How to dance like somebody’s watching

Jeffrey L. Page is an opera and theater director of both classical and contemporary works and a lecturer in Harvard’s Theater, Dance & Media program. He was the co-director of the revival of the musical “1776” and has won an MTV Video Music Award for his work with Beyoncé.

We all want to be seen.

Ralph Ellison wrote this book, “Invisible Man,” which was essentially about Black people. As I walk through my life, many a time, if I’m not already invisible, I have to make myself invisible so that I’m not disrupting a process or shaking the boat. I have to become invisible in order to adhere to respectability politics. But dance is all about being seen. How can the narrative that I’m putting into space, with my body, be read like a book? I believe dancing can do that. Dance as if we’re all watching. What do you want us to see?

It’s as if I’m accessing a reservoir of information that has been locked away.

Imagine you’re writing an essay. You’re working on this sentence for maybe eight hours. You’re trying to put the words together. The moment you find that sentence, it’s like, ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the sentence. That’s the paragraph. That’s the story.’ That’s what it feels like to go from a non-dancing body to a dancing body. It’s cathartic. It’s as if I’m accessing a reservoir of information that has been locked away.

In Mali in West Africa, they have a practice known as djine foly. I’m sure people have heard of djinn, the Islamic mystic or spiritual guides; we might also know them as genies. Those djinn exist in Malian culture, too. Djine foly means the dancing space of the djinn. The dancers dance themselves into a trance-like state. When they have achieved this trance-like state, they become happy. An explosion of feeling comes upon them. In the Black community, we call it catching the holy ghost. It’s a spiritual thing. The way we unabashedly dance with abandonment and intention, it’s a spiritual phenomenon.

Students who take my class enjoy the class because I scream and I holler and I get them to release all of the stuff that’s sitting on their shoulders and sitting on their heads. Sometimes you just gotta shout to get the thing off of you in order to relax! Ain’t nobody concerned if you look good! Just dance!

Sometimes our logical mind is so strict and unmoving that, baby, it just needs to be a shout to get the logical mind to release itself so I can find that trance and attain my djinn.

— As told to Sy Boles, Harvard Staff Writer