On a balmy Wednesday in Southern California, I found myself skipping across a campus courtyard, following a student caller’s lead as our class navigated Regency dance moves to music from an iPhone speaker.  Each of us had been briefed on our role for the day, and we were doing our best to follow the requisite etiquette rules of gender and rank.  From here, we would return to the classroom for a game of cards (in this case, Jane and Bingley’s favorite vingt-un), followed by a sit-down “supper” of clementines and homemade banana bread.  Conversation cue cards and a carefully laid seating plan (alternating ladies and gentlemen) ensured that we stayed in character.  It was the long-awaited day of the Austenian Ball in our “Pride and Prejudice Remix” class, with each event planned and facilitated by a student presentation team tasked to research and immerse the class in aspects of Austen’s world.

It was a day of laughter, energy, and joy, as I joined several class sections for their respective events.  Part of each team’s grade was determined by peers, who voted (via anonymous exit polls) on whether classmates had successfully engaged them in illuminating, interactive lessons on Regency culture.  As feedback showed, students appreciated seeing the complexity of Austen’s milieu, from the layered meanings of play to the rigidity of rank as a relational framework.  As the semester continued, and we shifted our attention to global retellings of Pride and Prejudice, our early focus on dance continued to reap rewards for collective learning.  In this essay, I explain the assignment’s rationale and logistics, making a case for using dance—which Steven Mintz calls “the most participatory of the arts” and “one of the pillars of cultural expression”—to invite students into the transformative magic of literary worlds.  In a pedagogical context, I suggest, dance is not just a way to enjoy and understand Austen’s story; it can become a gateway to engaging diverse cultures with sensitivity and care.

Why a “Pride and Prejudice Remix”?  Teaching Austen in and through adaptation is a popular approach for good reason.  As Linda Hutcheon observes in an excerpt I assign to students, adaptation “is a process of making the adapted material one’s own” (20).  Interpretive adaptation is “imaginatively, cognitively, and emotionally active” (23), offering participants an “immersive” way to experience stories (22).  Tracing the long, complex history of Austenian adaptation, Devoney Looser makes a provocative claim that Austen “was not born, but rather became, Jane Austen” (1).  Looser considers how and why Austen’s work inspires “imagined intimacy with audiences” (4).  There is something in her novels that invites the participatory, immersive work of interpretive adaptation; readers are drawn to make Austen’s stories their own.

Smart, culturally diverse Austen adaptations have proliferated in recent years, opening new pedagogical possibilities for teaching Pride and Prejudice through the lens of intercultural understanding.  I am indebted to Sofia Prado Huggins, whose thoughtful course design (described in Persuasions On-Line) inspired some of my own.  While Prado Huggins gives students a reading shortcut with Joe Wright’s 2005 film adaptation, I let Austen herself begin the work of defamiliarization, revealing how activities like dancing are fraught with cultural nuance that we must learn to read.  To avoid presentist equivalence, I ask my students to reflect on the gaps between Austen’s culture and our own.  The challenge of the prose catalyzes our learning—indeed, grasping the scope, subtlety, and stakes of Austen’s satire is critical to our enjoyment and, later, adaptation of story elements.  Austen’s clear-sighted compassion is relatable to twenty-first-century readers, but the specific cultural values and practices she portrays are not.  Even the most fervent anglophiles amongst us must navigate a centuries-long gap.  We turn our attention to the details of Austen’s world to practice understanding how culture works before we engage with globally inflected adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.

The assignment: An Austenian ball

As Nancy Lee-Riffe notes, country dance “provided a natural marriage market where [Austen’s] particular type of gentry community could practise and preserve its manners, its values, and itself” (103).  Dance was defined by its “communal and sociable quality, its essence not in performance but in participation” (109).  This participatory emphasis makes dance a fruitful space for students to learn the cultural and relational nuances of Austen’s world.  “English country dance . . . is narrative, telling a story of relationships,” writes Celia A. Easton (254), and to understand its function in Pride and Prejudice students must “use their bodies” (252).  Heeding this call, Cheryl Wilson has offered wonderful strategies for “inviting students to participate in a country dance” as “an effective tool for experiential learning that helps them connect to the historical moment.”  Key to my own assignment is that students take on hosting responsibilities; their task is not just to participate but to research and demonstrate what they have learned by teaching others.

