What if Dance Could Save the World? (2024)

There’s been a lot of dance seemingly coming out of nowhere. A recent unexpected sighting — one of many this year — happened just this month on “Saturday Night Live,” when Chloe Fineman, dressed in a Santa coat, appeared on Weekend Update with an idea for a sexy present: re-enacting the dance that Julia Stiles performed at the end of “Save the Last Dance.” So random!

Stripping off her coat to reveal a leotard and ripstop pants, Fineman, with elfin ballerina determination, bops from side to side in an approximation of the choreography — snapping her fingers alongside high knees, carving shapes into the air with robotic arms, throwing in an occasional pirouette — while describing the plot of this 2001 film and its dubious dance style: street ballet. The surprise comes when Stiles herself jumps beside her to wrap up the number as a duet — folding chairs, shoulder rolls, fist bump and all.

I adore Stiles, and her table dance in “10 Things I Hate About You” remains in my personal Top 10. But this was all about Fineman. As she deftly demonstrated the choreography’s awkwardness while playing it straight, my mind went for a moment to Audrey Hepburn’s beatnik dance in “Funny Face.” And then I thought, no. Fineman is our very own Danny Kaye; like him, her physical comedy comes from a terpsichorean place.

The cool quotient of dance has been brewing over the past few years. It was boosted, on TikTok, by the solitude of the pandemic, and this year it seems that dance has really spread its wings. It’s not only fashionable to like dance, but also to have others know that you do. At New York City Ballet, where audience members look like extras in “Emily in Paris,” everyone is posing for pictures or asking me to take them. Sure, it’s basic, but it’s also endearing.

In January, I didn’t think that #balletcore would make it to the spring, but it’s still going strong. I’ve seen designer ballet flats selling for $550. Pink — the soft, cozy ballet version — is everywhere. In October, the clothing label Reformation released a collaboration with City Ballet; Urban Outfitters has a balletcore web page. It’s not the way the dancers I know dress on their days off — I find street tulle cringe — but as trends go, this one has its pointe shoes dug in deep.

At least balletcore has given more momentum to the efforts of @modelsdoingballet, an Instagram account and website started a few years ago by a pair of dancers who promote another approach. Their motto: “Just stop. Hire dancers.”

On their feed you can see models in a heartbreaking array of problematic ballet positions. The sight of a woman standing en pointe can be terrifying; feet are disembodied, stiff and lifeless (those are called biscuits); and ribbons, normally laced around the ankle, have been used to tie two legs together. Hashtags like #whodidthistothem point out the obvious, as do comments like “I do love a barre with a kitten heel”; “Looking at this image alone broke my ankles”; and “I keep forgetting I’m following this page and then I feel very confused and distressed for a moment."

Yet there’s something just as compelling when choreography is less about steps and more about the way a body inhabits space, as it did in the movie “Corsage.” (The film was released in the last days of 2022; I count it.)

Vicky Krieps, as the rebellious, water-loving exercise enthusiast Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, moves through life with a somatic approach, floating through her scenes with dancerly levitation. Her sarcasm, her unhappiness, her wit — they are all ingrained in her body. (Throughout, she reminds me of the downtown choreographer and dancer Jodi Melnick.) And stay for the credits, in which she rolls and curves in dreamy slow motion. It is a dance.

Looking for something new in dance doesn’t interest me as much as watching it morph and grow. As George Balanchine, the founding choreographer of City Ballet, used to say, “There are no new steps, only new combinations.”

Imagination gets to the heart of what new combinations can bring. In a way, that was best epitomized not on a stage this year, but in the viral video for the song “Back on 74” by Jungle, the British electronic music band, from its album “Volcano.”

I love the entire film. But the “Back on 74” video is a stand-alone masterpiece of music and dance, of funk and rhythm. Its older influences, including the Supremes and the Temptations, mixed with the here and now produce such full-bodied gorgeousness and groove that once its movement becomes lodged in my head and body, I lose sleep because I am dancing in my sleep.

As the choreographer Twyla Tharp has said: “Dance is simply the refinement of human movement — walking, running and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.”

Dance gives us the ability to see beyond the obvious. I’m not coming from a place in which “entertainment” is a dirty word. But as the world continues to crumble in big and small ways — and as other art forms suffer from immersive this and commercialized that — there is relief to be found in smaller-scale performances and the community they foster, which you see at dance spaces like Pageant in Brooklyn.

At this moment when dance is everywhere, it’s time to give it deeper attention, to move beyond the ballet-centric surface of it all. Dance isn’t separate from life; movement is a part of life, after all. There is an urgent need not just for spreading the gospel of dance, but for recognizing it, because within its wild wingspan the art form is also this: We all have a body, a body that needs to dance.

In the finale of the Apple TV+ show “Physical,” the troubled aerobics instructor Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) concludes that dancing with others releases a chemical “that makes us feel connected to the strangers around us.” She adds, “It makes us feel connected to something bigger than ourselves.”

It does! I keep circling back to something that the French collective (La)Horde, which made its United States debut this year, said to me over the summer: “Maybe dance can save the world.” Maybe it’s not maybe. Maybe, under the radar, dance has already been changing the world in unassuming ways — in a street jazz class at a gym or the line dancing in the back of a Ukrainian restaurant, where movement is seen and shared through the bodies and minds of everyday dancers.

As the world gets darker, and it will, remember that we all have the capacity to be everyday dancers. But it's more than capacity: We just are.