Impromptu Dance by Football Coach at Scrimmage Gets over 140K Views on YouTube

Posted on April 22, 2017 by WildBill

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

Posted on December 21, 2016 by WildBill

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

Posted on November 15, 2016 by WildBill

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?

Posted on October 21, 2016 by WildBill

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.

Does “In The Mood” Put You OUT of the Mood?

Posted on July 6, 2016 by WildBill

The experts on musical taste formation say that our tastes are mostly formed during our 14-24 age range. For example, a 60-year-old today would relate to music popular during 1970-1980 and an 80-year-old today would relate to music from 1950-1960. Someone born after the heyday of swing (the Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, et al era), could logically say “‘In the Mood’ puts me out of the mood”. MAYBE folks who have been dancing a long time would relate to music from the time they started dancing (especially if they took a lot of lessons at that time).

Disco Balls Survived Longer Than the Hustle Dance

Posted on June 15, 2016 by WildBill

Louisville, KY recently had a big party to celebrate its newest monument, an 11-foot diameter, 2,300-pound disco ball, to commemorate the city’s longtime role as the capital of American disco-ball manufacturing.

The heyday of disco-balls was during the 1970’s, when disco dancing was so popular. The signature dance at the time was the hustle, a sort of swing with several variations that takes some skill to make it look and feel good, but the music’s strong beat often also brings lots of unskilled “freestyle” folks onto the dance floor. For Wilddancer, it was difficult to learn the dance figures just by watching, because of their strangely syncopated steps in comparison to the more common and intuitive east coast swing or west coast swing dances.

Disco’s popularity was also helped by the Saturday Night Fever movie starring John Travolta (with his white suit and signature pose), with the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive” song. And it also got a boost from the funny send-up of “Staying Alive” from the movie Airplane!

The disco feeling and faster tempo of that song are much better matches to the figures of the hustle than those of “The Hustle” that is often played today by disk jockeys unfamiliar with the dance.

Lindy Hop Dancer Frankie Manning Would Have Been 102 on May 26, 2016

Posted on May 31, 2016 by WildBill

Frankie Manning didn’t invent the “Lindy Hop”, but he was instrumental in making it popular. The Lindy Hop was a “street dance”, i.e., something invented by the dancers themselves, rather than more elite dancing instructors. (In that respect it shares with the sophisticated Argentine Tango, which grew out from its origins in brothels.) It was being developed at the Savoy ballroom in Harlem (a black ghetto in New York City), and got named the Lindy Hop by one of the dancers there (Georges “Shorty” Snowden) when he was asked by a journalist what its name was, who groped for an answer and found it in the headlines about Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. Lindy went national and became higher class (and its name was changed to Jitterbug), particularly with Benny Goodman and big band swing starting in 1936. Frankie Manning wandered by the Savoy in 1929, and soon became a passionate Lindy dancer and the ambassador for it … to the extent that he was worshipped around the world for his artistry. Frankie’s favorite song was Count Basie’s “Shiny Stockings”, which seems slow to Wilddancer for Lindy Hop, but you can see hundreds of folks doing it in a tribute video made on his 88th birthday. We at Wilddancer had been dancing for 10+ years when we saw a swing dancer do a back flip onto his hands, and back onto his feet during a “For Dancers Only” program at Stanford University on April 14, 2000 by Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. It must have been Frankie Manning, who would have been “only 86” at the time. And he was 89 when he astonished a crowd in Sweden.

President Obama’s Tango in Argentina Boosted Both Dance and Statesmanship

Posted on March 31, 2016 by WildBill

Some pundits likened President Obama’s dancing the tango during a state dinner in Argentina, when terrorists were killing people in Brussels, to Nero “fiddling” while Rome burned. But we believe that his dance performance, when coupled with his visit to Cuba, was an important step (no pun intended) in showing his solidarity between the U.S. and Latin America. Obama has generally shown that he is a good sport. And the tango is the Number One tourist attraction in Argentina, so to the Argentines the fact that he gave a decent account of himself on the dance floor can only help the relationship between the two countries.

Argentine tango is a challenging dance. It is unlike the American social version or the International competition version, and tangueros often dance only the tango. The place or event where they dance is a milonga, and milongas are found around the world. A few years ago, Wilddancer was traveling in Seoul, Korea in the evening, and when the taxi rounded a corner, he saw a whole group of tangueros dancing outdoors in a vacant lot.

Chicken Soup When You’re Sick; But the Chicken Dance Is Good Any Time

Posted on February 26, 2016 by WildBill

According to a study by an Oxford University experimental psychologist group dances and memes like Gangnam Style, the Macarena, and YMCA make us feel good because we are socially connected. Actually, it doesn’t take a lot of research to deduce that people feel good when they do these dances; all you have to do is to see the enthusiasm with which people—especially men—jump up and race to the dance floor to strut their stuff. And apparently the more ridiculous the dance, the better you feel, which accounts for the popularity of the Chicken Dance.