Slip: Notes on Dancing Out of Frame

With summer this year, came the abrupt end of my longest, dearest romantic relationship. X and I met seven years ago, rather improbably, on Tinder. Over our seven years together, we became the artists we dreamed of being when we started dating as freshly heartbroken 25-year-old kids.

The pain of our break-up was tremendous; others have written about this feeling. Anne Carson in ‘The Glass Essay’ writes: “When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die.” That was me.

I went out dancing a lot in the aftermath. Into the space of my unbearable longing, I poured movement. In my empty palms, the rush and spin and blur of dance. Blue organza skirt swishing, shimmering, translucent in the indifferent lights of this bar and that. I swirled, clasped, and twirled, bumping hips with whichever acquaintance was wasted at the club and happy to see me. I smiled like a reflex, like it came easily.

To counter this unbearable uncertainty, a circle of friends, the glint of a nosepin, the image of myself arms up in the air like a cut-rate Carrie Bradshaw, twirling-twirling-twirling.

Since childhood, I have had something in common with the geriatric and dementia-stricken—sundowning. In the aftermath of the break-up, every minute of every day felt like being stuck at 5 pm. Faced with the spectre of my own hurt and loneliness, my stomach grew teeth. I found that I was afraid. That my life was hurtling, and had always been hurtling to some incomprehensibly terrible lonely end.

Dancing feels like the opposite of that. At the height of catharsis, it is the terror and ecstasy of being suspended in air, almost flying, like having propelled myself off the ground on a playground swing.

Most of our culture bends like a plant finding the sun, towards romantic belonging. Cradled in the security of relationships, I used to think mostly about writing. But with X suddenly excised from my life, the pain thrummed, a steady beat under my hours, wrecking everything else. Early in our relationship, I sent him a favourite Frank O’Hara poem, Animals. I now wept, thinking of it: “Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth.”

How could he have forgotten? How was I going to forget? I could not bear to forget.

The size of my Delhi bathroom limited my range of motion. Still, it was dancing that powered me across the endless stretch of the day, and alleviated, to some degree, an immobilisation born of how tiring heartbreak feels. Of how tired I felt of my life, yes, how very tired.

I hate exercising, but there are saints on YouTube who post follow-along videos of ‘Low impact HIIT’, ‘Tabata’, ‘Mamma Mia dance-along’ and ‘Early 2000s dance-party’. Before I jumped in the shower every weekday, the party was me—red-faced and sweaty on the white cool marble flooring, a pigeon roosting on my bathroom window taking a shit, and whichever YouTuber was on my tiny phone screen, balanced on my shower caddy, above the Vagisil (for emergencies) and Soframycin (for tattoos).

One saint says, “Let’s go, clowns!” and teaches two steps per Pitbull song. Clown, I go!

It reminds me of the year I was a devotee of Cult.fit’s dance-fitness classes (Cult.fit is a nationwide chain of trainer-led, group-workout classes). I was excluded from my other, far cooler choice of kickboxing because of carpal tunnel syndrome. In classes of around 40 people, we faced each other in rows, and copied our instructor’s moves. Cult.fit had this unreasonable thing about needing to see smiling faces. They also encouraged you to shout “HA!” while doing vigorous dance moves. In fact, the shouting was equally, if not more important, than the moves themselves. It was all about ENERGY!!!

At the midpoint of each session, the class was split into half for a dance battle (the losing side had to do burpees). The winning side was not the one which danced best. It was the one which shouted “HA!” and at the right moment hooted “OOH OOH!” louder.

Here, there were all the body types you could think of. All sweating. All waiting for the moment when the speakers would blare ‘Aloo Chaat’, and we could do our favourite steps, or ‘It’s The Time To Disco’ and we could do our other favourite steps. (Picture Saif Ali Khan in his printed vest, hands on his hips, kicking out side to side, legs bent at the knees. He looks like the Bangla letter দ (daw). I wish I could describe it better.)

