Gangnam Style: a contemporary Macarena

Gangnam Style was a hit just a little after we had finished putting the show together which is a pity in a way as we would most probably have included it in the show if it had been around at that time. If the opportunity comes to work on the show again then I think we will have to master this one and work it in, most of the other dances are a little dated but this one shows that the impulse to dance in unison is as alive and well today as it ever was.

As with some of the other videos, this one is not so much a dance as a pop video that features a lot of dancing. This means there is not a very clear authoritative way to dance it.  There are people who will try and teach it to you but there is no precise original routine to go with the song. Compare it to the Birdy Song, for example, which is as much a dance as a song and which was doing the rounds before videos of songs became expected. The Macarena too is very clear as a dance, it's brutal simplicity makes it stand out from most of the other post video age dances.

Another song / dance that has come to my attention recently is Xiaopinguo (Little Apple) this, like Gingham Style, is more a song with a smart video featuring dancers which has become very popular (in China) and spawned countless imitators. When you start to see videos of kids doing it, friends, colleagues and shoppers at it too, then you are treading into Indifference territory. Embarrassing though it is to admit it, I have started to learn the lyrics to this one: in China it is always handy to have a karaoke number up your sleeve.

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.

Getting Started: Agadoo

Hello, this is the first posting for this blog following the performance Indifference and as such I feel a duty to EXPLAIN what it is, why it is, where, how it is and what it will be. Needless to say I will not nor cannot do that. Instead I will simply drop into the middle of it and we will have to work out where we are as we go along.

Today will be the first day of rehearsals at the Nightingale in Brighton. We have just come from London where we were last week working at Chisenhale Dance Space. Katja and I will resume our dancing and philosophising to music that should have died a natural death a while ago but which we have brought back into the spotlight only to have it manipulated, speeded up, slowed down, pulled one way and another by the ever inventive James Dunn. Neither Katja nor I are trained dancers, though we both are experienced performers and can learn complicated sequences so the results are quite curious. It is as if the dance is used as a way to show the person rather than the person the vehicle to show the dance.

Here is the original Agadoo:

This was Black Lace's biggest and most distinctive hit from 1984. Like the other music we are working with, I never touched it at the time as it was about collective choreography, which seemed to me as an adolescent boy, the most desperately uncool thing imaginable. I am sure I have been to British wedding receptions and heard this playing and seen grannies and children getting up and following the movements. In a culture that supposedly values the individual so highly it is curious that there remain these group dances for amateurs that are not folkloric but contemporary. It is these dances that we are inspired by and it is only now with the distance of time and the filter of art that I can come to appreciate them and find something in them that completely passed me by first time round.