Hanif Abdurraqib - A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

When the thick fog of exhaustion set in on a room, it was desire that kept a dancers body upright. When the desire wore off, it would be another dancer, pulling their partner up by the arms. In the photos from the Depression-era dance marathons, women sometimes appear lifeless in the arms of their men. In some photos, men lean their resting bodies on women who have their backs arched, standing and trying to support the dead weight of the person affixed to them.

Dance marathons began in the 1920s, largely in farm towns. As carnivals and fairs began growing along the American landscape, Americans became more obsessed with the impossible. Feats of strength, or human endurance. People attempted flagpole sitting, or long, horrific cross-country footraces. With the successful modernization of the Olympic Games in 1896, Americans became invested in the idea of world records. Even well before the establishment of the Guinness Book of World Records, everything was measured. Time and tenure were benchmarks for the impossible.

In 1923, Alma Cummings danced with six men in Upper Manhattans Audubon Ballroom for twenty-seven hours straight. Cummings was a dance instructor who was interested in the bodys limits on the dance floor. Her triumph sat directly at the intersection of the eras many fascinations: with excess, with endurance, with testing the limits of the countrys tolerance for more liberal sexual expression. In the only photo of Cummings taken right after shed stomped and spun along the wooden floor for over a full day, shes got her feet in a small bowl of water. Her smile would appear to be one of satisfaction, if not for our understanding of what shed just completed. With that knowledge, her upturned mouth looks as if it might be tilting toward a type of madness, highlighted by her barely open and vacant eyes. In one hand, Cummings holds the shoes she danced in. A hole is blown clean through each of them, near where a foot might strike the ground during a spirited movement. Both holes, wide as two open mouths, in awe, in horror.

When word of Alma Cummingss accomplishment started to crawl across the records-obsessed country, there was no way folks were going to be outdone. People saw someone do something that had never been done before, and they wanted a piece of that something too. Some churches still said dancing was a sin, but there would be no sin greater than the sin of sitting idle while a chance to carve your name into immortality was available. Cummings had her record broken at least nine times in the next three weeks. In Baltimore, in Cleveland, in Houston, in Minneapolis. Stories of the hours people danced spread through newspapers, traveling from town to town. If someone hit thirty-one hours on a Sunday somewhere in Indiana, then surely someone a few states over would be trying to drag themselves to thirty-two hours by Tuesday.