In her book Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (2020), Usha Iyer observes, “Dance forces us to attend to the corporeal materiality of performing bodies. The point of dance is the immediacy of the body, being of the body. Through this corporeal gaze, these ‘techno-spectacles’ of filmi song-and-dance sequences generate pleasure.” And then she says something amazing: “Moving bodies, after all, are slippery.”

This slipperiness is where my hope of inhabiting other realities—living into different sensations—resides. Raised on Bollywood, I have been indoctrinated into the value of a production number (a specialty number or routine with a cast of people singing and dancing). A deviation from narrative that bears its own extravagant utility and operates on dream-logic.

I love Iyer’s articulation of the ‘para-narrative unit of the dance number’ in Bollywood films. Simply put, the spectacle of the production number allows us to inhabit a heightened emotional state, a truer state, and exit the tyranny of linear time and realistic narrative logic. This isn’t exactly outside the narrative of the film so much as it is superimposed; the meaning of the dance number, the state it makes possible, then layers on to the rest of the filmic narrative. Similarly, going out dancing for me creates a space where I am able to exit, even if temporarily, the tyrannies of “real life.”

Film dance produces a mode of participatory spectatorship through a gestural contagion from performer to spectator, Iyer writes. This gestural contagion is hard at work when I hear the opening fluted strains of Bollywood-adjacent indi-pop girl-group Rouge’s early 2000s hit ‘Don’t Be Shy’. Tell me your hips don’t spring to life of their own accord, when the first tu-turu-tu-turu-tu-turu-tu-turu-tu-turu-tu-turu-tutututu hits.

It was playing one night when I gathered a crew of friends who didn’t know each other to pay a visit to Drama, a new Bollywood-themed lounge. Located in Connaught Place in Delhi, it promised someone called DJ Mike on the console. We walked in to two toddlers bouncing on an empty dance floor, but soon enough, infected by the bangers that DJ Mike deftly queued, we were ricocheting across the stage under the massive chandelier, drawing a crowd onto the floor with us.

‘Dil Mein Baji Guitar’, ‘No Entry’, ‘Maston Ka Jhund’—there was no end to DJ Mike’s artistry. I experienced two transcendent moments that night.

First, when a group of us were already thick in dance—circular in a callback to high-school auditoriums, fingers sticky with flat Pepsi, and the anticipation of boy-girl dancing. Suddenly, the magic words blared over the speakers wafting from the chandelier to us. “Ho dilwaalon…”

It was Udit Narayan singing ‘Kaho Na Pyaar Hai’. From the very depths of our soul, each one of us retrieved the choreography and immediately started shimmying in a circle. Kick foot out, jiggle your torso inwards, kick the other foot back, lean backwards and jiggle. With our arms out like Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, we shook invisible maracas. We were ecstatic. We somehow knew all the steps, and all the words.

I will remember the second moment as one of the highlights of my life. I was dancing when I heard my name on the speakers. An announcement: “Song dedicated to… Riddhi!” And then, ‘Aisa Jadoo Dala Re’ from the 2004 action-thriller Khakee started blaring. I do not have the words to describe how my heart burst out of my chest, how fervently I danced with my friends. We were drunk, we were stoned, we were high on the peak Bollywood of it all.

The lounge really did look like a villain’s den-of-vice in an item-song. I could see a jawaan Sheela. No, in this atmosphere, I could be Sheela.

The Marxist writer, Guy Debord, offers the term ‘psychogeography’ to describe the effect of a geographical location on the emotional and behavioural state of an individual. To me, it’s one of those ideas that feels intuitively and affectively accurate while seeming fuzzy in science. It’s not exactly measurable. I’ve felt it in the cool white silence of marble in museums. The solidness of a wood floor.

Psychogeography is a part of Situationism where ‘situations’ are tools for the liberation of everyday life. The manifesto of Situationist International—a primarily French group of artists and thinkers in the 1960s, who aimed to eliminate capitalism through the revolutionization of everyday modern life—describes the construction of situations as “the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality.” This passional quality is exactly IT.

I am interested in the psychogeography of the club. Ira Sachs’ film, Passages (2023), opens at a wrap-party for a film, where two strangers—a chaotic, self-absorbed director and a searching primary-school teacher—encounter each other in a nightclub.

