Brehm Center

          Many of us would like to learn to dance, whether figuratively or literally. Boxed in to our routines -- even if freely chosen and useful to others -- we wish we could somehow transcend the ordinary. At least, these reviewers do. Such is the situation for Shohei Sugiyama, as well, the central character in the delightful Japanese movie, Shall We Dance?.

         The story is simple, yet elegant, a parable of a decent, hardworking middle manager in a Japanese company who discovers a new joie de vivre (joy in living) through dance. Sugiyama was married at twenty, a father at thirty, and the owner of a house with a garden by the time he is forty. Dedicated to his work, he leaves early in the morning (after being shown praying alone for his breakfast) and comes home late many evenings. Sugiyama doesn't even take time out to go drinking with his work team, as is the custom in Japan. Having a loving wife and daughter, he knows that his life should be thought fulfilling. But it is not.

            Sugiyama is depressed -- depressed until he discovers ballroom dancing! If you think this incongruous, so too did the largely Japanese-American audience with whom we saw the film. They laughed uproariously through much of the movie. The opening subtitles tell us that in Japan, ballroom dancing is regarded with great suspicion and dancing before others is embarrassing. (Does this sound familiar to certain Swedish Covenanters?)

            To take up dancing does not come easily for our hero. He feels the need to sneak up the stairs to the school. It is as if he were having an affair, though he is not. Too embarrassed to tell either his wife or his co-workers, Sugiyama nevertheless slowly learns to trust his body to the music. And the result eventually pleases all around him, his wife and daughter included, as it will please you.

            Sugiyama is attracted to the dance studio when he sees a beautiful, but lonely, woman staring out its window. The mystery is alluring. The woman, Mai, is extraordinarily graceful, but as a disappointed, former dance competitor, her dancing is all seriousness. Her "play" is but work; it's a job. Moreover, as she later admits, she has always done it "alone." But as Mai becomes Sugiyama's teacher, both discover that dance requires a lightness of spirit and a trust in one's co-dancers. Mai helps Sugiyawa and his partner prepare for a dance competition, and in the process discovers in herself the dance of life again. "The splendor of dance," she writes Sugiyama, "is when you trust and enjoy. You taught me that."

            Many of us have been taught to "trust and obey." There is, according to the traditional hymn, "no other way." However, Shall We Dance? portrays a profound option, the other side of the coin. We must also learn to enjoy life as God's gift to us. Perhaps our society is less routinized than the Japanese. Perhaps we are less reserved and work slightly fewer hours each week. But relationships come difficult for many of us (particularly those of us who are male). And a life of obligation and goal-setting is all too common and proves equally incomplete.

            To enjoy life -- to trust one's self to its music -- one need not take up ballroom dancing. But whether its swimming or kite flying, listening to Mozart or reading Snow Falling on Cedars, meditating or dancing, we become more fully human as we give ourselves over to the music of life. (In our household, Cathy is trying to teach Rob something of the pleasure of dance, while Rob hopes Cathy can have her spirits buoyed also by seeing U.S.C. win in football (an all too infrequent event these days).

            Harvey Cox has written on our life's lack of balance. In our bureaucratic and industrial society, he thinks, many of us have contracted the cultural and religious equivalent of leukemia. The balance between the white and red blood cells has been lost, the white cells even cannibalizing the red ones. The result, eventually, is death. Writing in The Seduction of the Spirit, Cox opines, "life for me is a two-step saraband of creating and letting be, of making and simply enjoying, of molding and then being molded, of work and play, prayer and politics, telling and listening. If you reduce it to a one-step, you might just as well stop the music, because it isn't really a dance any more." (p,51) Shall we dance?

Robert K. Johnston and Catherine Barsotti

November, 1997