Dance Lessons

Fred Astaire didn't like to do romantic clinch scenes on screen. Partly, he thought he didn't have the requisite romantic leading man looks. So the kiss that follows this still from Swing Time is blocked from audience view by a door in the foreground that opens just in time.

And anyway, Astaire would add, the lovemaking was in the dance routines he choreographed.

Which assertion could certainly stand as support for any romance writer's choice to leave the explicit erotic details out of her romance writing. And indeed (though I've always written erotic romance , not to speak of some down and dirty erotica) some of my favorite romance reading depends upon little besides a hero and heroine, perhaps a text, glove, or stocking in contention, and lots of good banter.

While for my own writing, it's always been a different matter. Explicit sex is an important part of my books. A mysteriously important part of it, especially for mild-mannered, shy moi -- I'm always trying to figure out what fascination this sort of writing holds for me, what part it plays in my craft, and how to do it better and yet to keep it fresh, surprising. And mysterious.

And so, a few weeks ago when I was packing for a vacation trip (which meant first a whole lot of ironing in front of my DVD player), when I was marveling at the dance routines in the 1936 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers masterpiece Swing Time, I did surprise myself by thinking, "Oh yes, that's what I'm going for when I write the sex scenes."

At first I didn't even quite know what I meant. But I had a lot to iron, and a lot of choices to make about what to bring for frigid East Coast and Midwest weather and how to get it all into my carry-on bags. And luckily, the DVD of Swing Time contains some of the most informative and least self-indulgent supplementary material of any DVD I've ever seen, with film scholars, dancers, and various artists who actually worked with Astaire and Rogers explaining, in exhaustive detail, the remarkable conception and production of those dance routines. And after I watched certain segments enough times -- even, as Astaire scholar John Mueller suggests on the voice-over commentary, in slow motion -- I started to get it.

Or at least I started to get what I could take away from it. Which is that in the three extraordinary numbers Astaire and Rogers dance together in Swing Time, what we see is two people simultaneously being most themselves and also somehow becoming more than that -- learning to be a couple -- in a narrative arc that spans the dance routines and traces the development of a relationship.

It starts simply, and it's built into the very steps Astaire created.

The ostensible plot, by the way, hardly bears scrutiny, except to say that it provides obstacles when needed: sometimes money (this was the Great Depression, after all), sometimes prior obligations to other lesser love interests.

All you need know at the beginning is that Rogers is a dance instructor, Astaire a gambler who's been secretly moonlighting a dancer. They've met classically cute; Astaire, partly because of his gambling, has inadvertently insulted Rogers; he's decided to take dance lessons to get close to her and get her to forgive him,. And to justify his getting the lessons, he's been pretending (with some effort) to be a hopeless klutz while she tries first simply to teach him to walk rhythmically at her side, and then to do a rudimentary right-two-three left-two-three with her as a couple.

Here, in their first routine "Pick Yourself Up" he "suddenly" picks up the steps, amazing Rogers and everyone but the delighted film audience. What I love in the sequence besides its obvious gorgeousness is his and Rogers' mutual discovery of who they are in motion -- or when they're being their truest, most intimate selves, dancing.

But also check out what film scholar John Mueller has called "The Astaire Double Helix" -- a step that begins with them walking/dancing side-by-side -- gorgeously equal in their competence, entertained by each other's competence and (wonderfully) just a little bit competitive as well -- then spinning around each other in a complex drama of separateness, yearning, and attraction, then somehow propelled by the energy of their separate spins to land back face to face to dance as partners.

I found myself moved beyond measure, and I think (in this dialectic between separateness and mutuality) I found a piece of what I've always been trying to portray in my sex scenes. Click here for the exquisite routine, which Mueller called Ginger Roger's greatest two minutes (and note that the double helix is about a minute and ten seconds into the routine.)

The steps and motifs develop and grow more poignant as the narrative works its way home. In the "Waltz in Swing Time" number, the couple is confident in their growing mutual professional competence, happy to share it with a breathless, appreciative audience, to explore the joys of waltzing to an updated beat (the meeting of old and new thrilling my historical writer wonkiness), and simply reprising the one-two-three from their first dance with a fabulous exuberance coming from an ecstasy of their emerging understanding that they've become a couple with a shared history (a history that -- thanks to the voyeurism that always informs the best erotic fictions -- the audience is also privileged to understand).

And at the dark moment when the plot conflicts seem insoluble, the dazzling "Never Gonna Dance" routine reprises and reorders the steps and motifs so that now the separateness always threatening to dominate finally makes good on its threat (at least until the HEA ending soon to com). The now broken-up couple are alone on the set where they last danced so happily. They've tried to talk -- but talking isn't what Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers do best even at the best of times.

Again beginning by walking side to side, Astaire sweeps Rogers into almost frighteningly quick spins. For a moment it seems like the old one-two-three step might bring them back together. But it doesn't. Nor does the double helix work -- perhaps because they no longer have that good-natured competitiveness that's so productive in all romances. Astaire is too violent as the initiator of the spins; the poignancy of Rogers achieving them is startling -- though eventually she's spun off the screen to leave him (gorgeously, of course) exhausted and despairing.

(This was the famous routine, by the way, that took 47 takes and left Rogers' feet bleeding; I don't know why it was so difficult, but I'm guessing it's the speed and control demanded of her. Dramatically it's astonishing; she never seems stronger than in this break-up scene -- and the gown is to die for, isn't it?)

But the happy ending does come. Improbably, ridiculously, plotwise. But wonderfully from a thematic viewpoint. Taking explicit notice of the dance/sexuality equation, Fred sings, (to the tune of "A Fine Romance")

Remember how my arms hold you when we dance
But we're not going to dance
This is a fine romance

And it is. Leading me to remember the dance scenes I've included in Almost a Gentleman and The Edge of Impropriety (interestingly, in both cases, with the dancers all in black and white). And that I recently commented on some blog that "I write because I can't dance."

OK. Your turn. About the relationship of eroticism to other sorts of narrative. About dance and film and other arts and romance. Or whatever -- including the films and novels of the 1930s that seem to be so much a part of the romance aesthetic a la hoyden.