Wouldn’t the world be a little lovelier if everyone moved with a little more elegance and poise? People around us would appear charming and polite. We would exchange gently approving glances as we flowed through our daily lives, spreading harmony. How might we move towards that wonderful vision? Ballet classes.
That, at least, is the subtext (OK, in extreme form) behind a recent story of the Romanian transport policemen whose twice-weekly ballet classes help them to signal at junctions and to deal with road rage. Ballet as traffic-calming. How very lovely. How very Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Every so often, some such story does the media rounds, and it tends to follow a format that goes something like this: oh my god, you’ll never guess the secret training of this policeman/rugby player/Sky newsreader/Jean Claude Van Damme – it’s ballet! And we are invited to snigger at the very idea and to read briefly about whatever beneficial effects are claimed for behaviour/productivity/health/teamwork/self-esteem before getting back to our own graceless lives.
Well, let’s invite ourselves not to follow the standard line. I think dance (let’s not restrict it to ballet, it’ll only encourage the sniggering at the back) is something we seriously lack in our lives. We should have more of it. No, not more professional dancers (I already see enough dance, and sometimes actively wish there was less of it). I mean we should do more of it in general. Of course it can have practical, instrumental benefits – and those tend to be the justification given in those stories. But it’s not just about doing our jobs better, or about tangible results; it’s about our quality of existence. We spend most of our lives as disembodied brains and mindless bodies (which, by the way, neatly accounts for the popularity of zombie films).
But you can’t dance like that. Your body incorporates your brain. Your actual mode of being becomes different. Your physical presence becomes more mindful, your mindfulness more corporeal. It’s a quality you could call grace – an old-fashioned, uncommon word. If you look around you, just occasionally you can see it in people. Perhaps in the sway of someone descending a stairway, or perhaps in the waving arm of a traffic cop. Don’t you wish you saw it a little more often?