Goodtime: A Line Dance

This is Goodtime, the third of the five songs we're working with. It is, quite obviously, an American dance. One of the qualities that differentiates it from the previous two is that it is a dance that changes the direction in which it faces, it works its way through 90 degree turns to make a circle. Well to be precise it makes four L shapes with slight spurs that can look like a swastika. I don't particularly want to go there however with this performance and there are plenty of other interesting qualities to it. The lyrics for a start are quite special and we will have to work with them quite deliberately. To this end in fact James has offered a wonderful technical solution. There are parameters that alter these songs (and dances) and one of these is a change in tempo. Goodtime speeded up does of course sound plain silly, like a gnome song. However, when it is speeded up and the pitch dropped the lyrics become audible once again and it simply sounds like a manic line dance. Working with this we have been training in dancing it at double speed and there is a strange quality that takes hold when dancing this way for a few numbers. I find that I myself have sped up in order to follow the pace and when a normal paced song plays it seems interminably slow, like some sort of zombie dance. Another attractive thing in this dance is the connotation the American West has with the libertarian spirit. A type of extreme freedom from organised social control. This brings up the question of freedom and society, of an absolute freedom of the will and how this has consequences beyond abstract philosophical and theological speculation. The recent debates on the riots in London were good examples of this question of freewill and responsibility clashing with freedom (or lack of it) within a consumerist economy to buy products. My favourite phrase about them that I heard was they were "shopping violently". Goodtime has something of this in it, it is a song of the worker who feels entitled to a weekend's play, a sort of play that is so connected to the work that it is escaping from that the two may be seen (from a distance) as two sides of the one coin. Why do I compare it to the riots? Simply as the riots held a similar tension between shopping and protest. They could be thought of as the anarcho consumerist shopping by any means necessary. Again from a distance, it appears to be two very different activities that collapse into one entity.