This chapter was inspired by the question of why it is so much fun to break into a dance and why it is so much fun to watch someone else dance. This may sound like an innocuous query – but perceiving dance, through Heidegger, as a way of our existing in the Being could be an eye-opener here. It makes this change from an innocuous to a complicated question, it opens up our mind to the unrecognized fluidity in our day-to-day life, and it lets us see how this fluidity lends itself to enormous fun. Finally, we may realize how we are often able to laugh, get excited and be elated in every little moment in life, all without much effort from our part. This chapter is about this “invisible fun” in our everyday life.
We could understand how, in comparison with, say, a written examination, dancing is so much more fun. Let us ask what is “fun”? This is not the same fun as watching an IPL match in TV or playing Candy Crush on a smartphone.
This is a different kind of “fun”. This chapter looks to put in concrete terms this ‘slippery’ notion of “fun”. So, that is what we are going to do here – We shall dance to the tune of Heidegger and know what “fun” is.
As a form of performance dance is something we gravitate most to, and even more purely drawn than we may be towards an aesthetically intellectual performance like a play, a purely ‘political’ performance like a speech or eclectic ones like intellectual gatherings. Also, there is dance in the prancing movements of children, their spurts of spirited approach to everyday life, and this dancing spirit in them never dies out even as they turn into ‘us’ – adolescents and adults – we plonk, we tiptoe, we stumble, we stagger, we limp, we lurch and on a breezy morning we stroll. We gesticulate wildly when agitated, almost poking our finger into the listener’s eye sockets, and we jump up and down in excitement and scream. We try to dance when we move and even when we stand in the bus – In a popular comic clip from the Tamil film Aai (2004), Vadivelu enacts an extreme case of this attempt; he satirizes the bravado of some men who pride in running up and boarding a bus on the move than gravely walk up and measuredly climb up the steps to board it. Vadivelu, now inside the bus, with much grandiose decides to not take a seat even when seats are available and stand on the aisle through the whole bumpy ride and then ends up crashing out of the front window after the driver applies sudden brake. After brushing off the broken glass pieces, he rises unhurt and with a serious poker face admonishes the people involved for being so careless since if it had been anybody else, they would not have survived the crash. This scene is a parody over the ultimate fantasy of everyday dancing – to be the superman of everyday life so that one can challenge the rules of spatiality through one’s inconspicuously subversive movements.
An extreme form of similar such a fantasy is visualized in the film The Mask (1994) when the protagonist conjures up the heavy traffic on the road to bifurcate and make way for his car to speed away.
Also, in day-to-day life, we only need the watchful eyes to turn away, the comfort of privacy and quietude to, for us to break into a nervous dance – it is a moment of deliverance from the regularized modes of “thrownness”. In the same vein, don’t we all love to sing out of tune, in our moments of privacy, while bathing, while reflectively strolling the corridors and also in the multiple apps for amateur singers – we sing in the knowledge that we aren’t singers, and that is why we find it more fun and more liberating. In fact, the popular app TikTok has revolutionized our day-to-day being – a society that has never been trained to dance and a society that has never practised breaking out of choreographed and socially validated movements now is in ruptures – even grandmothers mouth popular film dialogues and break into a gig in front of camera and are delighted as a result.
Here, I don’t want to reflect on the sociocultural dimension of this phenomenon – I want to look into the state of ecstasy that we go through when we dance and sing and when we watch and listen to people dance and sing. I want to look into the why and how of “it” – the “it” of our being in terms of dance. This “it” comes to us, it invigorates us, unshackles us, and the unshackling is welcomed by us with a sense of lightness, which comes from a sense of unboundedness to time and space – this further is possible due to a boundedness we develop towards the “clearing of Being”, through the unboundedness to time and space. Thus freedom comes from a paradoxical freedom–enslavement, happening simultaneously within time and in terms of space.
To put it simply, a non-normative and unplanned movement frees us from time. (When you leap and swirl you are showing from within something from the past, something you have experienced, but you do this in your present, and the upcoming movements are pre-empted by the viewer in his imagination to make sense of the movement of the present. Thus you are enslaved in the past, but stay also in the present and then in parallel project this sense to the future – all three in a single movement across time.) The movement frees you from space as you are constantly negotiating different, varying and paradoxical positions with regard to the space you stand from. You run, turn, swirl, bend, raise, swish your garment and gesticulate. The non-static states negate your staticity, while your staticity simultaneously unsettles your non-static states. This oscillation ruptures spatial binary, which further takes us to the Being that “stands out”, and dance then is a performance of this dramatic entry into the Being.
This reflection on what this “fun” is all about taught me why Heidegger wanted to term our being as “ek-sistence” – it is truly ecstatic, though we hardly realize it. For Heidegger, both ecstatic and ek-sistence have a specific ontological signification and significance. Being ecstatic is not merely feeling overwhelmed with great happiness, as any dictionary would define it. Ecstatic is “the way in which dasein ‘stands out’ in the various moments of temporality of care, being ‘thrown’ out of a past and ‘projecting’ itself towards a future by way of the present”, as David Krellx puts it (47) . Care means the desire to be with being in spatiotemporal manner; When there is care, in a reciprocal manner, from the space, objects and the persons, dasein in unveiled (like darshan in Indian spiritual tradition).
(From “Plop: Notes on Heidegger”)