Interview with Liquid Leaders, Trevor Copp, Jeff Fox, and Alida Esmail
I had no business learning to dance salsa. I was the last kid in my class to learn to skip, the last kid picked for every team sport in school. I am not physically coordinated. And yet, I felt a conviction in my soul to try. Why salsa specifically, of all dances? I don’t know for sure, but partner dancing to salsa music was the first place I was able to practice mindfulness. Perhaps some part of my brain was drawn to the complex rhythms because they busy my mind enough that I can release all other thoughts.
After working in the shelter, salsa was also the place where I learned to have a bit of trust in humans again. In men again if I’m honest. Not trust on an intellectual level, which I never lost, but an emotional one. This trust was necessitated because when you do any partner dance there is a lead role and a follow role. On a social dance floor, the dance steps are spontaneous, and the follower has no idea what step is coming next. You have to learn to be present in the moment, because if the follower is predicting and thinking too much, it can be unsafe for both dancers. So, you also learn to trust yourself in moments of unpredictability. Since I am female, I was automatically assigned the follower role. Salsa was a complicated place for me. I had to put aside some of my values to be able to learn the dance. My instructor was…not feminist. We bickered back and forth about it constantly. He wouldn’t hear of a man following in his classroom. I would say things like “this dance just mirrors our status quo, if society were different, this dance would be different.” He would jokingly warn the male dancers about me. Through this debating and dancing every week, we became good friends. I loved him; all of his students did. He yelled at me for about a year to stop thinking so much until finally I could. He gave me a gift that I use to survive every day. He died several years ago. I still carry what he transmitted to me – his technique, his rhythms, his interpretations – in my body. They are part of me, and they flow out of me on the dance floor. I can spot the distinction in others too, the few of us in the Oklahoma City salsa community who learned from him.
I wanted my daughter to have the gift of salsa too, so I was excited when she came home and told me that they were learning it at school. Then she incredulously told me that the instructor assigned her to be a follow because she is a girl. Knowing that I dance salsa, she asked, “Mom do you know about this?” I felt like a total sellout when I had to tell her that I did, but I was also able to tell her that the world of partner dance is changing. It is no longer uncommon where we live to see men partner dance together (it’s never been uncommon to see women dance together). Many women now lead, and more men are learning to follow. So, I was ecstatic when not long after that conversation, I was able to tell her that I had come across something new called “Liquid Leading”, a gender-neutral lead/follow technique developed by dancers, instructors, choreographers, and thespians, Trevor Copp and Jeff Fox.
In a TED Talk that went viral, Fox and Copp discuss ballroom dance as an art form that they love, but one which admittedly also erases people.[1] Particularly the more competitive one becomes in these dances, the narrower the standards regarding their forms. Competitive rules have historically only allowed male/female couples, but it does not stop there. They point out that the woman is expected to be smaller, shorter, less aggressive than her male counterpart. Even street or social partner dance often reads as a caricature of gender. Despite its difficulties, however, dance can also be a space of innovation. I have met multiple people using the physicality of partner dance as a teaching ground for how to obtain consent. For those of us navigating the tensions present within this societal magnifying mirror of sorts, Copp and Fox’s concept is a game-changer. Partner dance is full of non-verbal vocabulary, so they used their fluency to tweak the physical cues to allow a switch of lead/follow roles mid-dance. The TED Talk explains the concept of Liquid Leading, but I was curious about the qualitative experiences they have had in developing and teaching this model, so I reached out to them. Since the TED Talk, they have brought on Alida Esmail as a partner in Liquid Lead instruction. Esmail, who also appeared in the TED Talk, is a dance and theater artist as well as a former student of Copp. I spoke with all three of them over Zoom (with each of them having various entry and exit points). An excerpt of our conversation is below.
Ariyeh: Can you tell me about how you got interested in this topic?
