nature of dance was still doing little soubresaults in my mind, I got to thinking about how the Medieval Congress itself is a performance on a massive scale, choreographed by its program (a tome thicker than the latest Dan Brown blockbuster, spuriously based on Dante's Inferno) and by the particular human and natural geography of the WMU campus (hilly, spacious, late twentieth-century institutional architecture), but ultimately collaborative and improvisational. Like a big dance company, or a bunch of big dance companies (the Anglo-Saxon Stompers, the Chaucerian Mincing Men, the Christine de Pizan Company, the Medieval Technology Tanzgruppe, etc.), the performers come to the stage with their particular strengths and play on those. Some are principals (you can identify these by the trailing cloud of graduate students who perform some kind of weird contact improv in order to get closer to their etoile). Some are soloists (these tend to travel in packs of others of their own rank -- mid-career scholars with tenure, but without the citation quotient of the real stars), some are corps members, and some are apprentices, but they (we) are all there and all necessary for the Zoo to work as an ensemble piece.


If the whole Congress is something like a dance, the culminating event of the Zoo is The Dance. Now, while THIS is what you might expect, THIS is a fairly accurate picture of what it's really like (early on, before the dance floor gets shoulder-to-shoulder). Graduate students with ear-spools and tight pants bump and grind with professors emeriti with elbow patches; at some point there's a polka; inevitably lots of really tipsy people do the Time Warp... again. As if we feel the need to bring it all down to earth, to make literal what has been drifting just beneath all our high-flown talk of allegory and identity politics, of signification and the order of things, of recensions and declensions and attributions, we all gather in a large, dark room where the bass is turned way up, the heat is on, and hundreds of people who probably never go out dancing in their "real " lives let it all hang out (as the young woman whose cleavage features in the video clearly demonstrates). When I first encountered this carnivalesque phenomenon I was sort of horrified and embarrassed, but over the years I have come to see it as a necessary antidote to all the high seriousness and high dudgeon of the conference. To dance, for real, with our bodies on and our minds more or less off, is to shake away the constraints of the choreography and of our assigned roles in the companies to which we belong. At The Dance we are no longer étoiles, premiers danseur, sujets, coryphées, and quadrilles, we are just people, or just bodies, colliding, moving apart, sweating, drinking, shouting, gyrating. In a very useful way, things do fall apart.

And now The Dance is over for another year, and the long summer ballet drought has begun for me. I feel a bit deflated after all that fun.