New Orleans Saints quarterback Jameis Winston is lots better than many of the attendees at social events my wife and I attend.
Dancing New Orleans Saints
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Where There’s a Will There’s a Way to Keep on Social Dancing
Social dancing is an optional activity, so people can simply not do it during these days of the CoronaVirus. One of the dances that would be most dangerous is the Salsa Rueda. The people most impacted are dance teachers, who are unable to make a living now. But where there’s a will there’s a way … or several ways. One way is to sit down, maintaining the required “social distance” and avoiding heavy breathing. Another way is to minimize contact by using hula hoops and gloves.
Social Dancing Has Been Upended by CoronaVirus
Social dancing is an optional activity, so people can simply not do it during these days of the CoronaVirus. One of the dances that would be most dangerous is the Salsa Rueda. The people most impacted are dance teachers, who are unable to make a living now.”
Impromptu Dance by Football Coach at Scrimmage Gets over 140K Views on YouTube
When a football coach is a former lead dancer for the MC Hammer hip hop music group, anything can happen. A scrimmage of the San Jose State’s football team during spring training was accompanied by music, but when the DJ played one of the group’s hit songs, “U Can’t Touch This”, the running backs coach Alonzo Carter showed off some of his old dance moves. They were captured on video and were a big hit on YouTube.
Actually, incorporating dancing into training of running can pay big dividends. Cornell University once sent a couple of their clumsier running backs to a ballet teacher in Ithaca, NY. She worked with them and she and the coach were pleasantly surprised when one of them executed a “Grand Jete” over a defender for extra yardage.
Flash Mobs Delight Both Dancers and Audiences
The majority of flash mobs do NOT feature dancing. But when they do, they can be impressive. Notwithstanding the sometimes-challenging venues and the non-dancing spectators in them, the dances themselves are tightly-choregraphed, the opposite of freestyle. But they can be lots of fun to participate in, and virtually always are very entertaining both to participants and spectators.
Notwithstanding the sometimes-challenging venues and the non-dancing spectators in them, the dances themselves are tightly-choregraphed, the opposite of freestyle. But they can be lots of fun to participate in, and virtually always are very entertaining both to participants and spectators.
Once the phenomen was recognized, advertisers jumped in. Because of their size and roof overhead, and the built-in audiences, train stations are popular venues. A 2009 T-Mobile ad (uploaded January 16) has garnered nearly 41 million views.
But a non-commercial one (uploaded March 23, 2009) has rolled up 32 million views, probably to some extent because of its sweet music and beautiful architecture.
In 2010 there was a west coast swing done to Usher’s tune “xxx” (a poor choice of tune and a few strange figures, in Wilddancer’s opinion) flash mob. There were several episodes in San Francisco, but on December 5 it was (humorously) upstaged by the (only-in-San-Francisco) Santa Skivvies Run.
Just Dance: Dancing for Millenials
If line dancing is mostly done by grown-ups, Just Dance is mostly done by younger people. Just Dance is a sort of party game where the players try to accurately imitate the “dance” figures of the animated characters on the video game screens. It is a sort of “virtual dancing” that was created by software engineers at Ubisoft rather than real-life dancing created by amateur or professional dancers and refined in dance studios.
The songs comprising the annual Just Dance lists are an eclectic list, usually chosen from recent hits by younger singers. The most recent list was released in mid-October 2016.
Some groups of enthusiastic “players” or “dancers” upload videos of their performances to YouTube. It is a worldwide phenomenon. One of the more unusual (because it was done to the William Tell Overture) performances was done by a group in Cyprus.
Freestyle Dancing: Just Do What You Feel Like Doing?
One of the challenges that beginning social dancers, especially men, often have is that they can’t feel the beat of the music. But if you can feel the beat, you were born knowing how to do freestyle dancing. Sure saves a lot of time and money taking dance lessons. And unlike most other social dances, where you can see qualified teachers demonstrating most of the figures, our web surfing suggests that you can’t learn much from watching online videos. One website suggested learning how to tap dance or do hip hop. Well, tap dancing is a long-known form of dancing that takes a considerable amount of learning and practice.
And hip hop (with some of its included variations) came about because people didn’t know, or didn’t care for, the well-established social dances, so perhaps it IS one form of freestyle. And the hip hop variety of “freestyle” today has its own set of figures, e.g., popping, locking, waving, robotics, and gliding.
