Shut Up and Dance

In typical social situations he’ll introduce himself as Daniel. The answer to the most common follow-up question is “I’m an actor.” More often than not, his next response is “No, I doubt I’ve been in anything you’ve seen.”

The actor line is usually accepted far more readily than the precise answer: Dan is a professional dancer. He’s been doing it formally since he was in high school, but his family would say he knew how to move to rhythms before he was able to crawl. He was awarded a fellowship at New York University where he graduated with honors. He spent a short time in a residency program but ultimately left the academic world to forge his own path on the professional circuit. Since then he has been working continuously in film, television, and theater productions. He has lost track of exactly how many titles he has worked on over the last two decades or so, but it is certainly several hundred. From off-Broadway shows to promotional videos for a basketball tournament, Dan has danced in them all.

To the layperson, acting and dancing are sort of the same thing. Each one involves getting up on some kind of stage in front of an audience, doing a piece of entertainment, and if the person is really good at it they’ll get paid a lot of money. For whatever reason though, admitting your livelihood depends specifically on dance forms a rockier basis for conversation. This was something that took a painfully long time for Dan to fully internalize.

He also learned that calling himself “Daniel” slightly reduced the odds of being hit with alliterative assaults like “Dancin’ Dan” by otherwise well-intentioned jokesters. This concession pains him because he always did prefer the shorter name.

Seemingly half a lifetime ago, Dan was interviewed by a student journalist from his alma mater. He doesn’t remember exactly what he said about his approach to the craft, and the article was too prehistoric to have been added to the school’s online archives. He recalls trivializing the amount of effort he put in. It went vaguely like, “I come to the theater, I put on the costume and the makeup, I do the work, then I take it all off and go home.” In those younger and brasher days he really did believe it was that simple—an innate gift that he effortlessly channeled and directed at will. But that was never true.

Dan pushed himself his entire life, and his commitment has remained strong to this day. He spends hours watching other dancers, studying their routines, emulating the movements, and conditioning his body to make it all seem effortless. He works out in the gym for six days during most weeks doing everything from strength training to cardio. He has done this for essentially all of his adult life. Whether there is an inherent talent or not, this practice is necessary for effective expression. Other investments, like the haircut every other week, aren’t strictly necessary but still bear the resemblance to a critical ritual.

As varied and wide as his studies can be, Dan focuses deeply on specific topics with equal intensity. When preparing for a new show, there will generally be a period of rehearsals where the choreography is refined and practiced. Dan approaches these sessions with cold and no-nonsense determination. He is a professional, after all. These are typically paid hours, which is starkly different from when he was first starting out—his first credited performance had a brutal eight-hour rehearsal day whose compensation was a wilty Caesar salad from a polystyrene take-out box. It is a welcome change to have risen to a level where one can be paid to learn and practice. It is part of his workday, and he treats it as such.

Dan needs to keep abreast of the latest styles and changing tastes that directors and talent agents are looking for, even if some of these new trends seem downright distasteful to him. Maybe he’s getting older and grouchier, more set in his ways and suspicious of change. Or maybe everybody actually is an idiot who likes stupid nonsense now. Either way, he watches the TikTok videos and learns the moves just in case he needs to appease that type of audience.

There’s a certain anxiety that comes from performance. No matter how hard Dan practices, studies, prepares, and anticipates, there is always an opportunity for things to go wrong. He has been involved in a few trainwrecks—none specifically his fault as far as he can recall—that left audiences cringing. Even after successful performances, he kicks himself over small missed landings, late cues, every minuscule moment of less-than-perfection. Even after decades of doing this stuff, these tiny failures eat away at him long after the curtains close. Lately he has been trying mindfulness exercises and controlled breathing before call time every night, just to push out the worry that something will go awry during the show—and that self-defeating feeling that his best isn’t good enough anymore. He has thought more than once about starting smoking again, but that would definitely screw with his endurance in the long run.

He’s watched his friends grow and mature around him, putting away some of their idealism in exchange for a safe middle-of-the-road way of making a living by doing (nominally) “art.” One of the most brilliant and free-spirited musicians Dan has ever known is now the first chair violinist in an orchestra… playing behind a greying heavy metal band on their latest worldwide vanity tour. His roommate, who is hardly ever in the apartment these days, travels the world writing whatever his managing editor tells him to write. Dan is pretty sure he saw one of his old flings featured in a TV commercial hawking a diabetes drug. It feels like everybody he knows now just recites other people’s lines, sings somebody else’s lyrics, creates whatever safe and uncontroversial art the average consumer (or advertising agency) wants to see. Even Dan can’t remember the last time he was paid to perform a work that was substantially his own creation.

