Well, what I have learned about African cultural dance suggests these were deeply fearful people releasing negative emotions and performing characters of strength. I am not entirely sure how the Africans who used it during slavery and still made it to America would assess whether it worked, but I am curious whether it is a maladaptive pattern in today’s world.
It is tribal. Acquiescent in appearance. It takes many different forms across today’s “cultures” but anyone who uses this “energy” is using it the same way. It’s what some traditions have called dark magic, what psychology might call energy extraction, what I have most accurately described as collective neurological warfare – deployed through the body instead of language.
Cartez, for instance, was too proud, too hip, and vibing in disrespect with his whole knee-buckling impromptu freestyle. Interestingly, it was documentation turned weapon. Maybe my first time realizing it so clearly. He was performing me. He’d been watching closely enough to replicate specific physical vulnerabilities and present them back, publicly. Predatory idealization disguised as freestyle, maybe?
His face while doing it though: ghost. Zoned out. Looking down. An ogre moving with unnatural confidence.
I think this is an unconscious and connected habit.
At Razzo’s a drunk woman was booty tooting and lip poking – looking down at me, directly at me and somewhere into unidentifiable space simultaneously. A challenge? The close-eyed, zoned-out quality of it was more interesting to me than the challenge itself. My mother used to make similar faces when flirting with my boyfriends or believing she had successfully redirected the attention of people who were ‘interested’ in me. I recognized it immediately.
The drunk got so lost in it she lost her knees. They buckled, not so ironically. She was gone.
At casa samba the same “body-language” appeared in the closing circle. The swollen woman shaped simultaneously like a carrot and a muppet was completely unnecessary with her “battle” initiation.
She appeared genuinely mentally and physically hurt when I “engaged” her.
Good?
I am also reminded of Neci “bear hugging me” and “rocking-with-me” at Razzo’s.
It felt like she was physically trying to squeeze to hurt me. Maybe she felt the same “hatred” that led the other girl to collapse and she didn’t want to “let it happen” to her. It felt like a deliberate attempt to paralyze me or stop me from “moving”. It was unnaturally forceful and quite disproportionate to her avoiding acknowledging me as a “friend” to Chancey just earlier. This didn’t bother me—it fit my assessment of our relationship—I thought it was bold but not surprising. It simply made the bear hug easier to interpret as an attack compared to an embrace.
And They All Fall Down
The same motions are everywhere.
I can’t explain how numbing and humiliating it felt simultaneously when that little short boy began that weird, sexually suggestive impromptu dance battle at during a program briefing. The ‘gitcha som’ motion. A child suggesting in front of 30+ people – mostly kids, some adults – that he would fuck me. The majority laughed. Some in fear like hyenas. Some happily. Some started dancing themselves.
Christian is the clearest example of what that looked like. His face in that moment resists description not because it was subtle but because putting it into words means feeling it again. It was relaxed. No thought behind it. Eyes spearing. A preemptive celebration. The face of someone whose body already knows the outcome and is gratified by it before it happens.
A slap wearing a smile.
This connects deeply to being told ‘you think too much’ and ‘get out of your head.’ It is all the same systemic pressure. A collective, body-based attack on higher order functioning. They cannot access what they cannot reach. So they work to bring it down to where they live.
They operate from principles encoded in the body. Not the mind.
Never the mind.
And across every dimension of social life for them:
Dance is not connection. Dance is not joy.
Dance is a form of displacement.
The Quellwell 
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