Body Image: What the Church Can Learn from a Dance
by Rebekah Zuñiga
Recently my church has been preparing for Vacation Bible School (VBS) with our elementary children. My husband and I are in charge of teaching the music. In Sunday School we teach the kids the words and motions to the VBS songs. This Sunday some questions occurred to me: why do VBS songs have motions? Do the kids simply think they are more fun that way? Possibly. But I began to notice that the kids learned the words more quickly with songs that had motions. Remembering their motions helped them to remember their words.
In addition, teaching the motions gave me the chance to explain to the kids what the words meant that we were singing. When we made a motion for a roof over our heads while we sang “mi refugio es en Dios” (“My refuge is in God”), we stopped and talked about what the word refugio (“refuge”) means (Ps. 46:1). The kids understood that your house keeps you safe and protected from the weather; making the motion that reminded them of a house helped them to understand what it means to say that God is our refuge.
Contra Dance: The Basics
I have recently experienced a similar situation myself. Over the past year I have attended several contra dances held at a church near my school. Contra dancing is a colonial American dance, adapted from French and English country-dances. It’s what some might call a “line dance,” and shares some of the same steps and terminology as a square dance. Partners line up in long lines, facing across from one other, and then meet their neighbors to form groups of four. As the caller calls out the next dance move, partners pass from neighbor to neighbor, working all the way down the line through simple, interconnected dance steps. Once the partners reach the bottom of the line, they jump back in and work their way back to the top. The music moves quickly, and dancers move from partner to neighbor to new neighbor, hopefully with some amount of fluidity and grace.
The dance moves are generally simple, but always require an amount of trust and reliance on your partner. For example, a common dance move is called a “balance and swing.” For this move partners will generally meet one another again after having been elsewhere. In order not to run into each other due to the pace of the music and the momentum of bodies, partners will hold their hands out in front of them like a game of patty-cake and press gently. The reverse momentum created by this movement will be countered by catching each others’ hands and coming together again to spin together in circles.
As the more advanced dancers will often tell the newcomers, the key while “swinging” is to lock eyes with your partner so you don’t get too dizzy. Partners must press on each others’ shoulders as they quickly spin in order to create centripetal force and avoid drifting apart. This dance move is the closest that the dancers get during a contra dance; new dancers often feel awkward locking eyes with someone they may have just met, but the more experienced dancers know that it is simply a part of the community—it is what keeps the dance going smoothly.
Contra Dance and Religious Communities
Contra dance, interestingly, bears many resemblances to church life. It is an intergenerational event, involving the very old and the quite young. It is an event incorporating people from diverse backgrounds and walks of life: the rich dance with the poor; the educated with the uneducated; and seasoned dancers with first-time dancers. All are on equal footing in a contra dance.
What is more, the dancers need one other to complete the dance. If one dancer drops out during a dance, the whole line falls apart. But when the dancers commit to each other, following through on the moves, the result is a wonderful experience for all who take part.
Interestingly, according to Juliana Flinn, dancers themselves recognize the resemblance that a dance community has to a spiritual community. Flinn interviewed country dancers[1] in Little Rock, Arkansas about their experiences dancing. She found that dancers tended to use religious or spiritual language to describe their experiences, often referencing the sense of community felt among the dancers, and the satisfaction of completing a dance together. One dancer speaks well of the feelings of community after finishing a dance:
We had a special really neat dance. . . . Everyone in it was just so together. We were all helping each other. Everyone would get lost at various stages of the dance. And when I finished it, I thought that it was just the most wonderful experience. It was like we put up a building together.[2]
In fact, Randall Collins developed a strain of sociology, called “interaction ritual theory,” which is devoted to the study of how “doing patterned physical things together induces feelings of solidarity in participants.”[3] The testimonies of the dancers seem to attest to the truth of this concept. [Although Collins’s worldview is far from a Biblical one, his findings can reveal a telling aspect of our church communities that is also supported by Scripture.] Although the philosophy behind this theory comes from less than a Christian perspective, the truth of the matter can be expounded upon in the context of a Biblical understanding of community.
Believers as a Physical Community
One of the unique aspects of the church’s life together that is replicated in contra dancing is the necessity of being physically present with each other. There may be online jobs, online schooling, and online relationships, but there is no online church.[4] The writer of Hebrews reminds us not to give up on meeting together (Heb. 10:25)—physically. Our physical presence binds us to each other. The “rituals,” as Collins would call them, that a church performs together are not only our means of worshipping, but also our means of learning and our means of being bound together in unity. When believers stand together and sing, bow together and pray, and together lift the cup to their lips, they experience the “solidarity” that sociologists have noted as being particular to religious environments.[5]
By performing physical actions together, we learn, just like my VBS kids, who we are before God, and who we are together. In contra dancing dancers learn that the older can teach the younger, that loving and enthusiastic cooperation yields successful and pleasurable results. We as believers, on the other hand, by kneeling or bowing in prayer, experience the true fact of our humility before God. By partaking together in the Lord’s Supper, we are reminded that we are one family, sharing in a meal together.
Conclusion
Concerning the effects that physical presence and communal movement can have on our mental images of the world and our relationships with those around us, the church must consider the message that it’s sending to believers and unbelievers. Perhaps a service in which one cannot see or hear their pew-neighbor due to lighting or volume of the service should make us think twice about the true purposes of worship.
The way that we use our bodies and interact with the bodies of others during our church services should reflect respect and love for others, and humility and holiness before the Lord. This is an important question to consider because ultimately, our physical presence—and what postures we take in that presence—impacts our image of the body of Christ, our perspective of worship, and even our understanding of Who God is.
____________________
About the Author: Rebekah Zuñiga lives in Nashville, TN with her husband of six months. She is pursuing her bachelor’s degree in history at Welch College and enjoys reading, singing, and attempting to garden off their apartment balcony.
____________________
[1] Country dance, in Flinn’s article, seems to refer to both square dance and contra dance, though Flinn notes that the dancers seem to prefer contra dance.
[2] Juliana Flinn, “American Country Dancing: A Religious Experience,” Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 61.
[3] Anne Heider and R. Stephen Warner, “Bodies in Sync: Interaction Ritual Theory Applied to Sacred Harp Singing,” Sociology of Religion 71, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 78.
[4] Online “churches” do exist (see http://tphechurch.org/), but the legitimacy of these “communities” is worth questioning considering the language of the New Testament that emphasizes physical presence together (e.g., Acts 2:1, 43, 46; 1 Corinthians 14:26).
[5] Heider and Warner, 78.
June 6, 2016
The topic is quite complex, you have done an excellent job in summarizing your theory.
June 9, 2016
Thank you, Mrs. Ede. There is definitely more research to be done.