For our ball, we divide the seventy-five-minute class period into three segments:  a Regency dance, a card game, and a conversational “supper.”  Recognizing the range of eighteenth-century dance “venues” (Thompson), students choose whether their event will be structured more like the public Meryton assembly or the private, more intimate Netherfield ball.  They also choose which dance we will learn, whether “the Boulanger” that Mrs. Bennet recalls from the assembly (PP 13), the reel Mr. Darcy mentions upon hearing Miss Bingley play “a lively Scotch air” (51), or a different country dance.  Over several weeks, as we read and discuss Pride and Prejudice, students complete in-depth research and prepare for their segment—learning dance or card moves, preparing a menu, writing character cue cards, etc.  They ensure that information is accurate to Austen’s textual evidence and that their presentation is interactive and inclusive.  I provide source materials and make myself available to help teams coordinate character assignments across groups, budget for food costs, simplify elaborate ideas to fit time/space constraints, and accommodate classmates’ dietary or physical needs.  (We have had students with limb differences and chronic pain, for instance; in these cases, teams adapted their plans to accommodate.)

On each class ball day, my students have proven gracious, creative, good-humored hosts.  It was a delight to receive their hospitality and see talents and personalities shine through the various roles they played.  One quiet student served as her team’s Master of Ceremonies, coming alive as she expertly called steps.  Another revealed a penchant for cards, honed through childhood family game nights, as he shuffled decks and explained rules for vingt-un.  Yet another student brought an elaborate “wedding cake” and homemade scones for our meal; bashfully, she shared that she loves baking, in her rare spare time, and sharing her creations with others.  Her classmates were both awed and grateful.  In our final minutes, as we finished eating and prepared to clean up, I asked students to complete an anonymous exit poll, designed to hold teams accountable for immersing classmates effectively in Austen’s world.  The poll let students weigh in on whether peers facilitated a well-organized, carefully planned, highly engaging interactive activity; it also invited them to share words of appreciation for teams that went above and beyond expectations as hosts.  Students were generous with each other, as well as honest in noting rare cases where presentations were confusing, clunky, inaccurate, or poorly timed.

Overall, the experience was highly rewarding.  As instructors, we never know exactly how a new assignment will play out:  will students be engaged and take ownership?  Will they see the assignment’s value, not merely for learning facts but also for navigating their own social milieus?  What surprised me most was how our collaborative efforts reverberated as we spent the rest of our semester discussing global adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.

Global Austen: Cultivating intercultural competence through dance

Birgit Neumann contends that “literature . . . conveys particular kinds of knowledge about others and may thus become an agent in advancing intercultural understanding” (138, emphasis added).  Rather than providing “factual or objective knowledge about other cultures,” literature is “suffused with cultural imaginations, creative invention and subjective meanings” (138).  Indeed, my students’ engagement with the cultural unfamiliarity of a Regency ballroom challenged them to read context and character with more nuance and sophistication.  In Austen’s world, the stakes of dance were high:  “how people performed manners determined, in large part, their character and social worth” (Engelhardt 24).  To be successful at a dance—and in the marriage market—women, especially, had to apply conduct manual advice with precision and skill, interpreting and responding to subtle cues in a dynamic socialscape.  Our own embodied exposure to what Molly Engelhardt calls “a semiotics of dance literacy that assigned meaning to each movement” (37) served as a meaningful lesson in recognizing and engaging across cultural difference.

Our efforts pushed us in each category of “Intercultural Knowledge and Competence,” as defined by the American Association of Colleges and Universities VALUE rubric.  First, the assignment cultivated knowledge of cultural frameworks, including “insights into [our] own cultural rules and biases” and “sophisticated understanding of the complexity of elements important to members of another culture in relation to its history, values, politics, communication styles, economy, or beliefs and practices.”  Second, it developed skills of empathy and communication, as students were asked to “articulate a complex understanding of cultural differences in verbal and nonverbal communication.”  Finally, it fostered attitudes of curiosity and openness, inviting students to “ask complex questions” and “suspend judgment” as they encountered culturally different practices and priorities.

The real test of students’ growth came as we spent the remainder of the semester applying these newly honed skills to diverse adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.  As expected, each retelling offered culturally specific variations on Austen’s familiar themes.  Less expected was how each story followed Austen’s lead by inviting readers to see dance as a rich microcosm of culture.  Formal dance shaped plots, of course, providing gatherings for casual (and sometimes transgressive) conversation.  Meanwhile, the rituals of dance—from fashion and musical choices to order of steps and swapping of partners—revealed both specific and universal aspects of human experience.

