FANCY FOOTWORK
​
by Roman Sympos
The laughter was explosive, where I’d expected at least a moment’s hesitation.
“Football as ballet?” asked my youngest brother-in-law. My second oldest brother-in-law shook his head in disbelief. My third oldest brother-in-law wasn’t around just then to pile on, nor was the oldest of the four. If they had been, I have little doubt they’d have made the vote unanimous among the “Outlaws,” as we liked to call ourselves.
The spouses in the room, at least those within earshot, said nothing. Their silence was eloquent.
My one face-saving thought was that only the second oldest Outlaw had a working knowledge of football (he’s a Packers fan), and not one of us knew a thing about ballet.
So, for all anyone knew, I could be right.
I decided to find out.
It seemed an appropriate time of year to do so. Fall is the season for both.
My ChatBot pointed me in the direction of essays, videos, and books on the subject—well, actually, just one book, Football and Ballet, by Jason Collins (Kindle edition $4.99 on Amazon). It turned out to be an “mm” (male/male) romance novel featuring a closeted gay NFL quarterback and an out-in-the-open premier danseur—the male equivalent of a prima ballerina. Not quite on the money.
As for essays and videos, aside from “how ballet cross-training benefits football players' agility and injury prevention” [1], they all seemed focused on the obvious similarities between the two: the physical and mental demands on players and performers, the intensity of training and brevity of careers due to injury or exhaustion, the rigid and dedicated discipline required for success, the athleticism of the participants, the organizational similarities, and, at the end of the list, something ChatBot (or a living relative) dubbed the “Aesthetics of Movement,” football as “the ballet of the masses” and “appreciating the grace and control involved in peak athletic performance.”
Of these “key areas of comparison,” only the last struck me as slightly less than obvious, as well as relevant to both football (as well as many other sports) and ballet (as well as many other forms of dance). All the rest (including "athleticism") could apply to working for Elon Musk.
So let’s keep one eye on the “aesthetics of movement” while we circumambulate the perimeter of the subject before moving toward the center.
It’s always best, I used to tell my writing classes, to start with concessions, move to rebuttals, and end with your positive evidence, leaving the best for last. As I didn’t have to tell them, it’s also a good idea to follow your own advice.
So, how is football not like ballet?
Football is a game. Ballet is an art.
Football is violent. Ballet is sweetness and light.
Football is competitive. Ballet is cooperative.
Football is played by men who are, as Raymond Chandler said of gangster Moose Malloy, “not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck." Ballet is performed almost entirely by women who weigh no more than a hundred pounds soaking wet, helped by a few athletically and otherwise endowed males who serve as umbrella stands for the females and leap about the stage in spectacular fashion during time-outs.
Football is usually played outdoors and ballet indoors. This may seem a trivial distinction, but I hope to show its relevance as we proceed.
I think that’s enough concessions for now.
Let’s tackle (sorry!) the rebuttals.
The distinction between a game and an art is real, but trivial. They are both, fundamentally, forms of play, the expenditure of human energy to no purpose other than enjoyment and the giving of enjoyment. This is true of painters and sculptors and actors and dramatists and musicians and composers and kindergarten finger painters as well as ballet dancers, and of rugby players and chess players and poker players and horse jockeys and figure skaters and marathoners and javelin throwers as well as football players.
Yes, the best of the best in any of these fields (well, except finger painters) can earn a great deal of money, but making money isn’t the point, nor is the fame and adulation that come with stardom.
The point is the rush of exhilaration and momentary transcendence, both individually and as a group, that comes with successfully completing a demanding and complex and, often, delicate or precarious or risky task, be it a long, downfield pass or a grand jeté. In October’s “View from the Precipice,” I asked my electronic friend, Alexa, to give me joy. She failed, but only because I had failed to understand the true source of joy, which comes from within—from something you do, not something you get. It takes you out of yourself and makes you feel part of something bigger.
One of the most intense forms of joy comes from practicing a skill until it becomes both second nature and a stepping-stone to taking on more challenging tasks that demand ever more sophisticated and intricate feats of mastery. At every level, what keeps you going is that hit of adrenaline and the feeling of well-being (aka dopamine) that comes with the sense of accomplishment and advance: the momentary loss of self-consciousness or ego-boundaries and the feeling of immersion in an activity or event that transcends you, that almost feels as though it’s proceeding under its own steam and taking you along for the ride.
Next to this ecstatic feeling (from the Greek ekstasis, or “standing outside oneself”), any differences between football as a sport and ballet as an art seem, if not exactly trivial, then matters of degree, not kind.
Violence? In football it’s blatant, even when players are at rest: why all that armor? And the sport is notorious nowadays for the cognitive decline its participants experience over time, even when wearing helmets.
