Sacrifice Your Body to the Beats

I want to talk about dancing and what persuaded me to do it. I used to be an active member of a group of dancing friends. We used to go to the “dirty thirty” held once a week in a cleared out living room of a house in southeast Provo. The DJ would play 30 minutes of loud dance music but even before he started, I would see the flashing lights and as I walked up the pathway to the front door I was compelled to start moving my body. We also went to the IDP twice a week at 10:30 or 11:00pm. This was a dance party held outdoors, usually at a traffic circle, public garden area, or on the top level of a parking structure. Each dancer would arrive with his or her own headphones and the 30-minute long track queued up on his or her iPod. Then the person who created the mash-up of electronic/pop/dance music would get up on top of a rock or pole, hold his or her iPod in the air, and shout “SACRIFICE YOUR BODY TO THE BEATS!” After which each person pressed play on their iPod and started dancing. 

This was crazy and irrational, but for me, the excitement of anticipating a fun hard dance session and hearing the loud music with strong beats was extremely persuasive. I was always driven to dance.

Now for Gorgias. I noticed that Gorgias talks about incantations, or magic spells. He says that, “By means of words, inspired incantations serve as bringers-on of pleasure and takers-off of pain (paragraph 10).” I would like to relate the dance music to the “inspired incantations” that Gorgias talks about. The lyrics and beats of the songs were definitely “bringers-on of pleasure” and they also took off the pain of feeling tight. They helped me loosen up and let go of my inhibitions and always persuaded me to move my body.

Here is a link to a mom’s blog post about attending an IDP with her daughters. This group was a little different than the one I used to dance with, and I have never met or communicated with this mom.