Barefoot Dancing the Sublime

Lately, I’ve caught myself salsa dancing on the way to Spanish class. Sometimes I two-step on the way to Introductory Business. I don’t know what it is – there is something about going barefoot that makes me want to dance. One thing I’ve noticed about dancing with my bare feet is that I become aware of every step and every movement: sometimes you can just be walking and because you feel your feet touch the floor, you’re inclined to make your feet touch the floor in a very special way.

 Where our feet touch the floor and how our feet touch the floor are incredibly monumental parts of our lives, but it’s something that usually goes unnoticed because we’re usually wearing shoes. However, let us not be ignorant of the benefits of shoes: as poignantly stated by the character Phil DeVoss in Cameron Crowe’s movie Elizabethtown, “a shoe is not just a shoe; it connects us to the earth.” (Crowe). But what if the shoe wasn’t a connection, but rather, a barrier? This character, Phil DeVoss as played by Alec Baldwin, essentially could be described as the Steve Jobs of the shoe industry. Representing the head of the most prosperous multimillion dollar shoe company in the world, DeVoss was responsible for only two meaningful things: the pithy quote, “I’m ill-equipped in the philosophies of failure”, and the firing of the movie’s protagonist, Drew Baylor as played by Orlando Bloom, who saw DeVoss in a simultaneously sincere and sarcastic sort of awe. You see, DeVoss was brilliant, but his entire empire was built upon shoes. As Baylor thoughtfully points out, “can you imagine an entire life wrapped up in a shoe?” (Crowe.) Now, what if we removed the shoe, removed the shoe as a foundation for our economic empire, removed the shoe as a barrier? What if we could go barefoot and what if there was nothing dividing us from the earth? What if we were truly connected?

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            For some reason, there are few published books written explicitly about barefooted-ness, but there are hundreds of books written about shoes. There must be some innate tendency of humans to write books about things instead of the absence of things, but occasionally a book on shoes will feature an essay on such a paradoxical concept as “no shoes”, and in the midst of all this existence – all these shoes that exist and are real and are tangible, there appears a fluttering attempt at capturing that which is not tangible and that which does not exist: the absence of shoes, i.e. bare feet. And just what do bare feet have to do with shoes, anyways? Are shoes and bare feet just two completely disparate and separate concepts? Or in their world of opposites are they, as Heidegger might say, inherently connected in coexistence in that feet could never be considered “bare” if we did not have shoes to cover them up in the first place? (Guignon.) This view makes going barefoot into an “anti-shoe” movement, and accurately so: in going barefoot, one makes a statement against all the confinements of shoes and popular culture, and what more vibrant way to defy the shoe-status-quo than through dance? According to Gerri Reaves’ article “The Slip in the Ballet Slipper: The Illusion and the Naked Foot”, the techniques of the barefoot Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, the two most important early-twentieth-century modern dancers, utilized barefoot dancing to “offer a sensual counterpoint to the masochism of the ballet slipper” that was predominant in the ballet dancing characteristic to that era. (Reaves 264.) These two women were making a statement against the contorted positions of ballet dancers. Choosing more comfortable and sensual poses, Graham and Duncan 

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opted to focus not on how high a dancer could jump, but on how eloquently her feet could sink into the ground. In Graham’s dance “Satyric Festival Song” (see picture 3), she utilizes gravity in such a way that “the energy surges from her arched bare foot through the lines of her body, traverses the horizontal lines of her dress, and continues even to the tips of her flying hair” (Reaves 264.) Graham’s bare feet allow her to really feel the floor, making her more aware of her surroundings, which creates that “connection” I mentioned before between the barefoot dancer and the earth.

            One does not even need to be standing on the ground to be aware of one’s surroundings via feet. The husband and wife dancing couple, C. Derrick Jones and Nehara Kalev of Catch Me Bird, utilize their feet and their legs to look completely natural while perpetually hanging in an overhead apparatus. 

Notice their slow awakening as demonstrated through the tender movement of their feet and legs, while still balanced precariously ten feet over a concrete stage. See how her foot slides up the circle gently while his feet remain poised in midair as he descends to the lower rung. In this performance Silk, the dancer couple celebrates their third anniversary by working out all their marital issues on stage in a combination of aggressive and tender dance sequences that at times resemble the foreplay to lovemaking, and at other times, resemble fist fights. No matter what sequence they were doing, it was fascinating and precious, but in a way that was really indescribable by words and uncapturable by camera. I saw this performance many years ago, in a time where I did not yet walk without shoes, but upon seeing them dance and live vivaciously on stage, I could not help but dance through the parking lot as well. But big boots are too cumbersome to dance in, and I tripped myself in the cold.

            The cold is the one thing from which bare feet cannot save you, even when you’re hot-blooded from dancing. You’re still dancing in the cold November winds with the wind whipping through your hair and the crisp sunlight taunting you with the pretense of heat. But that doesn’t stop barefoot dancers. Not me. Not my friends.
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In a time where man and woman feel most isolated, all you need to do is take off your shoes, stand firmly on the ground and realize that every other man and woman on Earth is standing on this ground, too. Take off your shoes and feel the interconnectedness of every human being, a slow awakening that spreads upwards from your feet into your chest like soft warmth. Realize that you are not alone. Realize it, and with this realization even if you were not inclined to dance before, you should be inclined to dance now.

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Works Cited

634.x600.dance.gift.graham.jpg. Photograph. Zap 2 It. Web. [picture 2]

Elizabethtown. By Cameron Crowe. Dir. Cameron Crowe. Perf. Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. Paramount, 2005. DVD.

Guignon, Charles B., and Derk Pereboom. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001. Print.

Morgan, Barbara. Satyric Festival Song. 1935. Photograph. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA. Chrysler.org. Web. [picture 3]

Reaves, Gerri. "The Slip in the Ballet Slipper: Illusion and the Naket Foot." Footnotes: on Shoes. By Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001. 251-71. Print.

Twin Rings. Perf. C. Derrick Jones and Nehara Kalev. YouTube. 06 Nov. 2008. Web. 2 Nov. 2010. 


pictures 1, 4, 5, 6 were taken by me, Jasmine Dahilig.
friends Amanda Goad and Victoria Rocha modeled for pictures 4, 5, 6