Dan has mused that the handyman who works in his apartment building is the most authentic artist he currently knows. It takes a serious creative spirit to preserve a prewar walk-up using nothing but the contents of a rusty toolbox and a bucket of watered-down latex paint. Dan has long envied that handyman, his freedom to solve problems in whichever way suits him, with nobody scrutinizing or critiquing the work or his process. It might be worth asking him what his name is one of these days.

It might be worth doing a lot of things. Dan is now approaching middle age, and his body is starting to remind him of that fact during inopportune moments. It hasn’t really impacted his ability to perform much, but he has been starting to notice a recurring pain in his knee that seems to linger a little bit longer each time it flares up. He proactively stopped signing onto performances that involve back flips—those are moves for a much younger man. He knows this won’t get better; his days of peak physical ability are now firmly behind him. Although he may easily remain capable of doing most routines as he continues to age, he also has to look like the sort of person who is capable of doing those routines. Ageism is rampant in the industry, and it’s a real bitch. In contemplating this eventuality, Dan has been idly thinking about what comes next, what kind of roles he might be able to land, whether he should actually become the actor that he always fibbed about being for all that time. Dan might accurately describe himself as lacking the stature and the gravitas for dramatic acting.

He wouldn’t come out and admit this, perhaps because he doesn’t yet consciously realize it, but Dan is actually somewhat trapped. Take away dancing, and there really isn’t all that much he can revert back to. If he doesn’t suddenly blow out his Achilles in one grand misstep, his knee could eventually force him to hang up the shiny wingtips for good. What then? He’s nowhere near ready to retire financially. Dan has to dance whether he likes it or not. It’s simply that, up until now, he has liked doing it enough to ignore the sense of obligation to it.

There’s been this nagging feeling keeping Dan awake lately. Should he just… stop, a little? Not give up dancing entirely, but maybe care a little less about it? It’s a heavy thought. This has been his entire life, the singular focus of his career, the one central thing that has driven him to become the person that he now is. Of course he can’t simply give that up; he invested way too much of his time—his professional time and his free time—into this craft. If he hadn’t put in the work, he would have never made it this far in the industry. All the parties he skipped, the dates he turned down, the travel and leisure he never partook in, those hours were funneled into study and practice. Leveling up, building strength, rising through the ranks. And now he’s here. He is neither the best nor the worst dancer the greater metropolitan area has ever seen. He’s realistically somewhere in the upper third. He could practice for a hundred years and never reach the top of that pile.

But what if he did stop studying and practicing in his free time? What if he simply decided that he is done improving, done devoting his outside life to trying to reach an unattainable goal? How much does he actually have to practice to continue passing his auditions? What would his gym routine look like if it was something he wanted to do, rather than being something he had to do? Would he even want to do it at all?

“I come to the theater, I put on the costume and the makeup, I do the work, then I take it all off and go home.”

Does that work? Could that work?

What does work-life balance even mean when both sides of that equation are so hopelessly commingled that both words effectively describe the same thing? Who’s really watching Dan and calculating his worth on a day-to-day basis? Who is keeping track of that score, and does the winner even get anything worth having in the end?

What would it really feel like to be the one that drags everybody down during rehearsal? To get passed over during an audition? To completely blank on the choreography during a performance? Would the trade magazines make a deeply unflattering remark about the production as a whole without naming him specifically? Will some vague concept of “they” rain down fire and fury, banning Dan from ever working in this town again? Does a shadowy agent from the government knock on his door later that night and then shoot him in the head as an extrajudicial punishment for not applying himself hard enough? Or does everybody in attendance just… take it all off and go home?

James. He remembered this time. The building’s handyman is named James. Today he’s tightening all of the balusters on the first floor stairwell. The handrail hasn’t felt this solid in years. Twenty minutes have passed. Thirty. This is a nice change of routine. If Dan hurries, he can still make it to the gym and squeeze in half a workout. Or maybe he won’t; this right here is a fine way to spend a Saturday morning.