We Need More Dance Parties
The Brilliance Experiment: Week 6
I’m not sure when we stopped dancing, but I think the pandemic had something to do with it.
We became even more sedentary and withdrawn, even though the Surgeon Generals had been shouting at us for years prior that we were heading in the wrong direction.
The night I received the idea for this project, The Brilliance Experiment, was the first dance party I’d been to in years. It was a birthday party for my friend’s housemate, the kind with a DJ, cartoonishly large balloons, and a bowl of plastic star-shaped sunglasses by the door.
That was the night I realized how much I had really lost myself in the lifequake of the previous 5 years.
As I left the party, I kept thinking — we need to have more dance parties.
Nothing replaces the ecstasy of losing your body in a moment and a song.
Deep in the pandemic years, ironically, I often danced at home to the song Marea (we lost dancing) by Fred Again and The Blessed Madonna, because the lyrics capture how much more than dancing we actually lost:
This year we've had to lose
Our space, we've lost dancing
We've lost
The hugs with friends and-
And people that we loved
All thеse things that we took for granted (wе've lost dancing)
If I can live through (we've lost dancing) this next six months (we've lost dancing)
Day by day (we've lost dancing)
If I can live through this (we've lost dancing)
What comes next
Will be
Marvelous
In Western culture dance has become something performative we do for Tiktok. It’s reserved for the choreographed dance classes I scroll through on my FYP.
In an open public setting, even if we are blessed enough to end up somewhere we can dance, we enter these spaces with a self-consciousness that our jerky, erratic, and embarrassing movements might end up on someone’s Instagram story.
I envy the women who samba through Carnival, the ones who can spin on poles, and the ones who crawl across the floor on the videos that slide across my algorithm.
As I make my way through these 52 weeks of The Brilliance Experiment, by week 6, I noticing more clearly how much trauma disconnects us from the sensory pleasures of this one precious life. Survival mode puts us in a tunnel vision where we lose sight of ordinary joy.
So, for the last 7 days, I ran an experiment on myself:
What would happen if I hit shuffle on a playlist and shook ass for 10 minutes a day?
If you’re just tuning in, I’m on week 6 of The Brilliance Experiment — 52 weeks of tiny, life-changing experiments to reignite the spark you lost when life got hard.
On week 1, I challenged myself to wear more color.
On week 2, I challenged myself to leave the house every day with intention and purpose.
On week 3, I challenged myself to read every day.
On week 4, I challenged myself to clear a path for fresh energy in my home.
On week 5, I challenged myself to do nothing every day.
When I started this journey six weeks ago, I was chasing an ambiguous “life force” I felt I had lost somewhere over the past decade. But last week’s experiment helped me see what I’ve really been looking for: pleasure. Full, embodied joy.
Grief, frustration, anxiety, and other sticky feelings don’t just live in our minds. They get trapped in our bodies, making it impossible to think clearly and act in our own best interest. Somatic movement (any movement that prioritizes how it feels over how it looks) is one of the most powerful tools we have for emotional processing.
Dancing tells our nervous system, I’m safe now. It’s okay to let go. I just forgot. I’ve been too busy trying to hold it all together to let anything go.
This week had quite a lesson in store for me.
Sunday, a violent windstorm swept through Los Angeles—the worst since the firestorms in January. My body remembered (it’s been known to keep the score), and it felt cruel.
Monday, one of my Threads posts ended up on the wrong side of the algorithm, and suddenly I was swimming through a sea of bitter, angry men in my comments. A friend told me, “Just don’t look at the comments!” and I always wish it was that easy to navigate the vitriol of the Internet.
Tuesday, my elderly dog got sick, and for 48 hours, I wondered if this was the end of the line for us. (Thankfully, he’s okay now.)
But every day, my daily dance party saved me.
It sounds so stupid to say that dancing helps me transform stress, which is maybe why we forget about the healing power of blasting music and shaking ass in the middle of the workday.
But, as I would feel the stress begin to swirl in my body, I flipped on the playlist and danced anyway.
I walk 2 miles nearly every day. I lift weights at the gym 3-4 times a week. But I lost dancing. And if I can live through this, what comes next will be marvelous.
💃 Try this challenge for yourself:
Here’s the Daily Dance Party Playlist I made for the paid subscribers last week. Let me know how how your experiment goes :)
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