AND THEN WE DANCED

A Voyage Into the Groove by Henry Alford; Simon & Schuster (226 pages, $26).

For participatory journalist Henry Alford, it all started with Zumba, the Latin-rhythm dancercise class he took in order to write a story for The New York Times. Six months later, he still found himself rising at dawn to Zumba twice a week. “I had just turned 50, which in gay years is 350,” he confides; his “love handles” had become “so shelf-like as to offer suitable support to a collection of decorative thimbles.” But calorie-burning was just the gateway experience for Alford, who became fasci-

nated with dance’s potential in the realms of intimacy, healing, spirituality, social entree, politics and rebellion—all examined in “And Then We Danced: A Voyage Into the Groove” (Simon & Schuster, 226 pp., $26).

Over the next five years, Alford signed up for everything from pas de deux classes and a swing dance conference to tap lessons with Alvin Ailey and a “contact improv jam.” He researched the lives of the greats— Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Bob Fosse, Arthur Murray, Mikhail Baryshnikov—and includes anecdotes about each. For example, in the early 1960s, Martha Graham told a roomful of Texas college students that “all great dancing stems from the lonely place.” “Where is the lonely place?” asked a girl in the audience. “Between your thighs,” Martha told her. “Next question?”

Although the chapters of “And Then We Danced” don’t seem to have been written on journalistic assignment, they nevertheless feel like a series of magazine articles. The finest works of immersion journalism— George Plimpton’s “Paper Lion,” Ted Conover’s “Newjack”—have a narrative drive that is missing here. Yet Alford’s jaunty reportorial style makes the meandering journey perfectly pleasant. From his participation in a Twyla Tharp community dance piece in a public park to his breakout role in a 4-minute art film about contact improv, he wholeheartedly illustrates the wisdom that shimmers at the heart of his book: “Hobbies are hope.”