Jason Sager

In the summer of 2002, fresh out of college, I went to a swing dance for the first time. I was a shy young adult, grown from a shy child with no experience in music, and a weak high-school wrestling career as my most athletic endeavor to date. But something about dancing took hold of me and my attention in a way nothing else had up to that point. Inside six months I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to teach. Within the first two years I was taking lessons from everyone offering them in the area and beginning to travel to learn as well. At my height, I traveled to a workshop at least once a month and was taking three different classes from three different instructors, teaching not-terriblycomplementary styles, in three different locations on the same night.

In the spring of 2007, I decided I wanted to be a Rolfer. After five years in dance and two teaching, I had begun exploring body mechanics and creative territories that most of my dance instructors had never taught me. Where my instructors had provided a form for students to fit themselves into, I saw the differences and sought a toolset to bridge the gap. I also knew by then that making a living in dance was not for me, but I needed to escape a life in computer programming to do something more physical. My first session of Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) with Bethany Ward confirmed that there was something here with at least an order of magnitude more information about the body than anyone I’d encountered in swing dancing so far. By late summer I had completed my Ten Series and was off to my Unit One training in Boulder.

Dancing in Denver

The Rolfing training took me to Boulder and Denver and an entirely different dance scene to the one I had grown up in. I had been traveling and competing rather unsuccessfully for several years at that point, so it wasn’t entirely out of my experience, but the level of play and skill in the Denver dance scene was something I found deeply intimidating. I can remember driving the hour or so to the Mercury Café in Denver just to sit on the bleachers, almost petrified, thinking “Oh s***, I don’t know how to have the kinds of dances these people are having.”

My competition career at that point had been clean but had failed to advance beyond first elimination rounds, because of similar inhibitions. The feedback I routinely received was that my dancing was good, but that I didn’t really stand out in any fashion. I’d struggled through tears and heartbreak for a few years with this consistent feedback, and while the Denver dance scene showed me what was possible, it didn’t fully help me to figure out how to achieve it.

Rolf Movement Training in Brazil

Fast forward about fifteen months from my Unit One, and I found myself in Brazil for Unit Three with Jan Sultan and Rolf Movement training with Monica Caspari. There were so many moments of brilliance and heartache throughout that training (including being dumped remotely, on week two of ten), but for the purposes of this story, I will share one of the moments that etched itself on my soul and radically altered the course of my dancing and teaching.

One day, we were discussing freedom of movement, and Monica made the amazing statement: “The primary cause of physical dysfunction is social inhibition.” In the days after that, I mulled over the dancing I’d seen and the way I had been trained. As I contemplated my home scene and training, there was a very clear feeling of “Oh . . . that’s what’s going on.” The dominant form of teaching was very much driven by the idea that there is one right way to do this, in effect installing the subtext that there is a lot of ‘wrong’. In essence, people learned to dance with an influence of “Don’t screw up,” rather than an influence of play.

Overcoming Inhibitions

Coming back from Brazil, I made it one of my missions to overhaul the inhibitory forces in my dancing. My goal became to try anything that came into my head on the floor whether I knew how to pull it off or not. Many moves failed; many moves came out weird: if I’d been trying to make a living from my dancing I’m sure I’d have starved that year.

However, out of chaos grew a new kind of order. As I was repeatedly presented with failed moves, I also started to learn better how to save them or make them into something new. When a dance partner ‘zigged’ if I had asked for ‘zag’, I began to ‘zig’ with her and make something new, on the fly, out of her contribution. And in the span of a year I went from being told I wasn’t taking enough risks in competition to being told I was taking too many. I also went from never making finals to consistently making finals, and then either placing or coming in dead last among the finalists.

Reworking Teaching

With the start of my own fundamental shifts in dancing, I found myself struggling to find uninhibited play with dancers back home. While I had changed, the local scene had not, and out of a sort of self-preservation I started to overhaul my teaching to try to evoke a similar sort of freedom amongst dancers in my home scene.