We first turned our attention to two South Asian adaptations that prominently feature dance.  Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable: Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan introduces readers to the dance-centric rituals of a mehndi ceremony, when the Binat family attends the “NadirFiede” marriage festivities.  The groom’s family members “dance a luddi around the henna platters . . . , changing their dance steps for each new circumambulation” (59); meanwhile, other “guests looked on politely, clapping and chatting among themselves and wondering when the synchronized dance would begin, after which dinner would be served” (59).  During the party, paralleling Mrs. Bennet’s motherly anxiety about her daughters’ prospects, Mrs. Binat laments that “none of her daughters were proficient in the art of hook, reel, grab,” or “catching a husband” as one would a fish (54).  In this scene and others like it, Kamal skewers social problems specific to her context, including the dangerous hypocrisies of purity culture and the residual idolization of western love stories at the expense of Pakistani voices.  Similarly, dance scenes establish setting and character conflict in Gurinder Chadha’s Bollywood film Bride and Prejudice.  Will Darcy’s discomfort and Lalita Bakshi’s joy, shown through facial expressions and side conversations during the “Punjabi Wedding Song,” reveal the couple’s chemistry but also foreground how their conflict stems from historically rooted cultural stereotypes.

Dance features, too, in adaptations set in multicultural America that students read while beginning to craft culturally aware adaptations of their own.  Karen Tei Yamashita’s “Giri & Gaman” (from her short story collection, Sansei and Sensibility) features the Benihanas, a Japanese family from Gardena who navigate oft-unspoken generational differences in “postcamp” California (124).  Mrs. Benihana, “in a high state of happy anxiety thinking of her daughters,” throws herself into “PTA baking action” to raise money for the high school prom (126).  The dance itself is nearly erased from the story, when Lizzy chooses to stay home and read a book instead.  Parsing the story’s clues reveals that her choice not to dance points to the title conflict of how generations of Japanese Americans wrestle with inherited legacies of giri (duty) and gaman (endurance).  Finally, in Ibi Zoboi’s Pride, dance represents embodied community within Zuri Benitez’s diverse Bushwick neighborhood.  “My neighborhood is made of love,” Zuri says, reflecting on how its “block parties bring everybody in our hood together” (33).  Meanwhile, as Zuri participates in Madrina’s “crowded” bembé ceremony in the basement of their apartment building (122), “dancing to drumbeat rhythms that pull at [her] core” (125), the dance feels like “more than just a dance”; it gives her a sense of belonging to a spiritual tradition and the community that gives it life (126).  In Zuri’s world, dance is also a source and sign of conflict.  Frustrated by how gentrification is transforming the place and people she loves, she observes that “all around us are the white people doing their strange dances . . . and the kids from around the way who try to carry on as if nothing is changing” even though “everything is changing” (71).  For Zuri, dance is both an embodied experience of belonging and a metaphor for negotiating her definition of home.

Kinesthetic pedagogy and the cultural power of dance

Observing how our ball united threads of inquiry across the semester, I found myself wondering:  why dance?  What is it about collective, choreographed movement that draws people together, not only in my classroom but across cultural history, from Austen’s England to Kamal’s Pakistan to Zoboi’s Bushwick?  How does dance function as a culturally inflected language that parallels and enhances the work of the literature classroom?

In Why Dance Matters, Mindy Aloff calls dance a “codified movement language” (87) that can “carry the history of a people through time via steps and gestures” (172).  What sets dance apart from other cultural practices and art forms, Aloff contends, is how it both unites disparate pieces of the dancer and unites dancers to spectators.  Indeed, dance has power to connect people on both emotional and physical levels.  On an emotional level, dance evokes responses that defy rational description.  There is “pleasure” in dance (191), as well as “epiphanies of meaning” that are more than the sum of technical parts (192).  Observing children dancing, Aloff notes how dance’s “joyous element of play” reaches back to “memories of having seen other dancers” (4).  Humans’ innate desire to dance reflects an effort to recover these memories “and, in reproducing [them], to speak the language [of dance] in a personal way” (6).  Meanwhile, on a physical level, dance links the minds and bodies of dancers and spectators alike.  Aloff describes “the logic particular to dancing” as a “process of association” (7), which connects, “whether calmly or explosively” (184), “this step and that gesture, this gesture and that pose” (7).  If dance is “movement as communication” (9), this communication works on multiple levels simultaneously:  purposeful movement from one step to the next demands not only bodily rhythm and agility but an emotional “cohesion” that distinguishes “art” from “exercise” (174–75).  Dance is an “art of process” (54) but also a strategy of coordinated “multitasking”; it “requires fast eyes, keen hearing, and a capacious memory” (90).  In sum, dance lets our emotional, intellectual, and physical layers converge.

