When You Dance I Can Really Love

One of the oddities of the recent trip to Tanzania is a couple of my most memorable moments occurred in a most unexpected time and place and manner.  Actually, I guess that's not that odd, since that is usually the norm for me overseas.  In this case it was because both of them occurred in Dar Es Salaam, and, truthfully, I was mainly just interested in blowing through the capital and getting on to Zanzibar and Pemba.  Steve and I decided that we wanted to give the students a sense of a different Africa, that is, a huge sprawling metropolis, as compared to a contrary popular perception.  So, I put aside my general disdain for huge cities and we planned some time in Dar Es Salaam.  I'll talk more about the Shree Swaminarayan Temple in a later post, but it turned out to be an amazing visit.  Since the trip was embedded in a Sacred & Secular class, we wanted to give the students as many exposures with different religious or spiritual experiences as we could.  We spent the afternoon at the temple, and they could not have been more welcoming (including feeding us).  As we were leaving they spontaneously asked us if we'd like to come back that night because they were hosting a dance.  Steve and I immediately said yes, and then prayed that the students would rally.  In the end around the half the students jumped at the opportunity, which made since since we had just climbed off two long international flights that very morning.  We arrived back at the temple and the crowd was already gathering.  Because it was a very conservative sect of Hinduism the men and women were separated, and the female students were immediately spirited downstairs for their own dance and ceremony.  Obviously, we had visited the temple earlier in the day, but now there was some large speakers in the middle of the floor and some instruments.  Several men were still praying and were sprawled flat out on the floor as part of their prayers.  Suddenly a line of four men started very gently dancing rhythmically.  For one brief moment I had this notion that maybe there was going to be a throw down between the men still praying and those who seemed to be destroying the somber religious moment by dancing, but then it dawned on me that this was part of the choreographed experience - it was almost a negotiation of the boundary between the secular and sacred worlds; of course, in Hinduism there really isn't that boundary anyway.  Foolishly, I thought that we were just there to watch, but instead we (four students, Steve and me) were quickly dragged into the temple and, on the fly, were walked through the dance.  We were dancing in a clockwise direction, and there were only four steps, two up and two back, but not completely back so that we were circling around the room.  From that simple beginning with four men soon there were two complete circles, an inner one and an outer one, and a couple hundred men.  Slowly the pace of the dance, and the passion of the gestures, increased, until finally I tapped out about a half hour in, sweating profusely.  Here's a link to a video of some women dancing, and I'm include it because the steps were pretty much the same, although the men danced much more dramatically. I found the entire experience almost hypnotic, and it clearly broke down the boundaries between worlds.  I've been fortunate to have a lot of experiences, and my Top 10 is pretty rich, almost illogically so (as my friend Sarah Cohen was wont to propose, "you know who has your life, no one has your life"), and this immediately climbed into my upper pantheon of unforgettable moments. Actually, I hate to dance - it's one of my great insecurities - but on this occasion I just gave myself over to it, and you could feel something mystic happening.  I defaulted to Neil Young's When You Dance I Can Really Love, which seemed appropriate for that transcendent half-hour.