Dance Jealousy

Hey, I watched the introductory Strictly Come Dancing show!

As usual for me, there’s lots of folk there I don’t know, including someone from Made in Chelsea (shrugs shoulders) who was in Strictly before but departed prematurely due to an accident or something. Didn’t know him then and still don’t know him now. Sorry but I don’t think he’ll last long this time either (though I reckon he won’t be the first to go). But that’s not what this post is about.

It is however partly about a general jealousy which grabbed me as I watched in the context of Covid-19 and the following details unfolded. 

All the professional dancers got together for four weeks, subject to very strict testing, to rehearse and record their group dances. Then another testing procedure got them together with their celebrity partners. So these guys, because of their admitted talent (or celebrity), have had the opportunity to do what the rest of us have not and cannot – be physically close with people. 

What, you may legitimately ask, is my interest in this, as a writer? I have to admit that my interest in it goes beyond writing but there’s a couple of things I can say in response to such a perfectly fair question, so here goes.

First of all, a big reveal – as a teenager I learned, and even competed in, Ballroom and Latin! Please don’t tell anyone I disclosed that – it would shatter any ambition I may have had to be treated as a serious writer! 

Secondly, if you seek a direct connection between dance and writing, it’s complicated but a good starting point may be found in one of my earlier posts, ‘Humans and Dancers’. Check it out!

I had considered finishing this post with a WIP poem in Glasgow dialect called Dad Dancin’ but will spare you for the moment, partly because it needs a bit of finessing (even for a work in progress) but mainly because it is the kind of low-quality semi-humorous doggerel that works better in performance at an open mic (with an inebriated audience) than on the page. 

If you’re really unlucky it’ll turn up as a video on this site…or somewhere else…and perhaps you’ll start thinking that, by comparison, Strictly Come Dancing is fairly high-brow after all.

As indicated earlier this little blog relates to jealousy, not so much of dancing per se, but of a group of people having physical contact, something which seems so alien to the rest of us these days. 

I have written a couple of dozen poems relating to Covid-19. Four of my short poems on this topic were published in Pendemic, an Irish site for writers on the topic, and I shall finish off with a couple of those which relate to the loss of physical closeness (the first slightly tongue-in-cheek).

 
CV-19: sexual distancing 
 
 O what a time to be alive!
 To appreciate platonic
 Resist relations intimate
 By order of the government 
 
 Assisted by technology
 To do your loving best
 Transactions during this time
 Confined to contactless
 

Father’s Day
 
Sunday witnessed a miracle
 Previously unheard of 
 In this time of plague
 Though small mercies
 Rare have sometimes
 Been distributed and received 
 This Father’s Day my son
 And family could let me come
 Visit them within their home where
 Legally-permitted hugs may be