Copp: We have, as a culture, spent some time deconstructing language and where hierarchies of power are. I grew up hearing “don’t say fireman, say fireperson”, but those conversations are noticeably absent around movement. If we consider that most of our communication is in our physical presence, in our gesture vocabulary then this is just one way into a critique around gender and power, and how we can address those issues through Latin dance. I did a paper once on a feminist deconstruction of “I Dream of Jeannie.” The key image of the show was Major-Whatever-His-Name-Was stood as this single solid presence, and Jeannie was wrapped around him and it was clear that if he took a side-step, she would fall over. To me, that’s all expressing and codifying gender as this powerful male singular presence and this liquid, less solid female presence. Those ideas of gender are solidified in how we move in Latin dances. If you watch, the women in competitive salsa, dance. Men lead; men do not dance. If you took the women out of “the portrait” and turned off the music, the guys look like they’re moving furniture. There’s zero expressive value to what they’re doing, whereas the women are throwing everything into it all the time. That was just so striking to me.
Ariyeh: That old saying in partner dance, “the man is the frame, the woman is the picture.” It seems like there are two ways of thinking about how we create a social dance. One is we are co-creators. The other is more like the man is the artist and the woman is the material, the paint to be moved around.
Copp: Yeah. It’s this irony that because dance has been culturally regarded as an emasculating activity, the way to get through it is that men don’t dance. [Alida enters] Something Alida despises, and I can appreciate why, is when men plant their feet, hold their hands out, and it’s like, “I’ll just stand here and you dance for me!”
Fox: Some of the comments we have gotten in response to the talk are from women who had walked away from partner dancing because there wasn’t a place for them in it. As Trevor often phrases it, these are strong and deliberate people who have to sit on the sidelines and wait to be asked to dance.
Copp: We also have an expanded version of the talk now that includes Alida. She talks about this problem of, once I say “yes” to dance, does that mean I say “yes” to everything? And how do we navigate this problem of ongoing consent as opposed to a one-time consent.
Esmail: Yeah. The example I use is with bachata [a form of Latin dance] because that’s the dance that I’ve experienced that discomfort the most, because it’s got this very sensual component. I’ve had to start saying “no” to dancing bachata if I know that I want to say “no” to everything else that comes with it. So, I miss out on the actual dancing component, but I’m no longer willing to put myself in the situation where it’s just uncomfortable and I ending up having a bad experience, so I just don’t dance bachata with people I don’t know.
Ariyeh: I think teaching becomes important here. Sometimes the popularity outpaces the transmission of knowledge within a given subculture. We’re talking about these negative experiences in dance which all of us have definitely had, but I’ve noticed that going to a dance studio and dancing with a community of people from young to old at “socials” versus going to the club has been a much more positive experience, although not without its problems. I also think of this term, “congress culture” where there is a huge industry around people showing up to these dance weekends. It’s exciting that Latin dance is growing, but there’s a concern of people showing up because they’ve seen these YouTube videos and get this impression that dance is a way to get access to women’s bodies.
Fox: Well, I think part of what becomes a problem is when there is just a three-hour lesson before the DJ hits the floor kind of instruction, as opposed to an ongoing relationship where you’re learning the craft of partner dancing. Then there’s an understanding of you’re going to share something with your partner and not just “I’m gonna get access, I’m gonna get mine.”
Ariyeh: I think some cultures better understand dance as a community activity. I wonder why sometimes the dominant view we see is “I’m gonna get access, I’m gonna get mine.”
Copp: I think it’s interesting to think of it from a lens of capitalism, because what’s happening is that we’re trying to take dancing, which I think is pretty fundamentally a community activity, but in our culture, it has become something that exists in a bar to sell alcohol. And along with that comes the advertising. The imagery that goes with selling a salsa night is women with very little clothes and alcohol. In contrast where I am, the largest movement in dancing is an organization that’s just said we’re going to take all that out of our imagery, all generations are going to dance together. We have kids showing up with grandparents and dancing and people are so surprised. It’s like not only can that happen, but that’s how it should be happening – interacting as a community, but it’s become reduced to this model of a thing that happens between young people at a club.
Fox: Where it’s a commodity as opposed to a cultural bonding experience.
