The Dance of Resistance

choosing joy in the gathering storm

1940, Zeist, the Netherlands. A tall, blond man, twenty years old, dances cheek to cheek with a seventeen-year-old brunette, her hair tucked demurely behind her ear as his lips move softly millimeters away. At the perimeter of the room stand foreign officers, unsmiling, their hands resting on pistols, red patches on their sleeves showing the four-angled cross mark. The small nation is occupied, but dance parties are allowed.

Marten’s hand curves around Gertje’s waist and he pulls her close as he whispers in her ear, their bodies swinging to the beat of the band. She laughs flirtatiously, plants a kiss on his cheek, then allows the next dancer to twirl her away. The Germans see more whispers of seduction passed.

But Gertje is not flirting, though her body and eyes deceive. The words she speaks close and quiet under cover of the big band are secrets, undercover resistance: locations, names, details.

swing dancing 1940s

Soon, Marten is discovered for his participation in the underground and interned in a concentration camp until the Canadian army liberates them in May 1945. But even while imprisoned, he continues his defiant resistance, dropping and stamping scraps of paper with intelligence scrawled on them into the dust near the barbed wire fence during the daily marches inside the perimeter of the camp, while Gertje watches from the shadows of the trees outside. When the prisoners and guards are past, she scurries out and retrieves the notes. Some of these secrets do become love notes, and on May 11^th, four days after Liberation, the freed and reunited young couple marries. Nearly a decade later, they move their growing family, including their son, my father, to the promised land of their liberators in Canada.

I am born of defiant blood.

Resistance to Nazis nearly prevented my existence, and that same resistance formed my family and pulses through my veins with every heartbeat. I will not close my eyes to injustice. I will not look away. I will not stand inert to oppression.

I sometimes wonder at the trauma impact of my family and of whole nations living through such a regime. We did not have many conversations about it because of that very trauma, as my grandparents tried to bury the past and forget. The symptoms were there, though, in the way he’d jerk awake from a nightmare, or in her depression, or his quick temper that pulled him from his usual jocular way.

And I wonder at the magnitude of collective trauma as we watch our own nation devolve, as rights are stripped away, as authorities trample sanctuary spaces to round up their own interpretation of second-class residents, and lives are dehumanized with the stroke of a key on a government website. As fear seizes hearts and paralyzes millions.

I think of resilience and the qualities that create it. Resilience, the backbone of resistance. One cannot effectively have one without the other. I don’t know how my grandparents fostered theirs, but I know what I am doing for my own.

Because I know this is a long fight. We cannot afford to burn out now, to turn to despair or apathy, to freeze or cower or acquiesce. We must fortify ourselves and one another for the days and years ahead.

So my formula for resistance begins in silence. In calming and stilling my spirit, slowing the anxious fluttering of my heart. Sitting strong in stillness and tuning into the present moment. Try it, right now:

Sit up strong and tall. Feel the strength of the muscles of your body supporting you. Open your shoulders, roll them back. Lift your chin. Notice the shift in how this feels. Embody both strength and defiance.

· Listen to the sounds around you. What do you hear? Can you hear at least three things? Cars passing, birds calling, a heater humming…

· Shift your attention to your nose. What do you smell? Breathe in deep and slow.

· Notice how that breath feels, without forcing it to change shape. Feel it in your chest, notice the air moving through your nostrils or your mouth. Let it slow.

· Lengthen your exhalation, opening your lips and sighing out the breath. This audible sigh strengthens your vagus nerve, increasing your physiological resilience.

· Notice your thoughts, and picture them like clouds, drifting into awareness and then traveling on. Allowing the worries to come and to go without grasping them. Come back to here and now. Back to your five senses. Back to what is known, rather than what is feared.

I’m practicing this every day, my strong but still act of resistance. Fighting hatred with peace.

And, I’m beginning to dance.

My whole life, as long as I can remember, I dreamed of being a ballerina. But I’m not. I never took a lesson, I only dreamed. It was not afforded me.

As a child, I took library books home and studied the movements, the pages spread wide on the basement floor as I tried to learn the various positions. But I also read that one must begin prior to age twelve, and so as adolescence emerged, I gave up the dream, though not the longing, my inner dancer fluttering like a bird in a cage.

Decades passed. And last week I overheard a conversation discussing an adult ballet class at a studio near me. Adult? What about beginning by age 12? The studio confirmed it was open to beginners. With trepidation, I went, my runner’s socks sliding in place of the pink slippers worn by the others.

I was self-conscious, aware of my age and inexperience. Joy burbled up inside, too; grateful for the opportunity to gift my inner child this long-deferred dream.

And I questioned myself: with all that is going on, what meaning is there in so silly a pursuit as learning to dance at my age?

In the 1980s, in the height of the AIDS crisis, a saying emerged amongst the gay community: We bury our friends in the morning, we protest in the afternoon, and we dance at night.”¹

Why? Was it frivolity? Insincerity? Debauchery? No. it was the dancing that kept them going, that fueled the fight, the resistance, the movement toward answers and treatments to stop the epidemic that unequally devasted their community. The movement that stood up demanding recognition of their humanity, their needs, their rights.

Dance stimulates a release of endorphins that boost mood; it lowers stress, anxiety, and depression, it boosts and protects cognitive health, and it fosters social connection and creativity². All necessary aspects of effective resistance to oppression and elements to building your personal resilience.

Sojourner Truth said, “If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.” Dance, my friends, and laughter and song and making art and hugging loved ones and writing stories is resistance. It is defiance in the face of a movement that feeds on fear and fleeing. It is a giant fuck you to those who seek to push and keep us down. And it is humanity. A cleaving to and immersion in our humanity, and an extension of that recognition to others, in the face of a mass movement of dehumanization. We will dance, with our eyes open and arms wide.

No. We will not be oppressed. Let us strategically embrace joy and bathe in art with a passion that invites others to dance along.

1. attributed to Dan Savage, author and LGBT community activist

2. https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/02/12/dancing-may-be-better-than-other-exercise-for-improving-mental-h.html