But violence comes in more subtle forms. Ever hear of anorexia? Bulimia? Ever look closely at a prima ballerina’s foot when she takes off her pointe shoe? The list of foot and back ailments afflicting ballet dancers is a long one.
The violence of football offers good reasons not to play it and to discourage others from doing so, or even watching it, which only encourages others to play. But violence is violence. Football’s is more dangerous, but both activities take a toll on the human body.
Competitive vs cooperative? Ballet films like Black Swan or Center Stage tell us otherwise. Yes, football is a competitive team sport, but jealous, bitter rivalries between individual players, whether teammates or opponents, are rare. In fact, teamwork is much more important to the success of a football franchise than it is to the success of a classical corps de ballet, where every move of every dancer is dictated by the choreographer to mesh smoothly with the movements of the ensemble as a whole. There is no room for chance or improvisation in a classical ballet performance, where planned choreography is the rule. If anyone takes it into their head to go their own way, something’s terribly wrong.
Not so in football, where option plays and serendipity—even variations of a fraction of an inch in the body of an interior lineman—can lead to cascading, unexpected consequences requiring split-second improvisation as a play unfolds. There is an element of jazz to football, as there is to chess, a need to prepare for the unexpected that’s missing in ballet. And, as in the best jazz ensembles, teamwork—adjusting to what your fellow players are doing from moment to moment—is essential to success in a way it can’t be in classical ballet.
​
Football is for men and ballet is for women?
That was then, this is now.
Today, women comprise nearly half of the fanbase of the NFL, says my Chatbot Overview, and 56% of girls 8 and above self-identify as fans. Moreover, women are involved with professional football at every level, including down on the gridiron. True, the only professional league for women’s football, the National Women’s Football League (NWFL)], lasted only fourteen years, from 1974 to 1988. (The players were paid $25 a game.) It died for lack of fan support. But semi-pro leagues like today’s Women’s Football Alliance, in which players pay to play, are thriving, and if paying to play proves anything, it’s that women’s devotion to the sport is more intense, not less, than that of their highly paid male counterparts.
Perhaps more importantly, women have entered the ranks of the National Football League as referees, coaches, and scouts. In 2021, Sarah Thomas, the first full time official hired by the NFL, became the first woman to officiate in a Super Bowl. You won’t find women on the gridirons of the NFL, any more than on the basketball courts of the National Basketball Association or the ice rinks of the National Hockey League or the base paths of Major League Baseball. Biological disparities between the sexes in size and strength will, for the foreseeable future, continue to work against integration at the level of play. But there’s no denying the fact that American football is no longer just “for” men, either professionally or as entertainment, if it ever was..
As for men in ballet, they’ve always been there, and however small their representation among performers, they continue to dominate the upper echelons of the profession as artistic directors and choreographers in major ballet companies.
One reason sex stereotypes have dominated our ideas of football and ballet is that their origins predate the rise of modern, egalitarian views of gender, extending into the realms of legend, myth, and storytelling.
And it’s here, in the tangled roots of prehistory binding football and ballet as bodily play, that we can most clearly discern what distinguishes them, as a pair, from any other sport or art, as well as from each other.
Both require what the late University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill called “keeping together in time.”
In a book by that title written late in life, McNeill explored the deep connections between what he called “drill"--as in military marching--and "dance." Both evolved in order to create and maintain cohesion among groups of people, going back, speculatively, to the first hominids capable of moving together in a rhythmically coordinated fashion. This was an achievement beyond the reach of our apish ancestors, at least to judge from experiments performed on their descendants, today’s chimpanzees.
Like many other scholars and writers of his generation, McNeill served in the Second World War and took away lessons that he later applied to his professional interests. Keeping Together in Time, published in 1993, began its slow gestation more than half a century earlier, on the dusty training grounds of a Texas military base, where a young, recently drafted McNeill learned, to his surprise, the pleasures of close order drill. “A more useless exercise would be hard to imagine,” he writes. “Given the facts of twentieth-century warfare, close-order marching within range of guns and rifles was a form of suicide.” [p. 1]
What he remembered of the experience fifty years later, however, was not boredom or fatigue or resentment, but that he “rather liked strutting around,” and he felt sure that most of his fellow recruits did, too. It all “somehow felt good”:
A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual. [p. 2]
Looking back on the experience, McNeill used the word “euphoria” to describe what he felt, something “visceral” and “far older than language” that “constituted an indefinitely expansible basis for social cohesion among any and every group that keeps together in time, moving big muscles together and chanting, singing, or shouting rhythmically” [p. 2]. “Muscular bonding” he called it, whose most obvious expression, throughout human history and, presumably, prehistory was the dance.
