Proletarian Dance 1

On tour with Indifference we finally came to the perfect spot to make the first video adaptation of our dances. Karl Marx Kopf, Chemnitz is a quite special place that, in spite of the rain, lifted my spirits immediately upon seeing so ambiguous a monument.

photo: James Dunn

There are of course still four more dances we have in store so maybe when the time is right we'll adapt another one. I already have a few dream locations in mind such as a leisure centre with fake palm trees in the North of England for Agadoo or an East Asian supermarket for The Papaya.  

What we owe the Swiss

The presentation of the dances would not be complete without the fifth, the Birdie Song. This video captures it rather well in both its essential movements and profoundly unprofessional quality.

I cannot swear by it but I do believe I must have danced it in similar situations as a young boy. I am not aware when I first heard it, it feels as if it has always been there in the background. I discovered it is of Swiss origin and from Davos in the 1950s it has spread far and wide. It must be a close contest between it and The Macarena as to which is the most widely know of the dances we perform. Of the two the birdie dance has by far the more traditional feel to it, it sounds as if it could be very old and I could imagine a medieval version of it without too much difficulty. But no, it is a song and dance that took flight after the war. This time frame does in fact work in a sense with the text we overlay upon it, a collation of Marx quotes stitched together with my best efforts at simplified Marxist theory. It gives it a cold war time frame though to be honest I am just as conscious of how such a text can reflect our current economic plight. I rather like the way that they sit beside one another, Marx and the Birdie Dance, for without precisely undercutting one another neither do they amplify the message or mood of the other. They simply colour and contaminate in a very particular way.