“It’s my party and my husband doesn’t want to dance with me,” says Tomas.

“I’ll dance with you,” says Agathe.

For this first meeting at the counter of a bar, costume designer Khadija Zeggai has selected a ruched, crinkly hot pink dress on Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos), and an open-weave, mesh-style wool long-sleeved black top for Tomas (Fanz Rogowski). The choice of costume in this scene is crucial, and in many ways, the moving muscle of the film.

Tomas and Agathe dance in the pulsing techno-music of the club with prominent hi-hat beats, Tomas bopping and jumping on his feet, and Agathe swaying a good distance away from him. After his husband leaves, Tomas looks downcast, his movements sluggish.

“Don’t think too much,” Agathe advises him. “It’s okay, you just have to listen to the music.”

And so Tomas begins to move with greater abandon, drawing closer to Agathe, their backs grazing. They smile and circle each other, still dancing mostly apart, then slowly moving closer together; Tomas’s face millimetres apart from Agathe, but not touching… yet. Then Agathe puts her arm on his shoulder. In concert with the dance floor, the low lighting, their clothes, and their moving bodies, surrounded by many other moving bodies also having a good time, they sing into a situation.

Sachs describes using lighting in the film to evoke emotion: “The colour of lights behind a frosted pane of glass in a discotheque creates a mood that is beyond language.” Their faces are lit up in pink, softer than they would be in harsh daylight, everything blurry, bursting with infinite possibility.

Last year, at a birthday party in a large farmhouse in Chattarpur, nearly everyone else went upstairs to do coke. But my new girlfriend and I swayed into each other, close and closer, hips interlocked, until we scrambled home to take our clothes off. It was the novelty of our bodies signalling so explicitly what we were to each other. It was the alcohol, and moving together among strangers in a strange new space.

On the dance-floor as in sex, I find myself closing my eyes. We’re all straining to reach this state of… deliverance.

Language only grasps at life, but this is especially true with something so of the body, like dance. To write this essay, I read the late Joan Acocella, a critic at Dance Magazine between the 80s and 90s, before she joined The New Yorker. She uses words like ‘kinetic’, and describes choreography as having “a strange, nubbly texture, riddled with pockets of mystery” and the virtues of “ugliness onstage.” In places, she uses ballet terminology like ‘relevé’ for movements.

I found that Acoccela had a sharp critic’s mind and a brilliant style, but even she reviewed a sublime performance by Mikhail Baryshnikov—the preeminent male ballet dancer of the 1970-80s—with descriptors like ‘plunged’ and ‘dived’. Perhaps it is in recognising the futility of capturing dance in words that she wrote about everything that contextualised Baryshnikov’s movements: his history, childhood, face, what people thought of him, and so on.

While writing this essay, I also read Miranda July’s new novel All Fours, which is about dance and sex, and midlife and menopause. A single, rudderless Indian woman in my thirties, I was looking in it for smoke-signals, guideposts, and reprieve, and also, a vocabulary of dance in writing. In it, I found a brilliant and very funny story in which I recognised my own experiences with non-monogamy, long relationships, sex, pain, the practice of art-making, and following the clues towards discovery. I did not find a way to describe dance.

When July describes dance steps in terms of the physical motion, it reads comical. Or inadequate. The protagonist vigorously makes “figure eights with her hips.” It works better when she describes what the dance evoked, or meant. A dance of loss, of longing, of come here right now.

The protagonist describes her impossible lover, the dancer, taking a strobe light out of his backpack to intensify the moment. “The room appeared in shattered pieces. We saw each other and then we didn’t. In the brief instant when the strobe caught us we were just souls, meeting each other’s eyes, dead serious. This wasn’t possible with language.”

The improvisation of dance is of course analogous to the improvisation of sex. It was improvisation when X took my throat in his hand, and wrapped his long fingers around the front. Kinetic motion, the way sweaty bodies get close, and draw apart.

