As a little girl, Helene Lawson was fascinated by tap dancing. She would watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers tapping away on the screen and think, “Wow! You can make noise like that with your feet!”
Fast forward to the 1990s. By then a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Lawson found herself glancing up at the second-floor window of a downtown Bradford dance studio every time she passed by. “What’s going on in there?” she wondered.
For years, she wondered.
Finally, in 2003, Lawson did what she’d wanted to do since she was a kid: She enrolled in a tap dancing class.
Two years and two public recitals later, Lawson felt she had gained a new identity to add to her earlier ones of teacher, researcher, daughter, wife, and mother, among others. Now, she also called herself a “tap dancer.” She felt like a different person, physically and spiritually.
But why? And why did two of her family members and a friend cry when they saw Lawson dancing in a recital?
And what about the other people in her tap class? Why were they dancing? What were they getting out of it?
Curiosity-driven scholar that she is, Lawson vowed to find out.
While remaining enrolled in her tap class, she read articles and books about dance—discovering, among other things, that her fellow sociologists had virtually ignored dance as a research subject (largely, some of her colleagues have argued, because dance is viewed as a nonverbal, predominantly feminine mode of expression). Lawson also learned that dance is probably the most ancient of the universal forms of aesthetic expression; surviving poetry from the 5th century B.C.E. alludes to dance as a paid profession.
After reading up on dance literature, Lawson interviewed a dozen adult dance students, 10 dance instructors, and 15 parents of dance students ages 5-15 at studios in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York. She focused on tap and her own dance group in particular. She did not examine ballroom or social dance, or anthropological perspectives on dance in other cultures.
Lawson summarized her research findings in a paper titled “Becoming Through Dance,” which she presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August. She is considering expanding her research into a book.
“People told me that dancing makes them feel different,” Lawson says. “One woman told me, ‘You go there for 45 minutes a week and you forget everything. You concentrate on the steps, and it takes your mind off of everything.’”
Other adults told Lawson that dancing freed them, at least temporarily, from restrictions that society placed on them because of their ages, body types, and social classes.
Lawson points out: “Unlike doing ballroom dancing, which is competitive and tends to be elitist, you don’t need to be young and have a perfect body to take lessons in a studio and perform maybe once a year in a public recital.” One of the nice things about tap dancing, she adds, is that “you can do it no matter what age you are, and it doesn’t punish your body the way that ballet does.”
In “Becoming Through Dance,” Lawson writes that the children she interviewed talked about the fun of donning dance costumes and performing on stage, “where they gain confidence in public, perhaps for the first time.” Many adult students, she found, described dancing “as a spiritual happening akin to a religious experience, a form of self-regeneration.”
An adult dance class involves “a process similar to therapy,” Lawson writes. “It transforms the students beyond teaching them a set of steps. How they feel becomes at least as important as what they learn. Even though the class is a group activity, the focus is inward. …Dance students are reacquiring what they have lost or never had, or changing who they are.
“Yet, the class seems only a very temporary fix,” Lawson concludes. “The dance class helps the women to shift their focus for a little while, but it is an ongoing battle. Their focus soon leaves their new selves and returns to gender-specific cares: the needs of their families, their bodily flaws, their volunteering and service occupations.”
Among the women Lawson quotes in “Becoming Through Dance” are:
• Sue, a single mother. “I wanted to do this my whole life and I never had the chance. We had no money when I was young,” says Sue, adding, “Why am I taking dance lessons now? Because at this time in my responsible grown-up life of no husband and three kids, I’m tapping for mental stability”;
• Rosemary, a 55-year-old preschool teacher who says dance is helping her to overcome depression. “I feel like I have a whole new identity,” she says. “I am someone else. When my students see me [in recital] they are so excited”; and
• An unnamed senior. “So why am I taking this dance class? Because I’m 67 and I’m afraid I won’t be able to use my legs or be able to dance,” she tells Lawson. “My ex- is 10 years older than me, and he can’t walk more than a quarter block without sitting down. …Also, because I have so much fun when I put on taps and make noise with my feet.”
It’s no accident that the dancers Lawson quoted in her paper are all women. Of the 300-plus students who came for lessons at her studio, only one was male—a 12-year-old who practiced Irish step dancing.
“Even as exercise—here, I’m talking about aerobics classes—dance in this country is extremely gendered,” Lawson observes. “Whereas, in Latin American countries you’ll see men and women of all ages dancing in public.”
Lawson frequently encountered husbands, boyfriends, and sons of female dance students in studio lobbies waiting for classes to end. “Boys would be playing video games, punching each other, running around causing trouble, and I’d say to their fathers, ‘Why don’t you let them take dance lessons?’ And the guys would all say, ‘No, no, everybody would laugh if we did that.’”
One question that Lawson hasn’t answered yet is: Why did her loved ones cry when they watched her dance?
“I still don’t know, and neither do they,” she says. “I mean, if they’d watched a video of me playing tennis, they wouldn’t cry, right? Maybe there would be some tears of laughter, but… .
“It may be that people feel moved, seeing someone they love doing something they were always afraid to do, but now, at last, they’re doing it. Dancing transforms a person, it really does. It’s like cheating death, almost.”