Copp: Jumping back to some of the earlier points about the frame versus the picture. I think that’s certainly the existing metaphor, and I love the ways in which that’s disrupted with same-sex couples, because if I’m dancing with Jeff, then it’s like, well, someone has to dance. The way that it puts those questions back up in front of us again. It also asks the question, what does it look like for a man to dance? When I’m following, I have to figure out an aesthetic for how my body looks.
Esmail: You don’t often see “styling for men” workshops, you get a lot of “styling for women” workshops.
Fox: Within the formal ball room structure, it’s been fascinating over the last couple of decades, because the level of expression, not as much in Standard, which you could say is the last bastion of that frame and picture kind of paradigm, but in professional competitive Latin dancing, the men have been expected now to dance more. They’re supposed to put out just as much energy and expression, but within a very specific paradigm. I remember seeing footage of a professional Latin dancer who went to an event and ended up following. He was enjoying the position of following, but if you’re watching the footage, he immediately adopted all of the “female” stylings. So, I was like, well you put your toe in the water, but you didn’t really go for a swim because you didn’t let go of all of that architecture.
Copp: What I think is interesting, problematic, but interesting, is that we’re trying to essentially learn about breaking binaries with a form with a history of binarism.
Ariyeh: Yes, we need the shades and the nuances, but binarism is part of our culture because it’s easier for there to be winners and losers if everything’s in a little box.
Copp: And I have to comment back on the American politics. There’s parties and it’s “you’re an A or you’re B” and someone loses, and someone wins.
Ariyeh: Yes, and that’s really what led to my interest in this topic, we’ve become so polarized. And dance has this very binary history and I think capitalism shapes this, but at the same time, referring to the point you make in the TED Talk, for thousands of years, every partner dance has always been this way. Right? As far as I know, like the partner dancing is always male leads, female follows. It doesn’t matter what genre of dance you’re looking at, whether it is in the street or competitive. We are in a historic moment where this is changing in pockets all over the world. Techniques like Liquid Leading are bringing us into the present, but are they taking us into the future? I’m going to ask a question, but I’m not sure if it’s true – compared to other forms of art, is partner dance less innovative?
Esmail: Well, I think it’s also important to mention that while ballroom and Latin dance has a huge history of binarism. Again, I’m not a historian or I don’t have that background, but I don’t think it’s true that it was always men and women together. Argentine Tango, for example, wasn’t it two men? So, I think what part of the problem here is, we’re trying to undo the binary from a binary lens, however, we’re also coming at it from a colonialist lens and so many other things that we’re not really talking about. We’re talking about the history up until a certain moment. It would be worth going further back and really taking it to more of the beginning or before the colonialist lens, which I think is influencing a lot of the binarism.
Fox: To give a bit of an example within ballroom. I remember watching an interview with Gaynor Fairweather. She and her partner were fourteen-time Professional World Latin Dance Champions around the time where in the Imperial Society a lot of that formula was being set. The physical posture in traditional salsa and bachata type dances is very relaxed. It’s down to the ground, the knees splay to the side and everything is just kinda loose. And then you think of this International Latin, it’s got a piano wire from the skull and the legs are locked underneath. Part of why that technique was put into place is because the dance teachers at that time were trying to come up with the system, looking at the British population they were going to try and sell this to, and realized they needed to pull it up, bring the thighs together, put black tie and pearls on it. So even the cultural appropriated and sourced movements were confined, redefined, redistributed and “corrected” so that it would be marketable. Over the years, it started to slide back just for the sake of more expression. So, we get layers and layers away from the original reason that dance would occur in a community setting. Then now there’s generation after generation of competitors who become coaches, who dictate to the next generation of competitors so that system is, as Trevor says, five or six generations behind as the current champions are trying to please last generation’s champions. And you see some of that coming out of ballet communities and how hierarchical and racist that can be. It’s not necessarily the dance form, but the power structures that have been built up around who the gatekeepers are.
