Dancing Around the World – The Taucker Travel Blog

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

– Vivian Greene

Dancing is one of those elements of culture that can be found wherever there are people, yet each culture has its own ways of doing it. Dance is universal, but it is expressed by different cultures in an infinite variety of ways. As with other arts and universal forms of human endeavor, dance can be a good lens through which to compare different cultures. It’s one of many interests that were awakened in me by travel.

Observing the ways different countries do familiar things is one of the most fascinating aspects of travel for me. Dance is something I have come to appreciate increasingly over the years, but in my early years my appreciation of dancing was a guilty secret.

I recall the little boys I knew as a young kid as macho little savages. Anything like dancing would be far too sissified for them to be caught dead doing. We were more interested in fighting great battles, in our imaginations of course. In the macho little boys’ world I inhabited out on the street, even interest in music, or reading would have been far too unmasculine to admit doing. Such interests had to be held close to the vest, if held at all.

At home with our families we could revert to being little boys, even crybabies, but out there in boys’ world, one had to maintain the highest macho standards.

But I had a big sister, three years older, and she and her girlfriends were not nearly so uptight about dancing. They liked the new dances that would periodically sail across the country on the wave of some new record, such as the Twist, the Monkey, the Watusi, the Dog, etc., ad infinitum. The girls would watch the kids dancing on American Bandstand, then get together on a summer afternoon and try the new moves, or dance the old ones just for fun.

There were times when I, as the younger brother around the house, would be enticed to join in. There weren’t any boys there to chide me, and the girls would ridicule me if I didn’t join in. So, thanks to my big sister, I did some dancing as a kid. And I enjoyed it. Secretly.

I didn’t encounter many occasions to dance in public. As I recall, during the few public dances I can remember attending, there was a lot of standing around, because most boys were still too intimidated to try to dance in public. More often it was girls dancing with other girls.

It wasn’t until I was 16 and went to Mexico with my…