Pierre Dulaine has seen the way you avoid eye contact in elevators. He's noticed how you clutch your phone like a security blanket on the subway, how you'd rather text your partner from across the room than actually look at them. And he thinks he's got the cure: ballroom dance.

Dulaine, who's spent decades teaching ballroom dancing in war zones, homeless shelters, and public schools, is diagnosing a very modern disease: we've gotten so good at being alone together that we've forgotten how to actually connect.

In a TEDx talk that's equal parts sociology lecture and dance manifesto, Dulaine lays it out plain. "We no longer touch each other with all of the new technology around us today," he says. "Many human beings no longer communicate face-to-face." He's not wrong. Think about the last time you were crammed into an elevator with strangers—five people in a vertical coffin, everyone staring at the numbers like they hold the secrets of the universe. Or a packed subway car where bodies press together but somehow never actually touch, everyone performing an elaborate choreography of avoidance.

We've turned isolation into an art form. "We have become experts at isolating ourselves," Dulaine observes, and he's describing it without judgment, just naming what's been lost. We speak through screens, we filter ourselves through glass, and reduce entire emotional states to tiny yellow faces.

A Situation Where Avoidance Isn't Possible

Ballroom dancing, Dulane believes, creates a structural situation where avoidance is no longer possible. On a dance floor, he explains, the usual escape routes simply don't exist:

 "It forces two people to stand facing each other, look each other in the eye, and move together." 

Think about that for a moment. When was the last time you stood face-to-face with someone? Not just briefly, but for minutes at a time? When did you last share sustained physical contact with another person outside your immediate family? For many of us, the answer stretches back further than we'd like to admit.

For Dulaine, the significance of dance is not the movement itself but the conditions it creates. Two people are required to share space, attention, and timing. There's no phone to check, no convenient excuse to look away. "All the while," he adds, "they get to know each other, have fun in the embrace hold."  The structure isn't a trap, but a container. You don't have to perform vulnerability or force intimacy. You just show up, follow the form, and see what happens.

The Ritual of Actually Asking

What gets Dulaine going is the ritual of it all. The whole formal dance: the invitation, the escort, the hold. "May I have this dance, please?" followed by "With pleasure." It sounds like something out of a Jane Austen novel, but Dulaine insists there's something valuable in the ceremony.

Consider how most of our interactions work now. We nod as we pass. We say "hey" without breaking stride. We've optimized human contact down to its most efficient components, which is great for productivity and terrible for everything else. We acknowledge without engaging, signal without connecting.

Dulaine's proposition: slow it down. Make it formal. Create space for both yes and no. "When you treat someone with such respect," he says, "they return the gesture, and now you are in a relationship of give and take." Respect extended becomes respect returned. The ritual creates a kind of social safety net—it signals that this interaction matters, that consent is visible, that your answer will be handled with care.

When's the last time someone actually asked your permission before launching into something? Not in the legal liability sense, but in the genuine human sense of: I see you, I'm requesting your attention, I'll respect whatever you say next. It's become almost radical in its rarity.

Bodies Don't Lie

Then there's the touch thing. "When you touch someone with respect, something changes," Dulaine says, and he's talking about information that words can't transmit. Physical contact, in his framework, reveals what people won't or can't articulate. You learn how someone holds tension, whether they lean in or pull back, how they respond to pressure or surprise.

This is crucial because we spend most of our lives managing impressions. We curate, we edit, we present carefully constructed versions of ourselves. But the body doesn't play along. It hesitates. It flinches. It softens. Touch bypasses the whole editorial process.

"You could be dancing with someone from another nationality, another ethnic group, another socioeconomic status, or race," Dulaine explains. "But when you touch that someone and look them in the eye, they now become a unique individual, and not a label."

"You have learned compassion," he concludes. Compassion that happens when you're physically present with another person's reality.

Trust Falls at 120 BPM

Dulaine asks his students to do something most adults haven't done since childhood: close their eyes while someone else guides them. "Asking the ladies to give up control, trust their partner, and just go with the flow." He poses the question: "How often in life can you relax and trust the person you're with?"

