I Hope You Dance

How fascinating to read this week about the A.I.-generated travel influencers that are taking gigs away from real-life, flesh-and-blood influencers. People whose job it is to take trips to far-flung locales and post about it on social media fear they’re being elbowed out by computer-created personae that can do the job for much less. For those of us who are still in awe that “travel influencer” is a job that exists, for which one might be paid $100,000 or more for a single post about a vacation, the news that this relatively newfangled position may be endangered by artificial intelligence is sort of dizzying. We were just getting accustomed to the fact that we are being “influenced” at all, and now the robots are taking over the task?

Ponder this strange screen-born economy long enough and you start craving the real world, a world in which influence comes from the things and people you encounter as your body moves and acts and reacts in space. Thank goodness for an equally intriguing recent story in The Times, by Margaret Fuhrer, about the uninhibited way that children dance. It delivered just the reminder I, and maybe you, needed that there’s excessive delight to be found on the physical plane.

Babies and toddlers are un-self-conscious when they dance. They’re spontaneous, present, unconcerned with who’s watching them. This approach “brings us back to our own intelligent bodies, our own basic understanding of what it is to be alive,” a movement therapist told Margaret. “Babies don’t perform movement — they discover it.”

Do adults perform movement when they dance? They do. We do. We have no choice — we’ve done it before, so each time we dance we’re re-enacting the remnants of every time we’ve danced previously. We try and fail and try again to catch the rhythm; we think about how we’re being perceived. But what a privilege it is to move, even if it’s awkward, to be embodied and expressing and trying to be responsive to a beat, to be more subject and less object.

Social media is, we all know, pure performance — whether you’re an influencer or not. But it’s etheric, as in taking place in the ether. An Instagram post is a conceptual performance, projected images of real action. And the whole point of a social media post is the audience: Who’s looking, who’s watching, what do they think of us? Our posting selves are the very opposite of a child dancing; we’re a million miles away from the grounded reality of “our own intelligent bodies.”

The last time I wrote about dancing, I wondered why we don’t dance more and made a commitment to do so. It’s been two years since then, and I’ve half-kept my promise. I’ve tried to “go out dancing” whenever I’ve found willing accomplices — maybe three times in two years. I dance in my building’s elevator at the end of most days; I always have headphones on, and I like the final exertion of energy before arriving and winding down.

But it wasn’t until I read Margaret’s story, and watched adults try to follow the unscripted moves of a baby, that I remembered why I’d wanted to dance more in the first place.

So much of our movement is just using our bodies like reliable vehicles to get ourselves from one place to another. Dancing is an act of remembering that, once, when we were small, everything was new. Once, we moved our bodies primarily in order to play, express and discover. The more online we become, the farther we drift from what Margaret calls “our earliest soundtrack,” the rhythm that’s in us before we’re born, “the basslike thump-thump of our mother’s heartbeat and the oontz-oontz of her circulating blood.”

There’s an old PBS interview with Kurt Vonnegut in which he says: “The moral of the story is, we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize — or they don’t care — is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.” Do many suppose dancing is unserious or frivolous? Let’s do it anyway. Let’s remind the “computer people,” which is really all people, ourselves included, that we’re dancing animals, and shake our tail feathers accordingly.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV-Z1YwaOiw>