Aloff’s insights align with my classroom experience.  We began in awkward play, working to learn steps and coordinate with partners; after twenty minutes, we were laughingly stepping, twirling, and bowing or curtseying our way through the country dances like Janeites in cosplay.  Dancers in the circle gamely maneuvered through the routine, to applause from spectators who knew their turn was next.  Together, we enjoyed the “waves of reciprocal energy” that, according to Aloff, offers “those of us who are open to it the wonderful sense that we all are participating in a phenomenon larger than any one of us” (193).  Energy from the dance carried into our card games and supper conversations, where we began to see “epiphanies of meaning” emerge (Aloff 192).  Drawing on M. W. Brumit’s “Characterization and Card Games in Pride and Prejudice,” for instance, students noted links between certain characters’ favorite games and their tolerance for risk, as observed in the dance.  Elizabeth declines to join a high-stakes game of loo (PP 37), whereas Lydia is “extremely fond of lottery tickets” (76); Jane and Mr. Bingley “both like Vingt-un better than Commerce” (23).  Mr. Darcy, who claims to “‘detest’” dancing (11), also “reject[s]” Mr. Hurst’s “petition” to join one of the card tables in the drawing room after dinner (54).  These epiphanies deepened as we saw Austen’s dance adapted for Pakistani wedding ceremonies and Bushwick block parties.  We appreciated how, in remixing Regency steps with new cultural settings and expectations, diverse authors came to “speak the language [of dance] in a personal way” (Aloff 6).

Students also learned to make this language their own.  By the end of the semester, as they crafted and shared Pride and Prejudice remixes of their own, several thought in sophisticated ways about the embodied intersections of intellect and emotion.  One of my students, a skilled ballerina, choreographed her own ballet scene to represent Elizabeth Bennet’s emotional response to Mr. Darcy’s letter; the video she submitted of herself dancing to Beethoven captured in physical motion the poignant tension between Elizabeth’s wildly tumultuous internal state and the restraint she showed in communicating it to the world.  A student-athlete from Ecuador wrote an original song (lyrics with a reggaeton beat) that used rhythm to underscore how Mr. Darcy’s emotional evolution meant, for him, a subtle challenge to the masculinity he’d seen modeled in his own country and cultural traditions.  Both students embraced the lessons of our ball, making explicit the links between analysis and affect.

I came away from this project with two pedagogical insights.  First, while I had designed the course before ChatGPT took campuses by storm, it turned out that our ball was a nearly “AI-proof” assignment.  Since students were tasked to teach what they learned through interactive immersion—and since their success was, in part, up to peers—they could take no shortcuts.  Meanwhile, the stress-inducing pressure of class presentation was diminished by its distribution across participants; presenters had to learn and teach dance moves, for instance, but others were on the hook for the performance itself (and no one was judging execution).

My second takeaway was less measurable but perhaps more significant:  my students’ enthusiastic, memorable participation as hosts and guests reminded all of us that humans are embodied creatures and that we ignore to our detriment the ineluctable links between intellect and emotion.  Aloff describes how dance—or “movement as communication”—contributes to “the improvement of mental health” (9).  Communal choreography, we experienced, provides a purposeful outlet for emotional expression through play, for attentiveness to bodily capacity through coordinated movement, and for human connection unmediated by screens.  Studies show that engaging in dance and enjoying the “synchrony of movement to others and to music” (Tarr et al.) contribute to “enhanced cooperation” (5) and “social bonding” (2) among strangers.  I was glad to see these insights ring true in our classroom community.

In a societal moment marked by isolation and loneliness, we need Austen’s insights into communal life.  Her novels are keenly aware of interpersonal challenges, especially ways we humans wound each other through our cynicism and apathy, hypocrisy and insecurity.  Her novels invite us to fight for healthy communities, finding ways to bridge whatever gaps of personality, culture, or generation may divide us.  We have learned, post-COVID, that the antidote to burnout is not retreat but rather more meaningful engagement; perhaps, by making space for laughter and meaningful play, our classrooms can model a way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the Persuasions On-Line editor and anonymous reviewer for their helpful suggestions, as well as to my students, who inspired me by entering Austen’s world with such good humor, creative energy, and hospitality.