Ariyeh: It’s like the more institutionalized it is and the less it is in the street, the less innovative, experimental. I think about this book I read in college about Pygmy culture called the Forest People. They have certain gendered dance roles, and the writer who was there was surprised one night that the women were dancing a role that he thought was only a man’s, but it turned out people weren’t threatened by it.[2] It seems in some cultures, even when there are gender roles, they’re not necessarily so strictly enforced, particularly when it’s not as commoditized.
Fox: That’s something I know that I’ve talked about with Trevor. One of the big ingredients is the increased stakes and the almost life-threatening stakes of making sure you are portraying your role properly. If they’re not following that formula, they’re doing it wrong, and the perceived danger drives this almost panic of doubling down on all of those spaces. One fascinating anecdote, I think it was Trevor’s birthday. We went to this more kind of macho salsa place in Hamilton. He and I got up to dance and in the back of the brain we were concerned, is this going to go over alright, he and I getting up and two men taking dance hold? And it was the complete opposite. When we were done dancing, the guys were coming up like, “Oh you guys are good dancers.” They just wanted to talk about dancing. In the middle of this kind of macho space where two men got up and did salsa together, there was no kind of threat, and partially because we didn’t violate any of “the rules.” One of us didn’t go hyper-feminine and we weren’t grabbing each other’s butts, but it was just dance.
Esmail: [giving final thoughts before she had to go] The feedback that I’ve gotten, mostly women, has just been kind of this validation of, like Jeff was saying earlier, that they have walked away from partner dancing as a whole because they didn’t see themselves there, and so I think that that gives me hope that maybe we’re opening up a space that could be relatable for other people, but yeah, I think I’m still in the state of having lots of negative experiences. I don’t know if I have any final thoughts on that, but I think it’s just really an ongoing reflection. I think these ongoing discussions and research around it, and people who are willing to try and be brave and to do new things is how this has happened. It feels like such a small movement right now that I’m like, the more people talking about it is just really exciting, and how do we know who else is doing it and who else is talking about it? [Alida exits]
Ariyeh: Going back to some of our earlier discussions, how do we dance in a way that pays tribute without appropriating, how do we navigate that space?
Copp: I think it’s about actually getting knowledge of the roots, like actually literally going… I can tell you about the history of the dance and I can tell you about the major contributors to the dance.
Fox: Like Alida was referring to, Argentine tango was taught in the military as the means to teach people how to be leaders. There are these different roots; it didn’t just exist the moment we encountered it.
Ariyeh: Do we, in some ways, privilege this concept of leading and allowing women access to leading, but really men also need access to following…
Copp: We talk a lot about male touch and the problem of male touch. Simple acts of male touch challenge the status quo, because the only context in which men are encouraged to make physical contact is through violence and sex. So, the fact of two men dancing together just for pleasure already inherently challenges a lot of our ideas around masculinity. Men are missing out on the opportunity of that space of mindfulness and that space of expression, and it is a lovely thing for me that when we think of the problems of models of gender, doing the other role solves a lot of the problems. If more men were more mindful and could let go, I think that’s what men as a whole really need. Not to say that I don’t love leading, but on a basic level, I think following is more fun, it’s more in your body and less in your head. [Trevor exits]
Ariyeh: I can’t believe how much it’s changed just in the past ten years. When you and Alida did your classic ballroom hold in the TED Talk (Figure 5), I thought, yes, that is beautiful. It’s not…not beautiful, but is that the only thing that can be beautiful? How can we create spaces where there is room for more variations?
