(If the url fails to link -- a couple refused -- just copy, cut and paste to your browser.)
“Grinding,” is a form of dancing as though the couple were engaged in rear-entry coitus. The high school administration in Great Falls has decided to suppress it -- at least at school dances. (Check out “grinding” on YouTube -- I am NOT gonna link!) We’re all shocked, right? So I thought I’d go to the other extreme and talk about religious dance. Or is sex so close to religion -- love and all that, fertility orgies, midsummer rites -- that one could consider “grinding” at least a political statement -- free speech and all that?
Liturgical dance is too often treated in a sort of Isadora Duncan aesthetic ladies way. Very Jules Feiffer. But it ought to be respected and included at heart-level, at moving-feet level, okay, at butt level. At belly level -- belly dancing is supposed to be about childbirth muscles. Hearts beating, breath moving, feet walking, hips swaying -- you know. These rhythms and more are essential to being human. If you look at the liturgical dance on YouTube, you find an amazing lot of stuff. Zorba the Greek line or circle dancing. Fat ladies in leotards. Most often evangelical Christians in drapery.
Winkelman encourages the idea that rhythm, setting up a steady pattern of movement or noise whether pounding with a stick or hooting or snapping fingers or running hard, is very close to the line that starts with primates and ascends through humans -- that slanting line supposedly depicting evolution (which turns out to be more a dance -- even a scramble.) At the early level dance is participatory, not professional performance. Okay, maybe sometimes it's just pre-dance. Winkelman also points out that if a person can maintain this for a long time, like hours or even overnight, the result will be a shifting of consciousness into the kind of state people take drugs to achieve. Many new attendees at a peyote ceremony will say that drumming and chanting, staring into a fire, will give anyone visions.
Winkelman values the social solidarity, the “belongingness” of doing something together, creating community that can be entered by participation. Chimpanzees do it, evidently blowing off huge amounts of emotion by pant-hooting, swashing branches around, and stamping in unison. Of course, in a formed traditional group one shouldn’t get too creative.
I remember the first North American Indian Days in Browning when a hippie arrived. Pow-wow dancing is VERY patterned, rhythmic, and only involves extravagant and extreme moves in the context of war dances. Women and oldsters are meant to stay dignified. This hippie, confident in his world view that all things natural are accepted and appreciated among tribal peoples, bounded into the circle waving leafy branches as though he were a chimp. The Indians were aghast. He was intercepted and diverted to someplace else.
Some people interpret pow-wow dancing as religious and were even MORE aghast when someone matched video of vigorous male dancers -- all absolutely synched -- with Chubby Checker’s “Let’s do the twist!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSzhOEWW8c4 I love it. IMHO, those critics have been assimilated into the Puritan stiff-and-sober missionary control that was the origin of the punitive boarding schools and penalties for practicing old time ways that hurt so many.
Hip-hop. Rap. If this isn’t preaching, witnessing, testifying, I don’t know what is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jjp8yuEBjxs&feature=related Is it dance? What is the role of the music video in liturgy? A meditation, a prayer, a hymn.
Black people seem comfortable with claiming their African heritage and even in a formal performance setting they are cool with participating verbally or gesturing in place -- all those “I swear” hands held high. But here’s a wedding that stunned many people -- much argument about whether it was “proper” and “serious.” They’re hefty white folks of a certain generation and, sure enough, this was a joyful ceremony, though I cry every time I watch it. (I cry at weddings. An occupational hazard for a while.) Note that the father of the bride and the minister did not dance down the aisle -- the bride entered alone and the groom went up the aisle to meet her. Such things are symbolic, interpretable, “felt concepts.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0
Another way that the people have claimed back dance is street performance, “busking” for money. Charity is a religious value, right? “Break dancing,” maybe done on a sheet of cardboard to save the backs of those twirling upside down or done in a boundary drawn with chalk to signify the performance space. In the cities carry money, so you can pitch it into the hat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLQiKEMf2Jk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ7GO5-cUNk&feature=fvsr
This is a new phenomenon that took Christmas by storm last year. A “spontaneous” unannounced crowd event that the bystanders can hardly resist joining, though clearly these dancers were choreographed and knew their moves. There’s something about synchronization that is very powerful, as the Rockettes know.
And as the military knows -- marching, riding horses in drill patterns, all that -- is part of learning to work together and to intimidate others. Here’s a bit of subversion. Watch it to the end. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-PeaVFodSU&feature=fvsr I was interested that in the tough movie Restropo, one of the restoratives was dancing. It can combat death, boredom and sexual frustration. How do you get more religious than that?
Coming from an entirely different context is this vid, one of several by a woman I know nothing about, but will watch for now. I just went to YouTube and put in “Experimental Dance” which tumbled out all sorts of fascinating things. More fun than cats that play the piano. (Ouch. Crackers just bit me. She’s particularly fond of banging out concertos.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceHbv0B1kxQ This little two-part dance is called “Drive,” a strange combination of the familiar and the surprising, the banal and the exotic, where dance intersects with daily gesture. It’s cool. It’s ordinariness distilled.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ7nSabiU4o This outfit is Argentinean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FhK1a6unKM This is called “liquid” dancing. The name of the piece is “Squid.” You’ll see why.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6KD1OvqQdw Malaguena. Flamenco. More my speed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te95-UywzRs&feature=related The real thing! And now
. . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzMayfIAyT0 I ask you, which is sexier, grinding or tango? Screwing or seduction? Um, religious ecstasy or devoted faithfulness??? Wait now. I’m thinking.
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