Dancing / Drumming

I remember my first experience with contact improvisation at a festival three years ago. It was like a monsoon of aloe vera on the cracked desert landscape that held the dance floor. Physical, freewheeling, mechanical and fluid at once, an exquisite foray into analog movement defying you to stop thinking and turn off auto-pilot. Every single second, stop thinking and keep feeling, engaging in a sort of deep aural copulation that has absolutely nothing to do with sex while having everything to do with intimacy. The more adept I've become since then, the more difficult and humbling the practice is. I am consumed, wide-eyed, ravenously hungry.

Nothing in three years has come close to piquing my passion. Until yesterday.

"Check out this drum beat," I tell my friend David, playing Chameleon by Herbie Hancock. "It sounds simple. But...."

David listens, his eyes famously relaxed but a mile deep. Within seconds he understands.

"Dan, have you ever played a drum kit?"

"No, I'm just really good with those plastic eggs that have sand in them."

"Come to my studio. I'll teach you how to play this song."

Listen to Chameleon and you'll barely notice. But listen closely and you'll realize the subtle twist, a swagger that makes this beat special. Tricky. Sexy. Almost incendiary.

Within an hour I'm playing it on a drum kit below a portrait of Muddy Waters. By "playing it" I mean I really, seriously almost got it. Drumming is doing three different things with three limbs simultaneously. I could do any two beautifully, making me feel like a shimmering music god spontaneously borne from this cozy little room in the Bayview district. Playing all three parts at the same time, though? Other than a few fleeting seconds here and there (hallelujah) it often devolved into what drumming would sound like if the player's head were sliced open and an immersion blender were shoved inside, the soupy remains being mixed with battery acid and pop rocks using a rusty spoon. My hat goes off to the song's original drummer Mike Clark, my friend David, and drummers everywhere. They're all probably really good in bed.

That being said, it was utterly thrilling. My body wanted to run into drum-ville a thousand miles an hour, wearing a loin cloth while screaming from the depths of my soul, covered in blood and sweat and several writhing boa constrictors. I want a drum kit.

I leave the studio beaming. Continuing my day later, I emerge from the annals of Civic Center Bart into a parade of black-clad beer drinkers and sequined roller skaters. People are eating Korean tacos from a truck while others are playing glowing skee-ball machines fantastically juxtaposed with the austere United Nations building. On a stage above a banner that says Noise Pop, a DJ mixes some excellent house music. The dance floor, a small segment of what's normally a brick courtyard called UN Plaza, is empty except for three people: two crusty homeless men, brandishing four-packs of wine cooler and crisp empty paper bags while dancing low and sexy like James Brown, and me, standing front and center kinda bouncing and bobbing in lieu of actually going for it. I'm where I spend a lot of my life: in the gray area.

I walk towards City Hall, which is brightly illuminated in red, blue and gold. A clown makes giant bubbles that drift off with the wind and into unsuspecting passersby; the smallest bubbles are the size of watermelons. On an adjacent stage further towards Larkin Street, a voice on a microphone screams, Justice for Bubbles!