Boys should dance

I was flipping aimlessly through a coffee-table book when one picture seized me. Oh, it wasn't because he was nude. Seriously. Nor because there was a woman in the picture, fully clothed and hatted even, strange though the conjunction between the two was.

What stopped me were his proportions. His legs were longer than the rest of his body. That got me flipping back and forth for other photographs of men from the same racial group, the Nubians. Indeed, the others had similar proportions, though only one other guy (the one with the kids around him) was as obvious as in that one picture.

This violates what we -– well, those of us who have tried our hand at figure drawing, at least -– have learnt as the standard proportions.

The best way to illustrate what we mean by the "standard proportions" is to look at Leonardo da Vinci's classic drawing of Vitruvian Man, used for ages as the basic reference. 

You see from there that the pubic bone (roughly where the penis joins the body) marks the midpoint of a man's height, which means the legs are equal in length to the upper half of the body, including the head.

In actual fact, this varies a little from person to person. Chiefly the variation is in one direction, where the legs are slightly shorter than the torso and head. This means that for some people, the pubic bone and penis are just below the line marking the mid-height. I have the impression that this variation is more often found among Asiatic men, i.e. East Asians and Southeast Asians, perhaps the Amerindians too, but needless to say, I haven't done any survey to substantiate my belief.

The reason Asiatics and Amerindians tend to have shorter limbs is because this branch of homo sapiens had, some time in the past, made an adaptation to cold. The result is a more compact body shape, mathematically expressed as a smaller ratio of skin surface area to body mass. This reduces heat loss from the body. The Tibetans and Andeans probably demonstrate this adaptation most clearly.

Variation in the other direction from the "standard proportions" -- to have the pubic bone significantly higher than the midpoint (i.e. legs longer than the rest of the body)  -- is rarer, and it seems only the Nubians, a group that lives in Southern Sudan, have this as their standard body shape. 

* * * * *

 
Normally, body shape hardly makes a difference in daily routines, but at extremes of performance, it becomes significant. There is no better occasion for extreme performance than the Olympics, with the 2008 games due to start in Beijing in a few days' time, on 8 August.

Pretty difficult to do if your legs are too long Synchronised diving by China's Wang Feng and He Chong. Montreal, July 2005.

No doubt we'll see athletes of African stock dominate track and field. In particular, for many years now, athletes from the East African highlands have shone in endurance running.

Diving and gymnastics, on the other hand, will see mainly competitors with East Asian or (Southern and Eastern) European ancestry. Shorter individuals with compact bodies have an advantage -- you're able to rotate faster in mid-air (conservation of angular momentum and all that), and make the most of the distance that you're falling. 

The fact is, anatomical differences between races and between individuals are real. At extremes of performance, every little advantage conferred on you by your genes count, be they longer legs, higher-capacity heart pumping, or a centre of gravity that is just perfect for the sport of your choice.

This is not to take anything away from the enormous amount of training each athlete has put in and the mental preparation they go through. But surely they are also smart enough to exploit every advantage they've been bestowed with.

And we will cheer them, for in the Olympics, we will be celebrating inequality. The most unequally good is the one who gets the gold.

* * * * *

 
Most other times, inequality isn't something we would celebrate. In fact, it tends to breed snobbishness on the part of some, frustration and a sense of failure on the part of others. 

"Boys should dance," my sister said, right after she saw the breathtaking one and a half minutes of "Humming Bird" performed by Hok and Jaimie in Season 3 of So You Think You Can Dance.

She's a school teacher, and every working day, she has to deal with teenage boys who can never keep still. "They need to work off all that energy," she explained to me. Instead of monkeying around at the back of the classroom, she thinks dance would be a more constructive channel for them. Like body shape where there is no ignoring the fact that there are differences between groups, we cannot ignore either that there are differences between boys and girls. The typical classroom culture -- sit still and listen -- may work against boys.

The problem may be especially acute for boys who aren't academically inclined. Unless they can find something else in which they excel, they risk suffering low self-esteem, which can lead to self-destructive or anti-social behaviour. Dance brings a number of compensatory advantages: the physical activity raises the body's endorphin levels, leaving them feeling good; it involves training, and the discipline associated with that prepares them for life. But dance involves performance too. Do it reasonably well, and applause awaits you. 

In addition, for boys especially, expressing themselves physically may be easier than struggling to express themselves verbally. So once again, my sister may be right: Dance has a lot to recommend it.

Without a doubt, 99 percent of boys will choose hip hop (also known as breakdancing). Other forms are seen as either old-fashioned or effete. Hip hop's fine, though if everybody's doing it, it gets harder to stand out from the crowd. It would be helpful to boys if we reduced the stigma associated with other forms of dance, opening more options for them.

At this point, let me embed two Youtube clips. The first shows Ivan Koumaev and Allison Holker, from Season 2 of the aforementioned dance competition. The second is of Hokuto 'Hok' Konishi and Jaimie Goodwin, from Season 3. 

I've chosen these two clips because they are acknowledged by the judges as probably the best performances of their respective seasons, but they have something else in common. Whereas in both cases, the female dancer was known to be good, with a background in contemporary and lyrical styles, the male dancer turned out to be a surprise. Both Ivan's and Hok's backgrounds were in hip hop dancing, but look how they stretched themselves artistically and physically into the choreography they were given:

Ivan Koumaev and Allison Holker to Annie Lennox's Why, choreographed by Tyce Dioro. 

Hok Konishi and Jaimie Goodwin to The Chairman's Waltz, choreographed by Wade Robson.

* * * * *

 
Not only do most forms of dance have a sissy reputation, formal training too suffers from the same. Yet without training, how far can one go? This is another example of how sexism -- the devaluation of things feminine -- hurts boys. We often think of sexism as something that leaves girls receiving the short end of the stick, but here it is reversed. 

However, if you strip away the cultural baggage, dance and masculinity fit very well. The male sex is the more physical of the two, and dance is physical, if nothing else. 

The next two clips show exclusively male dancing, but in a style that requires formal training. The first example is in a more traditional genre, and simply from this fact alone, some will think it is sissy, though frankly you need to be some kind of Olympic athlete to do what the three guys do in these three and a half minutes:

An excerpt from the Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance production of "The Men", choreographed by Heather Maloy. The dancers are Christopher Stuart, Christopher Bandy, Nathan McGinnis and Hitomi Yamada. The Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance is a professional ballet company based in Asheville, North Carolina.

 
The next one is not sissy at all, and furthermore it's in a style that is a lot more accessible to modern audiences. Unfortunately, all I can find on Youtube is a poor quality edited recording of a rehearsal. Strangely, the dance itself ends after 3 minutes, but the music continues for 2 more minutes. I don't know why; probably because it's a work in progress.

American Vampire (rehearsal) by The Wicked Boy Ballet Company, choreographed by Trevor Little, danced by Trevor Little and Dave Dubois. 

 
As you can see, fighting and ravishing is excellent material for dance. If boys are doing that in schoolyards and backlanes, wouldn't it be better to do it on stage, and be applauded for it rather than punished?

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

None

Addenda

None