It feels different to dance to techno than it did to dance frenziedly with my hands on X’s shoulders, both of us sweaty and a bit confused at a Goan friend’s wedding in Varca as the band played ‘Maria Pitache’.

On the dance-floor at Auro—a popular nightclub in Hauz Khas, Delhi—that I frequent, we have props along with our costumes: fog machines, strobe lights, red and blue moving spotlights, electronic dance music. To enjoy this, however, you must be on some small amount of low-key drugs.

Once, on molly, I began to see the music. It was a DNA-like double-helix structure, and somehow encoded in it was the way my limbs were meant to move. In front of me, a girl in a black sports bra and sunglasses glided tirelessly. It seemed like somehow the organism that was the crowd moved in syncopation. How do we ever dance not on molly, I remember thinking. A ludicrous proposition.

My then girlfriend—the first girl I ever dated as X and I ventured into non-monogamy in 2022—had masses of long curly hair, and rarely wore make-up. We left the house late at night to go dancing. Even now, I miss her at clubs. It’s a rare luxury to be able to invite someone to a gig, and have them say yes every time. She was with me the night I tried molly; she was the reason I did it. That summer, I had an accomplice.

Dance is time-travel. In X (2022), an American slasher film directed by horror-auteur Ti West, Pearl, an old lady with wrinkly-paper skin and hair like wisps of candy floss dances in a nightgown. Pearl carries out the first kill of the film. She stabs a young man over and over, and blood sprays out of his body onto the headlights of a car. After he dies, Pearl dances on her own, in the now red-hued headlights shining from the car. It’s a remarkable scene, her moving body ‘slippery’, as Usha Iyer says. For the space of the dance, she is young again.

Dance is a waking dream. Mulholland Drive (2001) opens with a purple background against which numerous couples dance, going round and round, like a carousel, with no explicit explanation. The effect is to locate us in a waking dream, usher us into the space of the film—Hollywood, the land of dreams.

There is a painting I can see from my bed, gifted to me shortly after the break up by artist Sohrab Hura. It shows a person lying down, looking straight up. She bears the same trace of slippage as the waking dream of the dance scenes in X and Mulholland Drive. The expression on her face is not immediately legible. A trace of her, atop, like an afterimage, fainter. The two selves float suspended in a sea of blue-white. I look at her a lot, this figure. It’s not clear, but there’s something there that I’m grasping at. I can see slips of it. The painting is titled ‘Afterglow’.

Let’s return to Debord’s “situation,” that dazzling yet ordinary unit of possibility. “The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment, ‘ordinary life’ may prevail once again,” Guy Debord says in his 1959 film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps.

One night, chasing the situation of the dance-floor, I went with a friend to Pass Code Only—a posh nightclub in Delhi known for being open after-hours—to celebrate her birthday. We were at the bar, waiting for a glass of water when a man barrelled out of nowhere, crashing into me. An accident I assumed, but then he had my neck in a chokehold.

I thrashed, but he wouldn’t let go. He groped me while choking me. Like a wild animal, I kicked till I was out of his horrible embrace, and kept kicking him.

I can still see it—my friends getting in between us, the man who had just violated me trying to reach for me again as they pushed him away and yelled. The management of the club seemed frozen in place. It seemed like it took forever, although it must have been minutes, for this man to be ejected from the club. Ordinary life had prevailed: tawdry life where femmes and women cannot reach for transcendence in our spaces of joy without the male entitlement to our bodies.

When I stepped out of the club to leave, that man was outside with his friends. The club’s management tried to get us to stop making a fuss, and be quiet. Two weeks after the incident, and one phone-call where the owner of the bar complained that we were unfairly tarnishing its reputation by demanding action, we had still not received the CCTV footage, or any kind of substantive apology with next steps. The owner implied that the onus had been on me to file an FIR (First Information Report). It was “off-putting” to have too many bouncers on the dance-floor, he said.

Ordinary life, where people assume we will shut up and take violation as a natural exchange for the fact of my body. For my audacity to go out assuming I have a right to joy.

