A week ago the event floor itself was inches thick with dirt. Now a freshly laid dance floor sits bathed in light, below a small, raucous crowd. The couples have two minutes to blaze through amazing routines that transition from artistic to athletic, from spins to lifts, from the spirited to the sensual, all along dancing to and through the music.
The crowd feels like a soccer match without the hooligans. The Aussie fans—"Aussie Aussie Aussie!"—and the Argentinians—"Ar-gen-TIN-a!"—try to out-shout each other.
Lately, dance is everywhere. There's a tap-dancing penguin in the animated movie Happy Feet; there's the recently wrapped season of television's pro-am Dancing with the Stars. Successful musicals like Moulin Rouge and Chicago have paved the way for the dance-pop Dreamgirls.
In the movies, dancing solves all problems. It is the perfect metaphor, a signifier of almost limitless dimension. It means individual expressive freedom in teen movies such as Save the Last Dance and Take the Lead. Or, in the Jennifer Lopez-Richard Gere vehicle, Shall We Dance, or the Vanessa Williams flick Dance With Me, it spins on a dime and symbolizes community: The dance studio is the ultimate surrogate family of loving and lovable misfits. Either way, it's always about getting your groove back, or discovering you had a groove in the first place.
Dancing with the Stars was so gripping because working your groove is such work. One can't picture the tuneless contestants of American Idol breaking a sweat trying to get their voices fit enough to carry a song better. The celebrity dancers, on the other hand, clearly busted their butts as much as they shook them. That physical connection is what makes dance so appealing. Even if few have the real talent to be great dancers, we can all find the rhythm somewhere in our bodies. Hips, to quote high priestess of song Shakira, don't lie.
"If we were all dancing, there'd be no war," MC Albert Torres tells the crowd. The salsa promoter is leading a quiet revolution, helping to organize and promote salsa events in countries around the world. The irony is that afterward, Torres says he doesn't much like competition, and indeed, he sounds as enthused about the fact that the audience was invited to dance 'til 3 a.m. after the competition as he is announcing the winners. But contests makes good TV— this event will be broadcast on ESPN2—and TV can help Torres realize his goal of achieving unity through salsa. To that end, he plans a salsa congress uniting dancers from Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. Still, the Middle East is a little too hot even for salsa; the event will be held in Greece.
We are tired of war and conflict, and tired of being in a world that treats us not as men and women but merely as consumers, and that seems to atomize us everyday. There is in dancing—if you can only overcome the bumbling of missed steps, sore muscles, and gnarled coordination—the promise of a healing union. Dance is so popular because it is holistic. It engages other people, one's mind, body, and spirit. It harmonizes our need to be part of a larger community with our need to stand out, our need to find a comfortable rhythm with which to live life and our desire to stop the world, slip between the spotlights and shine.
Dance may not guarantee love, but it does bestow life upon its practitioners. The proof of that could be at the South Point, especially among the competitors from Colombia. Last year, cabaret-division dancers Ricardo Murillio and Viviana Vargas were the first Colombian dancers to succeed on the international stage. But the defending champs can't make this year's show. Their bus back home, with all their travel documents and gear aboard, was robbed.
But they made possible a flood of dynamic Colombian dancers over the weekend. The highlight of the whole competition is an 18-member team from Cali. The black men with blond hair and their gorgeous short-wigged partners bounce onto the dance floor and put on an electric number, their routine climaxing when men throw their partners over their heads, into the arms of other men behind them. When they are done and the crowd stands in thunderous applause, it's pieces of feather boas that now dust the floor.