McNeill devotes the remainder of Keeping Together in Time to proving his thesis in broad strokes and granular detail at every level of society and across millennia. Whether ceremonial or spontaneous, religious or military, work-related or initiatory, dancing is, by far, the most powerful form of “muscular bonding” human beings living in groups have yet devised.
“Pervasive well-being,” “personal enlargement,” ‘becoming bigger than life”—these euphoric feelings also characterize what I have called, both here and in the October “View,” “joy.” And they all involve mastering a physical skill. The only difference is that joy can be achieved in total isolation, while McNeill’s “euphoria” is something only a group of people “keeping time together,” as in dance or drill, can intentionally evoke and experience.
Dance, which presumably began as a kind of drill requiring uniform movement to a repetitive beat—foot stomping, hand clapping, bodies turning and stepping in synchrony—included both sexes from the beginning, but they were typically segregated. It appears on the hominid scene long before military drill, but the drill per se, a masculine affair, is rooted in dance. The war-dance, the hunting dance, whether before or after the battle or the kill: these are the dances of men exclusively.
McNeill, who established his bona fides as a historian with his award-winning The Rise of the West, a long-term study of the rise and fall of empires on the Eurasian continent, traces the emergence of close-order drill to ancient Sumer, around the turn of the third millennium BCE. That’s where, for the first time, kings like the legendary Gilgamesh usurped divinely ordained, priestly power by amassing armies to defend their empire and, in doing so, secured their soldiers’ loyalty to them, personally. Close order coordinated movement on the battlefield became a new and ruthlessly efficient way to subdue the enemy and close order drill, crucial to maintaining dominance on the battlefield, emerged for the first time in human history as an equally efficient tool for maintaining a euphoric esprit de corps that helped cement fealty to the sovereign and solidarity among his troops.
Football’s origins in warfare are what make it an outdoor event, arena football notwithstanding and despite the appearance of stadiums with retractable roofs in 1989. Competitive team sports that involved kicking a ball around an open field appeared long before the first football game was played in 1869, however, and the Olympic games in ancient Greece featured individual competitions based on prowess in warfare: throwing, running, boxing, wrestling, and a combination of the last two, called pankration.
Dance, overwhelmingly an indoor activity today, also began in the open air. Ancient theaters, which included dancing and singing, were outdoor affairs, as the ruins of Greek and Roman amphitheaters throughout the Mediterranean amply testify. There have been a few attempts in recent years to revive the practice. Quarry Dances commissioned by the Windhover Center for the Performing Arts in Rockport, Massachusetts, for instance, have become an annual event at abandoned granite quarries on Cape Ann, on Boston’s North Shore. But outdoor dance performances are now the exception that prove the rule. Like musical performances and theater in general, professional dance companies came in out of the cold centuries ago.
Football’s connection to ancient warfare should come as no surprise to anyone who’s the least familiar with the sport, or with the Iliad. The combatants wear armor, fight man to man and hand to hand in Homeric fashion (agon), and seek to advance inch by inch and yard by yard until they can burst into the equivalent of the enemy’s citadel, the end zone, or penetrate its invisible walls—represented by the “uprights”—with a field goal. Each march down the gridiron is a campaign comprising a series of individual battles—“downs”—until the team in possession of the football scores points, making the campaign a success, or their forward movement is stalled and the defenders take possession of the ball, becoming the attackers.
Football’s earliest origins in dance have been obscured by its military associations. But classical ballet has little more resemblance to its prehistoric forebears than football does. Neither the sport nor the art, as now practiced, conforms strictly to McNeill’s notion of “keeping together in time,” namely, the identical movement of bodies in unison to a steady and unvarying beat, which is what McNeill himself experienced as a young recruit in boot camp. More elaborate and complex patterns of interaction have evolved requiring divergent but intricately interweaving movements among participants—the equivalent, in music, of harmony and counterpoint replacing unison chanting and plainsong.
Of the two activities, however, ballet comes closer to McNeill’s ideal. As various as the dancers’ movements on stage may be, the ensemble as a whole must adhere, like their earliest ancestors, to a steady and largely unvarying homorhythm. Each dancer must be at their assigned location and execute their assigned movement at precisely the beat chosen by the choreographer and the director. Otherwise, disaster could ensue. Imagine a prima ballerina leaping for the arms of her premier danseur a fraction of a second too early or too late!
Football has no musical accompaniment aside from the half-time show in college and high school games, which typically features a marching band in uniform to remind us of the sport’s military origins. It does, however, have a literal clock ticking away the remaining seconds in a quarter or a half or the last two minutes of a game or between each down and the next, and woe betide any player—not to mention any coach—whose negligence of that timepiece costs his team a penalty for “delay of game.” There’s not a professional football player worth his salt who hasn’t, in the course of hundreds of practices and scores of games, learned to internalize that ticking clock.
