Boulder's Dance Home

Free Form Ecstatic Dance For Every Body

News articles Celebrating Dance Home

 
You’re barefoot, jammin’ to some deep funk on a bouncy, padded floor. Fifty of your best friends are dancing around you. The bass is up, the lights are moving in time with the beat. You shake your groove thang until it skims the ground, then gyrate it back up.

Surprisingly, nobody spills their dirty martini on you as you tear up the song. And the floor, for once, isn’t sticking to your feet — a good thing, since you’re not wearing any shoes.

This is Dance Home, Boulder’s alcohol- and drug-free biweekly dance party. Touted as “community dances to celebrate life,” Dance Home might at first sound like another dread-intensive Patchouli fest. Not so. Dance Home is actually part of an international movement filled with perfectly normal strangers who just like to dance, sans beer-stained slacks, lap-space violations or drama.
Walk in on a typical Tuesday or Friday night, and you’ll find a scene that’s a microcosm of Boulder itself: body-conscious, colorful and unclassifiable. At the door, a host sits behind a folding table, taking a pittance of $5-7 to dance for the night. Rimming the place are Swiss therapy balls, hula hoops and a handful of perfectly content wallflowers. Rather than contemplating their toes the way a typical wallflower might, these petunias are often doing a handstand or some variation of Monkey King Pose on the floor, readying their bodies for another round of dancing.

The carpeted floor has just the right amount of bounce to keep bare feet comfortable. The lighting is unobtrusive and mild. In a small back room, a DJ — challenged with finding tunes complex enough to accommodate freestyle dancing — spins everything from mainstream beats to world fusion. Dance Home itself describes its beats not by genre, but by the sensations they evoke: funky, melodic, profound, insightful or carefree. “Our DJs take people on a journey, with peaks and valleys and a crescendo around 11:30 p.m. It’s like making love with music,” says Mark Klosterman, who has directed Dance Home for the last 10 years. Ongoing support from Bart’s CD Cellar and White Swan Music Distribution keep the selection fresh and versatile, a necessity for a place where hip hop is just as welcomed as Gurdjieff sacred dancing.

Dance Home’s freestyle flavor isn’t peculiar to Boulder. You’ll find rooms full of “dancing fools” in places like the California Bay Area, New England, Dublin and as far away as Israel. As in Boulder’s Dance Home, people are barefoot and mostly groove alone. What keeps these dance jams going is simple: When you let your body get lost in rhythm, you don’t think. And when you stop thinking, you’re happy. When everyone’s dancing and happy, a sense of tribal connection is fostered; some say it’s like coming “home.” And, finally, it’s not about making money, hooking up, showing off or acting like Kevin Bacon in Footloose. It’s about dancing. Period.

You’ll see people of all ages here. “They’re mostly in their early 20s to 60s, with the average age in the mid- to late-30s,” says Klosterman. Sometimes, if you come early enough, kids will be dancing among the grown-ups, though this is rare. Everybody is welcome, because the group’s acceptance of formlessness is ultimately what brings it together. Around 10 p.m. on any given Dance Home night, the floor separates into elements of twirling, yoga, Jiu-jitsu, improv and hues of in-between modalities that, through freeform voodoo, end up forming a kind of cohesive dancing unit. An old guy doing ballet might glissade past a somber-looking young woman lost in a trancelike shake. The fact that neither acknowledges the other is testament to the tolerance they share. And, eventually, they might even pair up and dance together for a while — if they feel like it.

Dance Home has no dictates governing how, where or with whom participants dance. The rules that do exist are simple. Don’t smoke, don’t drug yourself and don’t drink. The only difficulty is etiquette. “You get a character every once in a while who doesn’t get it,” Klosterman says. “It can be a tricky dance — no pun intended.” When this happens, he pulls them aside and does an intervention, which usually involves explaining Dance Home’s etiquette rules: Pay attention to nonverbal cues. Ask before massaging those who are not friends. Refrain from destructive behavior of any kind. The most important thing, says Klosterman, is to maintain a sense of safety.

This is something Klosterman’s team stays highly cognizant of: The event doesn’t just attract regulars, but hosts up to seven new people per dance, according to Klosterman. The Dance Home team and Board of Directors ensure that the event stays safe, sane and cheap through a continual process of consensus-based management. Since its inception in September 1993, Dance Home has welcomed people of all ages and socioeconomic positions. That means that if you can’t afford the fee, they’re open to bartering goods or services. They want you to dance as badly as you do.