It's not a small ask. Closing your eyes while moving means surrendering your primary sense, giving someone else authority over your trajectory. You could trip, collide, be abandoned mid-floor. But Dulaine argues this is something dancers do routinely because the structure makes it safe enough to try.

Most of our trust is transactional. We trust the barista to make coffee, the accountant to file taxes. But trusting someone to guide you through space while blind? That's different. It requires betting on their attention, their care, their competence, all at once. "Now you're moving beautifully as one," Dulaine says, "four feet pretending to be two."

The genius is in the low stakes. You close your eyes for a few measures. You feel how your partner responds. You learn whether they steady you or let you drift. Failure is just a stumble, not a catastrophe. But the experience registers.

Chemistry of Motion

Dulaine makes an interesting claim about mood: "You can't be angry or sad while you're dancing. The body changes, and your soul is elevated." It sounds like motivational poster copy, but there's something to it. Try ruminating about your shitty boss while executing a turn. Try catastrophizing about your credit card debt while keeping time with someone else's feet. You can't. There's no bandwidth.

Dancing interrupts the internal monologue. For the duration of the dance, you're too busy coordinating—with music, with your partner, with your own limbs—to maintain the loop of anger or sadness. The mood lifts not because you've resolved anything, but because you've stepped outside the narrative for a minute.

And you're creating something with another person. Not a product, not an outcome, just a shared moment of coordination. That act of creation, however small, shifts something. It reminds you that collaboration is possible, that your body can be a source of pleasure instead of just a thing you haul around.

Beyond the Social Dance

This is where Dulaine's work gets serious. He's not just teaching social graces at country clubs. He brings ballroom dancing to public schools, psychiatric clinics, and adult homeless shelters. In these places, he says, "a high percentage of the participants began to feel normal again, and they regained their self-esteem and dignity."

he mechanism isn't performance or mastery. It's being "treated like ladies and gentlemen through the social graces that go hand in hand with ballroom dancing." People in psychiatric clinics and homeless shelters are usually treated as cases, problems, deficits to be managed. They're labeled by what's wrong, by what they lack. Dulaine's intervention: treat them as dancers. Not students. Not patients. Dancers. Partners who get asked, escorted, held with respect.

The implication is that identity isn't fixed—it responds to how we're treated. If you're consistently treated as broken, you identify with brokenness. But if you're treated, even briefly, as whole and worthy of respect, that treatment can shift your self-perception.

Dancing with the Enemy

He carries the same framework into situations of political and cultural conflict. Recallinghis "Dancing in Jaffa" project, where he brought Jewish and Palestinian Israeli children together to dance.

"And what if I told you, you could have trust with someone whom you don't know and that person could even be an enemy?" he asks. His claim is that "ballroom dancing even breaks barriers between two peoples that have been enemies for so long, and overcome hatred, prejudice and mistrust."

These are children who have inherited narratives of enmity. Whose families may have experienced violence. Who have been taught—explicitly or implicitly—that the other group is not just different but dangerous. And Dulaine is asking them to hold each other and move as one.

The logic here is consistent with everything else Dulaine has said: that dance is a tool that can create connection even where history, politics, and identity have created walls. 

The Smallest Invitation

Dulaine doesn't end with grand conclusions or sweeping prescriptions. He brings it back to the smallest possible action: "All you need to do is ask a partner, 'May I have this dance, please?'"

Not enroll in classes. Not become a dancer. Just ask. See what happens when you invite someone into structured, respectful contact. "Then go home, put on some music, hold your partner in the embrace hold, and watch your relationship change."

You don't need a studio. You don't need lessons. You don't need talent. You need music, a partner, and a willingness to try something that has become rare: standing face-to-face with someone, touching them with respect, and moving together.

"It will change your life," he says, "one step at the time."

In a world where we've perfected the art of being alone together, the radical act is just to stop, look someone in the eye, and ask them to dance. Worst case, they say no. Best case, you remember what it feels like to actually be present with another human being.

To learn more about Pierre Dulaine's work and philosophy, watch the full TEDx Talk.