Good thing, too. Because it’s not just between plays that good players heed its silent ictus. They can hear it ticking throughout each play as well. Like a successful ballet, successful football is a matter of “keeping together in time,” maintaining synchronized and coordinated group movement over a span of minutes or seconds. It does not, however, require “keeping time” to an external beat—all you’ve got to go by, out there at the line of scrimmage, is the beat in your head.
Timing, in short, is the foundation of what McNeill calls “muscular bonding” in football, just as keeping time is in classical ballet.
Timing is important to other team sports besides football, of course, notably soccer, hockey, and basketball, but much less so. For one thing, the players’ positions are more vaguely defined than in football (or ballet, for that matter) and the time constraints more relaxed. Players are assigned roles and areas of coverage on the field but, except for the goalie, they are allowed to assume another role and go anywhere within bounds without incurring a penalty. A striker, for instance, is not prohibited from falling back to midfield to deflect or intercept a shot on his own goal. And, barring injury or a ball or player going out of bounds, play is continuous until a goal is scored. If strategy plays any role in these three sports, it’s a more fluid and open-ended one, analogous to the difference between checkers and chess.
In football, moves and positions are more rigidly defined, as in ballet and in chess. An offensive lineman, for instance, must assume a position behind the line of scrimmage when play begins and is ineligible to receive a forward pass. Along the same lines, plays are more rigidly articulated in distinct increments, like individual dances and scenes in a ballet. Each play begins when the center snaps the ball back from the line of scrimmage and ends when the person carrying the ball is tackled or a pass is ruled incomplete or a fumbled ball is recovered by one side or the other.
It doesn’t matter much that the basic temporal unit of ballet is vastly disproportionate to that of football, that each play (or “down”) in football—mere seconds in duration—is equivalent, as a matter of timing, to a completed dance or even an entire scene of dancers keeping time together in classical ballet. Nor does it matter that football unfolds, at every level, according to a carefully planned strategy subject to improvisation and revision, instead of a strictly set choreography, as in a dance or a scene of ballet.
The euphoria remains the same. “Pervasive well-being,” “personal enlargement,” ‘becoming bigger than life,” all the hallmarks of McNeill’s “muscular bonding,” arise, in either case, from a group endeavor to impose on blank temporality and the messiness of life a structure and a direction, a beginning, middle, and end, in which each moving part has a role to play and a task to perform and a contribution to make: a structure, in other words, in which every participant’s every move is not just meaningful, but immediately and unmistakably seen to be.
And that eurphoria can be contagious. Spectators, aficionados, and fans can all experience the same feelings of solidarity and elevation, if only vicariously and in somewhat diminished form. There’s no rational basis for it, you’ve done nothing to merit praise or congratulation. You’re fully entitled to brag on “your team,” and no one who cares about the sport will question your sanity.
Speaking of those who watch and cheer, I’ve saved the “Aesthetics of Movement” for last because it’s not a feature of either ballet or football that requires “muscular bonding.” It does, however, require spectators.
At what point in the history or prehistory of dance did a dancer wonder if their movements were beautiful? Or graceful? Or elegant? Or sublime? Probably at the same point they became conscious of being watched or recalled how they felt as a watcher. At what point in the seconds before he throws a forward pass does a quarterback wonder if his posture reminds his fans of an ancient Greek spear thrower? Hopefully, at no point.
Beauty, grace, sublimity, elegance—all of these are attributes of our finest dancers and athletes. But the delight they inspire belongs to their spectators. For performers and players alike, an appreciation of the “aesthetics of movement” is, at best, a self-regarding indulgence and, at worst, a threat to that sense of expansion and loss of ego-boundaries McNeill calls “euphoria” and I call “joy.” If you’re thinking about how you look, you’ll never venture onto a dance floor or complete that forward pass.
* * *
At some point in my discussion of ballet and football with the Outlaws, one of them used the phrase, “fancy footwork.”
Recalling those words now, I’m reminded that when all is said and done, what connects ballet and football most intimately is the foot, the body part that sets bodies in motion, moves them around, and carries them to precisely designated spots of time and space, where a clearly defined task awaits them.
And the “fancy” part? It's not just ornamentation, something extraneous to the task at hand. A corps de ballet’s grand plié or assemblé, a running back’s stutter step or a wide receiver's second toe tap to keep his catch "in bounds"—the successful execution of each is integral to why and how the dance is performed and the game is played. Or should be.
If there is an “aesthetics” to football or ballet, then, it comes down to this: form is function, whether the goal is to delight or to win.
​
Notes:
1. See, e.g., the wonderful NFL Films production Touchdowns and Tutus, at https://www.nfl.com/videos/touchdowns-and-tutus-nfl-films-presents-280848.
​
​
