Meaningful Calendar Years: Dancing, Mostly

Given my recent reflections on secular life and its relation to religion, I began thinking about the parallels between dancing and religion. One of my earlier posts was Alain de Botton’s talk at TED Edinburgh on secular religion (watch it http://rethinkmundane.blogspot.com/2012/02/alain-de-botton-atheism-20.html) and certain aspects of religion that secular people can learn from. An idea I’ve been thinking about is a Secular ‘Liturgical’ calendar. The idea is that a secular ‘religion’ would have a calendar that directed thought towards various important topics or ideas at points throughout the year. What kinds of festivals would a secular religion that values inquiry, rational thought, and humanism have? I don’t have an answer, but I’d like to pursue this line of thought with someone.

But this brought me to dancing, specifically swing and blues dancing, and how our dance calendars can be like liturgical calendars. I have weekly meetings with my dance club, something like ‘worship’ where we all gather together to dance. We have weekly lessons that meet outside of the larger community togetherness time (sort of like Bible study). And we have pilgrimages. We travel; at least the more devout of us do, to other cities, sometimes other countries (Herrang Dance Camp is like our Mecca http://www.herrang.com/) to see other dancers in other dance halls, sometimes repeatedly, year after year. It becomes tradition to go certain places at certain times of year.

There are even orthodoxies and unorthodoxies in swing dance. For Lindy Hop, there are straight Lindy Hoppers…and then there are people like me who like their Lindy a little less fundamentalist and a little more playful. And with Charleston it can be the same thing. Even in blues there is a strict interpretation of what is acceptable practice and what is not.

Like a church, mosque, or synagogue, dancing fosters a community with similar, if not always the same, values and outlook. We differ in a lot of ways, us dancers, but we do share in basic loves of movement and music. And with our schedules we are oriented towards thinking about what we enjoy doing, where we enjoy dancing, and who we enjoy dancing with, whether they be Balboa or Blues, Lindy Hop or Charleston, or if we’re the Unitarian Universalists of swing, Fusion.

And we need this is the secular world, or at least I think we do. I have a framework like that in dancing, but it’s not true that every person who is nontheistic is a dancer, and every dancer doesn’t necessarily engage in the dance calendar (think Easter Catholics, and I can make that joke because I used to be Catholic). My musings on that will follow soon.

So if dancing can be a religion, I wonder if I can put that on the next census.