I began some of this going straight at the inhibitions, talking about how we tend to lose technique when we get scared, but my approach to teaching technique remained mechanistic at times. I started working to break movements down to a sort of ‘first principles’ level of ‘here are the absolute basic building blocks, and here’s how to practice them’, then combine that with an awareness of touch and social interaction with one’s dance partner. It worked, though not as readily as I thought would be possible, and students in my classes began to comment on how different the approach was, though they were at a loss to explain how it was different when trying to encourage their friends to join the classes.

Vaudevillian Revue: Bootlegger’s Ball at Southland Ballroom in Raleigh, South Carolina, 2012. Photo by Christopher Donald.

I had a sort of “What have I done?” moment, feeling like Pandora might have, when discussing “oh s***” reactions on the dance floor. We were talking about how mistakes tend to stop us in our tracks in different ways: some of us flip into apology mode; some scramble their feet; some stop moving, etc. One of the students looked at me with a semi-shocked expression and declared to the whole class, “That’s how I am in my whole life!”

I think the real aha moment came for me when I had a realization that has become one of my mantras for learning anything the past few years: “At some point in history, somebody made this up.” Swing dance started as a street dance, which means that the music existed, and people moved and played and made things up to it, until those movements coalesced into the dance that we call Lindy Hop.

Watching by Feel

One of my dance-influences-Rolfing SIinfluences-dance moments came during an event called ‘The Experiment’, which I attended for a few years and which was a big influence on my approach to teaching dance. It’s a concept that still makes me wonder if it would work with Rolfing SI. Essentially, a group of very high-level dancers rented a beach house in coastal North Carolina, a few international-level instructors came, and we basically spent a week dancing, trading ideas, and, well, experimenting. The instructors set out a certain amount of material for the attendees to play with, but in general it was a free-forall exchange of ideas.

On one of the days, we were watching clips of some of the original swing-era dancers now in their 70s and 80s, dancing at a place called Bobby McGee’s in California. The idea of the class was to try to replicate the moves from only the visual tape provided. As I watched around the room, something never seemed quite right in how my colleagues were replicating the moves. After watching and comparing for a while, it finally occurred to me that they were imitating eighty-year olds, but doing so as twenty- and thirty-year olds. Some of the dancers in these clips weren’t doing things that way because they particularly liked the aesthetic: they were doing it that way because they were protecting aching joints. As I settled instead into watching for how something felt (rather than simply looking for biomechanics), I felt my dancing begin to resemble what I saw in the videos, dancing as if my knees hurt. By taking on their internal experience, my body began evoking their movement much more readily and completely.

I found myself drifting further away from my dance colleagues in terms of approach and ideology. I also found over time that while my teaching became more effective, it also asked more of my students to engage and practice and challenged not just their dancing but their ways of being in the world. While it created amazing shifts in the students who wanted to delve deep, it also sometimes ran headlong into places where some people didn’t want to go. I gained a reputation locally as someone you should totally go take classes from . . . but nobody seemed to be able to explain why.

Current Status

In the past few years, my relationship with dance has gone up and down a great deal. I built and ran a dance studio for a few years right around the time that my Rolfing practice took off. While I continue to love dance like nothing else, the studio was ultimately a great deal of work for very little emotional payoff. About two years ago I realized that Rolfing SI was rewarding me far more strongly, both in emotional and financial terms, and that I needed to close the studio doors in order to save my own love of the dance.

I’m currently making a slow return to dancing for myself, seeing if I can evoke the things that most charge me up in dance without having to teach them. I still hope to find a dance partner who’ll want to explore it in the ways I do: the relational aspect with another person and another body is one of the things that makes swing so difficult to achieve but also so awesome when it happens. It’s much the same energy that drew me to Rolfing SI, and I expect the two will continue to dance together in my attention and influence each other’s growth for the rest of my life.

Jason Sager is a Certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement practitioner in Raleigh (and hopefully soon Durham), North Carolina. He is a recovering ‘danceaholic’ (not an actual diagnosis) and currently deep in some personal work discovering what life has to offer beyond the dance world. Jason occasionally blogs about Rolfing SI and dance and their intersections with his personal and professional life at sagermeister.com.

Dancing Between the Lines[:]