Starting about 1960 there were a whole bunch of simple dances done by individuals (often male-female pairs but not touching). The first one was probably the Twist, which was said to have killed couples touch dancing. Others were the Chicken (NOT the polka-based Chicken Dance), from which came the Hully Gully (which was based on the Frug (which to us looked like a variation of the Twist in which the hips moved up and down (sort of an in-place Cuban motion in the classical Latin dances like rumba and cha cha), rather than twisting horizontally.
What one often sees today (from folks just having fun) on a “club” dance floor (as distinct from a larger “ballroom” dance floor) looks more like exercise than dance, with more repetitive tap-step, tap-step, … than anything taught in any dance studio or choregraphed by a professional.
Any Dancing, Even Line Dancing, is Better Than No Dancing
Social dancing couples often joke about line dancing, e.g., “Line Dancing: See what happens when cousins breed”. But its virtues include steps that are much easier to execute than most of couples ballroom dance steps and the repetition of series of steps. Another important reason for its popularity is that no partner is needed, which lessens both the social pressure of coupling up and the need to coordinate movements with one’s partner. It is especially popular among women, because it takes men at least four times to learn to dance, so many men are reluctant to “reveal their two left feet”. This lets women dance and men watch or at least removes the pressure on the man to do a good job of leading (which includes thinking ahead about the next figure, and skillfully guiding the woman to do it).
Given its virtues, it is surprising that line dancing is a relatively new phenomenon. On the San Francisco peninsula, many of the dinner-dances attended by Wilddancer always include Elvira … perhaps because it is one of the older line dances (dating from 1981), and is relatively simple and with a slow tempo, so the mostly-ballroom dancers can master it quickly. Strangely, given its longevity and simplicity, it is not popular on YouTube, with the most-viewed demonstration (by Suzy Hazard)
having fewer than 48,000 views, whereas the 1980 Tush Push has nearly 3.7 million views and the 1989 Electric Slide has nearly 1.3 million views.
Beach Volleyball is an Olympic Sport; How about Dancesport?
For some years there has been a lot of talk and some action regarding adding high-level Standard (AKA Ballroom) and Latin dancing to the Olympic offerings. For those who might sneer that dancing is not very strenuous, we suggest attending a competition and listening to the couples panting after a 2-3 minute routine.
A greater challenge is that there is already a great sufficiency of different sports included in the quadrennial Olympic Games, with vastly different audience preferences among them. Prior to the Games themselves, the International Olympic Committee reckoned that half the world would watch (in large measure via TV or on-line).
Unfortunately, it is difficult to get comparable worldwide “ratings”. Actually, it’s always been a mystery to us why they are called ratings, which implies that higher ratings means they are “better” in some sense beyond just the fact that watchers tuned their TVs to those particular programs.
Fortunately, however, there is an irreverent website fivethirtyeight.com that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. The website, which takes its name from the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college, surveyed 57,448 people during August 3-4 (no description of who was surveyed, perhaps just visitors to the website) as to their opinion of the best Olympic sport. The whole account is humorous, but the most interesting finding to us was that Beach Volleyball was #1. Hmmm. We suspect that this relative newcomer of a sport owes much of its popularity to its participants, who are very attractive women in very skimpy outfits. On this basis, we would think that at least the Latin half of the Dancesport events would be highly popular because their outfits can be as revealing as the women’s Beach Volleyball ones. No?
Can You Lose Your Hearing by Dancing?
More likely you would lose it by NOT dancing, but by listening too much with the volume turned up on your iPod or iPhone, or other device, because many of the earbuds in use aren’t very effective so people turn up the volume.Studies have found that users of these Apple devices can be listening at 100-105 decibels. This is well above the OSHA-recommended 85 decibels.
Remember, ears that get damaged stay damaged. They can’t be repaired. And when people talk about decibels (dBA), which is how loudness is measured, we need to remember that they are logarithmic, so that a small increase in the number means a big increase in the noise level (adding 10 dBA DOUBLES the noise level). In the case of dancers, OSHA’s estimate of 110 decibels for discotheques means that the well-advised dancer should limit their dancing in such establishments.
At most of the dinner-dances and dance parties we at Wilddancer attend, the music volume is within safe limits. But we attend as many galas as we can, as they nearly always have dancing, to either a band or a DJ (sometimes a worse bet volume-wise because he has lots of watts at his command). Unfortunately, they almost always have live auctions too, and often when the auctioneer comes on the sound gets louder. (A similar boost happens sometimes when the ads play on radio or TV.)
Fortunately, loudness meters—either standalone models or apps for smartphones—are not expensive, and the serious dancer shouldn’t worry about looking a bit geeky using them. More simply, he/she can always carry earplugs, and use them when things get too loud. It’s a lot better than suffering hearing loss for the rest of his/her life.