Fox: We’ve talked about that. How do you create a space where just in the way you’re presenting the event or the studio, how do you message in a way that would make it clear trans individuals are welcome, racial diversity is welcome? And you’re going to have to be explicit about that because unfortunately, we say everyone is welcome while there is a long history of “everyone”, not meaning everyone. As artists who have craft and have that fluency, how can we use that to then change the space, break that seal, put that in there so that the idea can ripple through. And it’s going to be unsettling, but it doesn’t have to be threatening. Because if it’s threatening them, they don’t come with you. When we built the play, First Dance[3], we went through several iterations. One of them was very edgy and we’re like, this is okay, but it’s getting away from the specific thing that Trevor and I do so the room is not threatened by us but ends up being challenged without realizing that they’re being challenged until afterwards. We wanted to focus in some ways on storytelling about the commonalities because we’re more similar than we are dissimilar. So, we can get everybody on the journey with us, and then we drop a difference on them. One of the ones that hit the most in the play is the scene…he and I were childhood friends, and we ended up being each other’s first, so we had our first sexual encounter. Flash-forward several years later (the play is almost two-third movement) we remember that first sexual encounter with this big white stretch sheet that we end up climbing inside of. And you can hear this kind of wistful and kind of gentle and innocent, but slightly out of key or a slightly melancholy music, and all you can see is hands and body parts just kind of pressing up against the sheet. So, everybody in the room is with us – okay, this is that first moment, that first experience where you’re just swept up and it was a sensation, and it was all of that experience. Then as soon as the music fades, our heads pop out. He immediately panics and goes and runs to get some of the clothes that he had taken off, and I’m left standing there holding this thing, realizing that this entrancing, magical moment has now had a bucket of shame dumped over it.
Ariyeh: Wow. I can imagine that brings straight audiences into the somatic aspects of this experience, into the intimacy…and then comes the empathy because of the subsequent feelings of shame of the characters.
Fox: That was the conversation over and over again – how can we make 95% of this everybody’s story? And then show them that 5% that makes a difference and question why should this experience we all understand go that way? After the play, my karate sensei, a big 300-pound guy, came up with tears in his eyes and wanted to give me a hug. He specifically cited that moment. That’s something Trevor and I have been very grateful for, even doing the play in Albania, is we’ve been able to bring people into that common space, and then drop a little bit of that other, so they get a chance to experience it without it being a pointed finger or raised fist. Let that sit in them, and then they take that home and at least it shows up in their coffee the next morning, because they can’t stop thinking about it.
Ariyeh: I feel like that is such a generous perspective. I love this phrase, “everybody’s story”, because I think, for example, my experience as a female may not be the same as yours as a male, and that’s valid to say, but at the same time I am concerned when sometimes we’re like, “you can’t relate at all!” Is that true? I’m not saying that everyone experiences the same thing, but it scares me when we take that notion to its extreme where like men can’t conceive of what it’s like to be female. That’s dangerous to me if we can’t have empathy…
Fox: Yeah, you have to accept us, but you can’t understand us?
Ariyeh: Social dance is such an interesting form to investigate. I think about your play and how we can change people through movement, but in so many ways it’s also still so problematic and binary. If you ask most people involved if they believe in equality, they will probably say “yes”, but out of all the workshops taught by couples that I’ve been to, only one time was the primary teacher a female. Usually, the man is the main instructor and then he might ask the woman “do you have anything to add.”
Fox: Which is why, at times, I worry about partner dancing and a lot of the societal gook that has kind of glommed onto it. On one hand, it’s kind of lovely to see young dancers taking something so seriously. But if from a young age it’s so entrenched in the behavior – he leads her on the floor, and if someone asks a question, they ask it to him, not to her – if that is just so ingrained and embodied physically from a young age… Even on the TED.com site when they featured the talk, although they’ve taken the comments down, there was one from a female competitive dancer who said what we’re proposing is not right. Men lead and women follow because that is how the machine is built, and if you don’t do that, the machine doesn’t work properly. Well, it works differently. And different is not wrong. But these ideas are just so imprinted. But that’s also why partner dance and shared physicality can be so impactful. It bypasses all that language and just connects and transfers emotion, feeling, and awareness.
[1] Ballroom Dance That Breaks Gender Roles, TedxMontreal, 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/trevor_copp_and_jeff_fox_ballroom_dance_that_breaks_gender_roles?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare.
[2] Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1961), 147–57.
[3] Philip Blash, First Dance (Waterloo, 2011), https://youtu.be/GgwLEWolQME. This video provides an overview of the play; there is currently no public documentation of the full play.