Boulder Dance

26 Oct 2025

Boulder

I had the good luck to visit Boulder in October. And not just visit - to spend the month there in near entirety. Such travel does brilliant things to the brain. All things you do on autopilot at home all of a sudden require concentration. Frying eggs in the morning becomes a jigsaw puzzle. You can’t simply reach for your favorite skillet without looking. The number of steps between the stove and the cutting board is an odd, awkward number, like two-and-a-third. The refrigerator growls menacingly when you least expect it. The keys aren’t where you’ll definitely see them on the way out. Towels fall from unfamiliar hooks. Produce is of different quality. Traffic lights have innovative timing. And so on. If you’re struggling to feel more “present,” I implore you to try this.

Which gets us back to Boulder. Boulder is full of hippies. Calls for being “present,” “embodied,” and “authentic” are everywhere. It’s techy, too. But even its techies are hippies. Crypto hippies. And as the popular saying goes, “When in Rome, be a hippie.”

Now, I have my limits, and the endlessly scrollable feed of local events with words like “transformational,” “awaken,” “healing,” and “consciousness,” overwhelms and triggers alarm. A word of advice: well-disposed outsiders with open minds are able to accept a finite dose of foreign perspective at a time. Do not abuse it.

Fortunately, I had help. A trusted friend sent me directly to an ecstatic dance. “You’re a dancer, this will be up your alley.”

I’ve been dancing swing for about ten years and blues for a little less. The last year or two I’ve been grinding down my knee joints free-form dancing to Psytrance - an hour here, half an hour there. Eight at a festival. For three days, back-to-back. I’d heard about ecstatic, but resisted it back home. But all of a sudden I’m in Boulder and all roads lead to an ecstatic dance. Seriously. There are more weekly ecstatics than seven. And I was of course sent to “the good one.”

Ecstatic

For those unfamiliar, ecstatic dance is - as the organizers unfailingly remind attendees - a space to dance like no one’s looking. The music is varied, depending entirely on the whims of the DJ. The dances are no talk zones. All conversations must be taken outside. Asking somebody to dance involves making eyes, faces, waving hands, and shaking of various convexities, but not asking.

Ecstatic dances are also places to practice “contact improvisation,” a form of dance where partners offer various parts of their bodies for contact and improvise joint movement. You could begin with fingertips, roll the connection through the wrists and elbows to the shoulders, roll over your backs, move the connection points to the legs, and invite your partner to lay on your back as you bend forward. I’ve seen people pick up and spin each other, roll on the ground, and do acro-yoga. Ideally, this happens in tandem with the music, but this is secondary.

Connection and Touch

The theory is that such dance fosters connection. Limited to non-verbal queues, dancers pay attention to body, expressions, and eye contact. This shortcuts the usual social rituals. It gets intimate. It gets hot. Touch builds trust. Play creates levity.

This is interpersonal, emotional connection. But there is another.

The most important thing in swing (and blues, and likely in most partnered dances) is connection. You wouldn’t know it from entry-level classes. Nobody explains to beginners that the most important part of the dance is how you connect to your partner. Everyone teaches basic move sets which can be repeated and drilled like choreography. This allows the instructor to demonstrate a pretty sequence of motions and have the students perform something similar in fifty minutes or less.

Of course, the beginner’s performance of the steps is (feels!) nothing like the teacher’s. The beginner simply walks the steps, similarly turns his body, and moves his arms. The teacher is connected to his partner. What is the beginner missing? Frame, pulse, momentum. Together: connection.

Frame refers to holding a standard elastic shape. The base shape can vary, but elasticity is paramount. In swing, the standard shape involves having your hands down and in front, slightly outward, as if resting on a table. The elbows are not to cross behind your back. Arms are not to completely straighten when pulled. Frame compresses and stretches, but strives to return to the base position. The further from the default, the more forceful the pressure to return. When partners maintain their frames, they can feel each other in space and signal where to move next.

Pulse tells your partner when you are ready to move. When you are adding weight into your foot, sinking, and when you are bouncing up. If the leader applies horizontal force at the right time, the follower responds in natural and predictable ways. If I pull as you get lighter, you follow. If I push when you plant, we compress, build tension in our frames, and prepare to recoil at the next “up.”

Momentum means that movements have weight and inertia. They don’t reverse instantly. It takes time to slow and accelerate. If I have my partner in my right hand and send her across my body to the left, I expect her to reach my other hand at a certain time. I consider the weight she gives my right hand and apply force necessary to accelerate this weight to such velocity that she arrives on my left in N beats, at which point I catch and redirect her. If she stops early, in front of me, my plan crumbles and the connection is lost. There are delightful ways to thwart your partner’s expectations, but never arriving where they expect you severely limits opportunities for play.

On the other hand, there is something uniquely satisfying in training your partner to give you weight and momentum without words. Think back to the leaning trust games. Press into each other’s hands, stretched overhead, to form a pyramid. Now press back to back. Chest to chest. When you lean in, will they match your weight? Or let you fall? If they press back, you can begin to sway and move around the floor. Until they peel off and you must separate. Until next time.

That said, the deepest kinship I built was with an utterly enchanting creature who is decidedly guilty of the dance sins I describe. We went slow. Slow touches. Slow transitions. Sometimes she gave weight. Sometimes I lost her. Sometimes we teased each other, fingertips just barely apart. I basked in her joys and surprises - so outwardly, yet quietly and “to herself” she experienced them. Like sitting in the sun. And I am deeply grateful for the half a dozen dances we shared throughout the month.

So, if you’re still reading, visit Boulder next fall. And if you’re an ecstatic dancer, take some swing lessons. It will give you new connection tools which you don’t seem to receive elsewhere. And I claim this from an authoritative position of total ignorance. I’ve taken exactly zero ecstatic dance lessons. The only workshops I attended turned out to be cacao ceremonies, acro-yogas, or guided self-reflection sessions. Luck of the draw or a hint as to why dance fundamentals are rare in the community?