SIFF No Moves
The DJ at SIFF’s opening party was not exceptional but he/she did manage to play a few dance classics that never fail a dance floor. But the problem was not so much the music than the dancers. There were no moves to organize them. Everyone was doing their own thing and it just looked chaotic. A dance floor of substance is one that is a community of moves—the oak tree, the cabbage patch, the snake, the sprinkler, the running man. (Admittedly, those are older moves; the new ones—booty shaking, crumping, freaking—lack the social value of dances like the old and trusty robot.)
Not long ago, I wrote this about a socially relevant dance that was popular in my late teens, which was spent in Gaborone:
Because there are more cattle than people (three to one) in the country of Botswana, it’s not surprising that in 1988 (or thereabouts) the most popular dance in the nightclubs of the country’s capital, Gaborone, involved imitating the movements of a cow. As the hiphop or funk jam played, people on the dance floor would bend over, let their arms hang, and move their shoulder blades up and down to the beat of the music. It was a convincing imitation, and those who mastered the dance mastered the dance floor.
Note: I hate line dancing (the electric slide, the achy breaky, and what have you). Unlike the totalitarianism of line dancing, a community of moves allows the dancer to retain his/her identity while at the same time using recognizable codes. The totalitarianism of line dancing, however, is much worse than what I saw last night: the anarchy of whatever.
Um, there was definitely some sprinkler going down last night. Also, the classic line cast and reel in. And the DJ was a woman.