Peripheral Visions

music—generations cling to the melodies and dance styles of their youth, and for us learning to waltz or to tango once led into pleasure and elegance. It is easier to replicate the product of learning than to find the continuities in the process.
    At the MacDowell Colony, an evening of listening to music by a resident composer and looking at slides of the work of a painter was followed by dancing. Joining in, I found myself caught up in an enactment of what I had been writing on the nature of participation where codes are not fully shared. Dancing is increasingly a matter of improvisation on the dance floor, some limiting themselves to a narrow range of motion and still rather rigid, others finding new flexibilities and rhythms. For generations used to treasuring ballroom dancing as a rare opportunity for physical contact, it seems isolating, even autistic, yet there are plenty of ways in which dancers can turn their separate improvisations into dialogues, not so much alternating as simultaneous, like conversations in sign language. Rather private styles can be linked by changing orientation in complementary ways, choosing to mirror the movements of the other, or alternating rhythms, just as it is possible to establish a game with an infant by sharing gaze, echoing vocalizations, passing a toy back and forth.
    Changes in dance styles reflect other changes in society. We have come a long way since the minuet, constructing forms that allow everyone who will to participate without knowing a precise, shared set of rules, without rehearsing the details of fancy footwork. We have moved away from the notion that someone (generally male) must always be in control of any shared activity. Even in marriage we are developing different ways of harmonizing styles, with variable degrees of coordination. Not surprisingly, when the wider change is contested, one generation may condemn the dance styles of the next, labeling them obscene or chaotic. Yet the dance style that is evolving offers a new kind of commonality to a society of increasing diversity and ambiguity. Styles of dance, like the forms of ritual, convey very complex notions of how a society is organized. The new styles, never quite spelled out, are learned through participation and carry the lessons of a new style of learning that is crossing and recrossing the oceans and spreading through the life cycle.
    The problems of an era are likely to be reflected in its dance as well. The metaphor of compliance to a traditional form has been loosened, but now the need to belong is expressed by metaphors of increased intensity and intoxication by movement and rhythm that permit young people to drift into decisions without acknowledging that they are doing so. There continues to be conformity, tightest during the adolescent years, conformity in styles of clothing and language and imitation of behavior, pressure toward dangerous experiments with sex or drugs or alcohol. There are casualties in any process of change, elements that suggest risk and others that suggest adaptation. The youth of today, like previous generations, will dance off the dance floor and into the myriad settings of life, but they take with them a different set of models for participation.
    When I went back to Israel with Vanni in 1988, after thirty years away, the first experience that drove home for me the degree and kind of change in the interval had to do with dancing. For years I had been telling Vanni stories about the time I had spent there at the end of high school, visiting on a newly founded kibbutz near the border of the Gaza Strip. When we went back together to visit, I had predicted dancing and singing on Friday night, men and women alike in freshly laundered trousers and clean shirts, many of them embroidered (we packed carefully to be ready), singing the folk songs of a newly constituted “folk” and dancing the hora, with its evocation of community and vitality, its lack of sexual reference. But the kibbutz has changed. Women have drifted partway back into traditional gender roles and styles, privacy has increased, and now the only dancing on Friday nights was an occasional disco organized by the young people, with music and dancing not unlike the rock one would find in New York.
    All around the world, human beings make music and dance, using forms and rhythms that resonate with the other activities of the day. The anthropologist Alan Lomax has written about the congruence between styles of