There is a beloved Tumblr post about the sad fact that artmaking, singing, and dancing have been transformed into a business instead of something humans do because it’s in our nature, the way that birds sing, or bees buzz.

Months after the breakup, it was still very difficult for me to get out of bed. One night, I was suddenly possessed by panic at the thought of forgetting what X’s laugh was like. I could hear it, but putting image and sound together from memory into something living, present—it brought me to tears.

I went shopping to cheer myself up and kept running into gifts I wanted to buy him that were now inappropriate. Tailored trousers. A perfectly sized ivory-coloured espresso cup-and-saucer with an elegant font and a navy band. A Japanese wood-working class. I don’t know how anyone ever gets over anyone.

To think about every text that I have not sent, ‘I miss you, do you miss me?’ To remember the evening in our first months of knowing each other, when I put a piece of sour-sweet Pulse candy in his mouth from mine, so intimate, so intimate. To remember him singing ‘Visions of Johanna’ at a concert and thinking it was really only for me because that was my favourite Dylan song.

While writing this essay, I cried a lot. I thought of X tenderly bathing me when I was in the hospital with dengue, and of him having a nightmare in which I had died and he was gathering up my dirty laundry to bottle the smell of me. Of the dark windowless house in which we’d slept and made art and love and sweated and waited for summer to give way to winter.

After a long time of suffering, is it boredom that comes to relieve us?

Slowly time passed. I was already forgetting the timbre of the pain from the early days. In the long sweep of someone else’s breakup, we see our friends crying over someone who seems utterly unremarkable to us, saying the same things they have already wept over before, and we still don’t comprehend it. Not really. We don’t remember, until the next time our own heart is in tatters. Maybe, like forgetting the labour pains of childbirth, it’s a protective mechanism. We have to forget, else we’d never do it again.

The space I inhabit when I go dancing with my friends is like Iyer’s “para-narrative unit.” I am able to exit—through my body, my narrative of sadness and heartbreak, and above all, a crushing fear—into another place. Possibility, joy, euphoria, lightness. Dance is that portal.

Is it akin to Faye Wong’s character in Chungking Express (1994) playing ‘California Dreamin’’ loud and on repeat so she can’t hear herself think? Or is the song a vessel to tide her over till she can latch on to the future she’s going to have?

Over time, I have come to think of myself less as a fixed entity, and more as relational. In the last several years of non-monogamy and queer relationships, this has been heightened for me. My gender expressed itself differently around my first girlfriend, and my second, and X (a cis-het man), who was a constant. So did my bearing, and the air around me. Of course we have consistent qualities, but so much of it, I have found to be fluid. Who I was with X—a significant part of my understanding of self—is different from the self I now find myself having to become. I don’t know her.

Dance is valuable because of its corporeality. It is a space within which to exist in the verb form, where narrative is only an illegible point. I am reading. I am writing. I am dancing.

We long so deeply for a narrative arc that makes sense. But I’ve realised time and time again that things just happen. Bad things happen to good people. You think you are ready for the gift of a new love, but it turns out your heart is begging for time off. You discover your mild-mannered uncle supports a genocidal party. You meet someone with whom you could build a good gay life together but they move away and you realise you need, at this age, to have someone in physical proximity to you. If you can’t touch someone, if you can’t go out for a dance together, you can’t quite believe they’re real.

Miranda July again: “No reason was turning out to be a major theme in life… Pain just was; it radiated with no narrative and no end.” Let me reframe dance then without metaphor. It’s palliative. For me now, until the death of my present self.

July’s book ends with surrender. It is what I’ve been getting at with dance this whole time, or where dance lets me exist. Surrendering to the pain, the love, the music, to what is happening, to your body. Surrendering to your life.

I danced my way from April to May to June to July. In July, it began to rain in Delhi. I left for a residency—one of the big dreams I had in my life. In my head, words crashed into each other and I wrote them down.

In April, I thought it was an ordinary week in which I’d see X again the next day, like any ordinary day. But something had changed. He said he needed time. I said I love you, I said I’m here. I waited for him to call. In my room, the days stopped spinning. Love was over.

Songs referenced in the essay: