The Joy of Movement Read online

  In a video of us dancing to the song, there is a moment about halfway through that captures the energy that spread through the sea of dancers. A young man in the very back is grinning and moving with the group, but not quite dancing full-out. Then as the song approaches the second chorus, he leans back, throws his head and arms to the sky, and starts pumping his hands in the air, all while belting out the lyrics. It was an eruption of happiness, as if the music had entered his body and filled him with a joy that had to be expressed.

  Watch the official music video to the 2013 song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams, and you’ll see people lip-synching, strutting, clapping, snapping, jumping, bouncing, swaying, and spinning. The song was a number one hit in twenty-four countries, and the video—which Fast Company called “as cheering as an opiate and just as addictive”—played a major role. “Happy” is essentially an instructional video for finding joy by moving in happy ways to happy music. This truly is one of the greatest thrills of movement: When a piece of music that sounds happy makes us feel happy, so much so that we must move in ways that express happiness—a positive feedback loop that accelerates and amplifies the joyous feelings induced by the song.

  The similarities between happy music and joyful movement are striking. Songs that people describe as sounding happy tend to be up-tempo, higher-pitched, relatively loud, in a major key, and with a strong beat. Movements that people describe as looking happy share these qualities. Joyful movements are fast, big, and vertical. Happiness bounces, leaps, and jumps. It is upward-facing and expansive. A joyful body reaches out, looks to the sky, and takes up space. In one study, psychologists and musicologists at Dartmouth College created a computer program that could produce both piano melodies and animations of a bouncing ball with eyes. Users were instructed to create either songs or animations that depicted different emotions. When participants tried to express joy, their melodies sounded like their animations moved. A happy piano melody and a happy bouncing ball both had a regular, relatively fast beat. Both “faced up” through a higher pitch or eyes gazing upward. Participants also expressed happiness through increasingly larger steps in pitch or height—like a child on a trampoline, gleefully jumping higher and higher, or ravers bouncing up and down, gaining height and energy as the electronic dance music builds to a big break. Moving in this way can induce joy. In a series of experiments conducted around the world, anthropologists asked people of all ages to perform specific physical actions and report how they felt. Different movements reliably produced distinct emotions, including anger, sadness, and happiness. One movement pattern was more effective than any other at invoking a strong emotion. It was the signature expression of joy: a full-body jumping gesture, arms stretched overhead, chest open, and gaze lifted, as if you had just thrown confetti into the air.

  In the study led by Dartmouth College researchers, members of an isolated village in Cambodia produced “happy” songs and “happy” animations similar to those of students in the United States, suggesting something universal about how joy sounds and moves. Many traditional dances from around the world and the music that accompanies them share these joyful qualities. Bhangra (“intoxicated with joy”), a dance from the Punjab region of India, is characterized by bouncing, clapping, and upward arm gestures, along with bold jumps and kicks. The Israeli folk song “Hava Nagila” (“Let Us Have Joy”) is commonly accompanied by a dance of light and nimble leaps, arms stretched out or lifted overhead, often done in a circle, the dancers clapping and singing together. These dances capture something authentic about what happiness feels like and how we show it. Many dance traditions, and the music that accompanies them, persist not only because of their cultural legacy but also because they are effective vehicles for expressing joy. As British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown observed in 1922, “The individual shouts and jumps for joy; the society turns the jump into a dance, the shout into a song.”

  When I first viewed a composite video of the bouncing ball animations intended to express happiness, I was reminded of the jumping dance of the Maasai warriors in Kenya. In this ritual, young men form a circle and, one or two at a time, come to the center to show off their jumps. They jump vertically, in one spot, with as much grace and height as they can. The other men sing as they watch, raising the pitch and volume of their voices to match the height of the dancers’ jumps. The ritual is meant to be a competition, but sometimes the elation of the movement at the center of the circle is so contagious, the entire group forgets the rivalry and erupts into synchronized singing and jumping. When you watch such a moment, you can’t help but think, This is what joy looks like.

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  I met Miriam, a seventy-five-year-old retired computer specialist and grandmother of nine, in a dance class at the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center in New York City. Like most of the attendees at this class, Miriam has Parkinson’s disease. She was diagnosed in September 2015, but looking back, she realizes she had symptoms the previous spring. On a walking tour in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, she hadn’t been able to keep up with the group. At the time she told herself it was because she was tired and it was warmer than she had expected. But now she realizes it was bradykinesia, the physical slowness that is one of the earliest signs of Parkinson’s disease. When she visited her daughter a few months later, her daughter said, “What happened to you, Mom? You look like you aged ten years since I saw you.”

  Miriam’s doctor told her that movement was the best thing she could do to delay the progression of the disease. He encouraged her to exercise for two hours a day. “It doesn’t matter what kind,” he said, “as long as you move.” Miriam started taking classes at the YMCA. During one calisthenics session, the instructor left the room to get help with a broken air-conditioning system. She kept the music on in the background and encouraged the students to continue while she stepped out. When the Broadway classic “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” came on, Miriam began to sing along. To her surprise, singing made the movement easier. “I wasn’t thinking, Now I have to move my foot to the side,” she told me. “I just did it.”

  When she heard about the Dance for PD program at a health fair, she registered the next day. From the moment the pianist played a song from West Side Story, she knew she was going to love it. During class, she feels a lightness and ease in her body. She is graceful, not clumsy; elegant, not encumbered. Her body responds to the music in a way that makes her feel confident, less cautious and afraid. “The music reaches me,” she says.

  I attend one of the Dance for PD classes at Juilliard on a beautiful afternoon in June. Sunlight streams into the studio through a wall of windows. The dance floor, a traditional smooth black marley, has been staged with four concentric circles of plastic chairs. A piano stands in the corner. As participants arrive, they leave walkers and canes under the ballet bars or roll their wheelchairs into an opening in one of the circles. Many remove their shoes so they can dance barefoot or in socks. Class begins with a dramatic piano chord.

  The instructor, Julie Worden, is a professional dancer who performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group for eighteen years. Worden leads us through a warm-up that the dance company uses to get rid of pre-performance jitters. We make faces, stretching the muscles of our cheeks, mouth, foreheads, and eyes. We make noises. It loosens us up. Still seated, we sing “Amazing Grace,” but not with words—just sounds. We hum and aaahhhh the melody. “Let the music move through you,” Worden tells us.

  We learn modified choreography to a celebrated Mark Morris routine. Worden explains the nuances of each section, emphasizing the expressivity inspired by the music and emotion. We may be seated in chairs, stretching a foot to the left, instead of leaping, toes pointed, across a stage. But there is no implication that what we are doing is any less artistic, intentional, or beautiful. Worden insists we reach to the very tip of our fingers, like a trained dancer’s elegant port de bras. After the warm-up, those who can, stand. We ch
a-cha around our chairs, while the pianist changes the tempo. “Follow the music!” Worden encourages. We listen and let the music guide us. Our steps become quick, then slower. Our hips swing fast and playfully, then languorously, sensually.

  Finally assistants help us drag the chairs to the circumference of the room, and we begin to move across the floor. We walk, swinging our arms and taking big steps. I am spellbound by the difference in the quality of movement happening in the room at this point compared to when people first arrived. Many of the dancers had struggled just to get settled in their chairs before class began. That cautious shuffling is now gone, replaced by a liberated stride. It is as if before the first piano chord, their bodies had been windup toys insufficiently keyed. Now their springs were fully tightened, their bodies propelled forward by an energy ready to be released.

  For our last dance, we perform a grand right and left—two large circles moving in opposite directions. We greet each person we pass with a handshake and a smile. Pragmatics trump aesthetics here. The flow of the circles slows down as some exchanges take more time. Detours are arranged to include dancers unable to move their wheelchairs. One woman’s assistant moves her arm for her, to allow her to shake each hand and make eye contact with each passing dancer. As we greet one another, it feels as if the entire class has been a prelude to this moment.

  Months after I participated in the Dance for PD class, as I was poring over the neuroscience of music, I found myself thinking about that grand right and left—how we greeted one another with handshakes and smiles. Movement is necessary for the most basic forms of self-expression, including speech, facial expressions, and gestures. The body is how we translate what is happening inside us—thoughts, feelings, desires—into something observable that other people can understand.

  Slowed walking and tremors are the most visible and familiar symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But there are also more subtle changes, including how the disease interferes with the ability to express emotions. A facial expression is a physical action that, like walking or running, depends on the coordination of many muscles. A genuine smile recruits at least a dozen muscles to lift the corners of your mouth, crinkle your eyes, and raise your cheeks. These actions, like other movements, are impaired in Parkinson’s disease, creating a symptom called facial masking. It’s as if the disease puts a plaster of Paris mask on the individual, concealing their true feelings and giving the impression of a mild, unchanging dissatisfaction. The mask is often misread as apathy or confusion, leading others to view individuals with Parkinson’s as less intelligent, happy, and appealing as social partners.

  All of us rely on the constant waltz of expressions across our faces to convey our insides to the outside world. When Parkinson’s paralyzes this dance, the absence of movement becomes isolating. But just as music can help individuals with Parkinson’s walk with greater ease, it can also reawaken the muscles that let us express and connect. Music triggers spontaneous facial expressions of emotion. When you listen to joyful music, the zygomaticus major—the muscle that draws the corner of your lips toward your cheekbone when you smile—contracts reflexively, similar to when a physician taps your kneecap to make your leg swing.

  This spontaneous expression occurs in part because the emotion conveyed by music is contagious. Music activates the brain’s mirror neuron system, which helps us recognize and understand what others are thinking and feeling. Mirror neurons sense and encode the emotions conveyed by sounds, voice, body language, and gesture. These neurons also prime the unconscious mimicry we engage in when we want to connect with others. Smiling when someone smiles at you. Allowing another person’s laughter to elicit genuine laughter in you. Returning the grasp of a firm handshake or the embrace of a warm hug. Like the expression of emotion, spontaneous mimicry is impaired by Parkinson’s disease, creating yet another barrier to social connection. Music and dance can help break through this barrier. One 2011 study, conducted in Freiburg, Germany, found that weekly dance classes modeled on the Dance for PD program softened facial masking and increased emotion expression.

  The class I attended at Juilliard ended in a circle, with all of us holding hands. Our instructor explained that we would close by “passing our joy.” One at a time, each dancer would physically express delight in movements, gestures, facial expressions, or sounds, then turn to the person to their right and invite them to express themselves next. As our joy made its way around the room, we smiled, squealed, blew kisses, raised our arms, lifted our heads, clapped our hands, and shimmied our shoulders. When it was my turn, I wagged my tail like a puppy. We laughed with one another. There was a palpable sense of approval and acceptance as each dancer made their offering. After the delight had gone around the entire group, we showed our gratitude and respect with a bow to the dancer on our right.

  That afternoon, the ability to not just feel joy but show joy and share it with others was music’s most profound gift. Music was the energizing force that allowed us to feel, express, and connect. The piano chords ignited neurons that greased the nervous system and allowed dormant muscle fibers to fire. Physical stuckness softened, then stretched into the embodiment of joy—sometimes in sweeping gestures, face lifting, arms raised to the sky, and sometimes in more subtle movements, the corners of the lips reaching upward.

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  MY LOVE OF DANCE COMES from my mother’s side of the family. My grandfather served in World War II, stationed first in France, then Germany. He was in Czechoslovakia, waiting to be shipped to Japan, when the war ended. After he returned home, he contemplated joining the seminary to become a priest. Instead, he went to work for the U.S. Postal Service, riding the Reading Railroad nightly between Philadelphia and New York City to transport mail. He always said his decision came down to one thing: He didn’t want to give up dancing to the big band music of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.

  In December 1946, he met my grandmother at Wagner’s Ballroom in Philadelphia. He noticed her standing alone and told her where she should stand so that she would be asked to dance. She took his advice and jitterbugged with many returning soldiers that night. My grandfather waited until the last song, a fox-trot to Irving Berlin’s “Always,” to invite her to dance. Then he walked her to the Broad Street subway and asked if he could meet her at the ballroom the following weekend.

  After they married, one of the highlights of their life together was the annual dinner-dance for employees of the Philadelphia post office. My grandfather loved to tell the story of how in 1960, he was the only employee brave enough to try the hot new dance, Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.” While raising my mother and uncle, he worked two shifts: sorting mail for the post office from four P.M. to midnight, then delivering newspapers from one to five in the morning. Before he left for his first shift, he would lie on his back on the floor in the living room, his head close to the stereo, listening to his favorite records. My mother, who would often arrive home from school to find him on the floor, thought he was napping. When she was older, he told her it had been his way of dealing with chronic headaches. The music made the pain recede.

  When my grandfather retired, my grandparents left their Northeast Philadelphia row house for a ranch home in Leisuretowne, New Jersey, and he became the chairman of the retirement community’s monthly ballroom dances. He selected the music, while my grandmother scoured thrift shops for a new gown to wear to each dance. My grandfather chaired those dances for years, until complications from a hip replacement left my grandmother unable to move on her own.

  She died in 2007, and my grandfather’s heart weakened. Walking became difficult. He spent most of the day at home, sitting in the same chair. One day he stepped outside to get the mail, slipped, and lay on the ground for hours before a neighbor found him. Each Sunday when he attended mass, the walk from pew to priest weighed on his mind throughout the service. He was worried he would fall on the way to receiving communion. Three times he was taken by ambulance to
the hospital with heart and kidney failure. Each time our family was told that he would not survive, and my mother brought a priest to the hospital to give him last rites. But his heart refused to give out for good. “God will take me when he wants me,” he would say.

  Two weeks after his third hospital stay, my mother learned that a Philadelphia string band was going to perform at the retirement community. She asked my grandfather if he wanted to go, and he said yes. The event was in same room as the ballroom dances he had chaired. He insisted on attending with his walker, not his wheelchair. My mother was afraid he would suffer another heart failure just trying to get to their seats.

  The string band played many tunes he knew, and during some songs, the band asked the audience to sing along. My mother noticed a change in her father’s face. “In those last years, he never said he was in pain,” she remembers. “But his face was always troubled.” Now the worried look was gone. When the band started strumming a popular parade song, my grandfather rose from his chair and, to my mother’s utter astonishment, stepped into the aisle without his walker. He threw his hands in the air and began doing the Mummers’ Strut. Other seniors joined him, and soon the aisle was filled, my grandfather leading them all in the dance. My mother couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “I was shaking. My heart was pounding. He was so weak and so frail,” she recalls. “I was sure he was going to pass out and fall. I thought I was going to have to pick him up off the floor.” When the song was over, my grandfather took his seat next to my mother, smiling. He didn’t say anything, just enjoyed the rest of the show. He lived another few months but never danced again.