The kids, they dance and shake their bones...

[cookie]

The old man and I went dancing to our local Grateful Dead band, Lost Sailors, tonight (we were comped in by the keyboard player).

Damn! We needed that!

I wasn't encouraged to dance as a child, but once I hit college, people from pentecostalists to Deadheads taught (or rather, allowed) me to shake it. I've grown to crave dance despite my self consciousness. My hair and clothes are all wet, but I feel cleansed. I haven't danced for so long.

I know Steve (squaredancecaller) gets it, but who else on the board really enjoys dancing? I love it and wish I had some kind of training in it (I do have some elementary line and square dancing skill thanks to public school). Dancing to a Dead cover band is great because nobody gives a s*** how you look (and there's always somebody moving in an "alternative" way to the music who looks more weird than you feel). It was the healthiest thing I've done in months; I feel so good now.

Do you dig dancing?

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Moving to music... what could be more instinctive?

I sweated through 4 shirts dancing at Rita's retirement party last week (and I was calling some of the time!).

Community/ folk dances are a part of every society, part of the connective tissue of every society, but today most Americans sense the spirit of community dance only as a felt lack, a ghost.





Just watched a documentary on this, Maori haka dancing, simulates the ferocity of battle. There are all kinds of dances!

[shrugs]

I've never been a get on the floor right away dancer but the righ band doing dead tunes, Grayson Capps, Kermit Ruffins, Rebecca Barry, Vidacovich/Porter plus guest trio, the Geraniums, the Iquanas, Paul Cebar and his many collectives get me on the floor.


AFATGDG, They Love Each Other is a great tune to dance with your lady.

[Tom Storer]

I'm too inhibited. Actually, I did do some ballroom dance courses with my wife and we had a great time. But I'm too inhibited to dance outside that context. It's my Puritan heritage. Seriously!

[jesus marion joseph]

This is a pretty accurate depiction of me on the dance floor. Especially at a Dead/tribute band show.

Originally Posted by Squaredancecalling Steve

[Gary Sisco]

I used to like it, though I've spent a lot more time, even as a kid, watching people dance from the stage, which I also like to do, very much. It makes me feel like I'm not doing my job if people aren't dancing, or at least moving in some kind of way.

From club life here for years and my little tour a couple of years ago, and reports from my pals out west, it seems like people dance more out west than they do here anymore. It's a strange thing for me to see people standing in rows on the dancefloor, pints in hand, watching a band play.

It's a lot more fun for me to play when people are dancing. It feels more like a mutual thing happening.

[patricia]

There are few things that I enjoy more than dancing.
My parents were wonderful dancers, used to go out every weekend, dressed to the nines to dance at the Legion Hall in our neighbourhood.
But Mother had spent her early adulthood in Paris and London in the thirties and danced almost every night at one club or another.
Dad could dance beautifully as well, I guess because most men from that era could.
Hug-dancing, as my brothers and I called it.
I learned to dance on my dad's feet.
I remember as a little kid, very late one evening I heard music on the radio in the kitchen and peeked around the corner to see Mom and Dad doing the Tango. It was mesmorizing. They didn't look like parents at all, but like illicet lovers. WOW!!
In any case, love of music and dancing seem to have been genetic because all three of my brothers and I love to dance.

[shrugs]

and of course, a few shots of Tennessee courage always helps....

[Gentle Giant]

I can't sit still when music's playing, but I'm not sure what I do could be called dancing. But I do envy people who seem to have control over their bodies' movements.

[Jazzzoline]

Originally Posted by Tom Storer

I'm too inhibited. Actually, I did do some ballroom dance courses with my wife and we had a great time. But I'm too inhibited to dance outside that context. It's my Puritan heritage. Seriously!

You French ? Puritan ???

[Jazzzoline]

My son is a hockey player for his school team. They had 2 girls in their team (2 years older than he, 15 y/o). The showering for the team requires a bit of management, due to the girls in the tem, which can be tricky when they do play on foreign rinks.
Now, try to imagine the picture: The 2 girls showering and the rest of the team, teen boys waiting for them to be done, dancing with a towel around their hips. The 2 girls get out of the shower with their towel around them … the boys doing a circle, still dancing, and the 2 girls in the middle of that circle …

[Root Doctor]

Richard Thompson wrote a song about my dancing: two left feet.

[tippy]

Totally love dancing but VERY particular about the music I will dance to. It can't be dull or repetitive - unless it is repetitive in a way that I like. It has to be something that inspires me to move.

[clinthopson]

If you're not doing the Lindy, the New Yorker or the Balboa, you're just jumpin' around.

[Gary Sisco]

I can Lindy. Or at least I could last time I found myself in that position.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Dancers are the athletes of God.
– Albert Einstein

Dancing is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff.
– Rahel Varnhagen

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
– T.S. Eliot

Look at the graceful way she dances:
One foot speaks, the other answers.
– Elvis Costello

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
– William Butler Yeats

Zorba, teach me to dance!
– Nikos Kazantzakis

That which cannot be spoken can be sung,
That which cannot be sung can be danced.
– Old French Saying

True freedom is being able to dance in your chains.
– Fredrich Nietzsche

The girl who can't dance says the band can't play.
– Yiddish Proverb


... the hilarious joy, the laughing abandonment, the rhythmic ecstasy, the contagious good fellowship, without which the dances are nothing at all.
– Lloyd "Pappy" Shaw, the father of modern square dancing




Why thank you so much. I adore to.

I don't want to dance with him. I don't want to dance with anybody. And even if I did, it wouldn't be him. He'd be well down among the last ten. I've seen the way he dances; it looks like something you do on Saint Walpurgis Night. Just think, not a quarter of an hour ago, here I was sitting, feeling so sorry for the poor girl he was dancing with. And now I'm going to be the poor girl. Well, well. Isn't it a small world?...
But what could I do? Everyone else at the table had got up to dance, except him and me. There was I, trapped. Trapped like a trap in a trap.
– Dorothy Parker, from "The Waltz"




Fiddler Jones

THE EARTH keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to "Toor-a-Loor."
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill-only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle-
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.
– Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

[cookie]

Love the quotations!

I had a bit of a scare after my night of dancing. We got home around 1:30 and were pretty pumped from our (rare) night out together. We were listening to the Dead and sharing our thoughts on life, the universe and everything.

Around 3:30, I got really lightheaded. This happens to me sometimes when I stay up to the point of exhaustion. I sat with my head between my knees for a while but I still felt dizzy. Then I started having weird, pulsing pressure just around the bottom of my rib cage. It gripped really tight, then it pulsed, then it gripped again, then pulsed a different rhythm. I said, "Oh, no. You gotta be kidding me. Not a heart attack!" I got up to straighten up my body and get to the couch where I could lie with my feet up (as I normally do when I get this dizzyness). I didn't make it. I basically collapsed onto the floor. I didn't really lose consciousness, but it's fuzzy. I sort of crumpled and banged my head on the floor. I just lay there and put my feet up against a nearby door jamb and breathed deeply.

I didn't go to the hospital, which in retrospect, was probably not a good decision. I was whipped the next day and took it pretty easy, but I had another dizzy spell late night. So today I called the doc and he sent me to the ER. All the cardiopulmonary stuff looked fine, but it turned out that my potassium level was very low. They pumped a potassium IV into me and sent me home with instructions to eat bananas (blech! Give me kale, man).

So I'll live to dance another day. In fact, probably not a bad idea to do a little joy dancing every day. I really like to put on an Earth, Wind, and Fire or other funky cut and just move to it to boost my energy or mood.

I admit it was scary though. I was afraid I may have danced myself to death!

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Originally Posted by cookie

I was afraid I may have danced myself to death!

Do you remember the story of the Red Shoes, the shoes that wouldn't let the wearer stop dancing?

[clinthopson]

OBE's version:


I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, Madame, with you
My heart won't let my feet do things that they should do

You know what?, you're lovely
You know what?, you're so lovely
And, oh, what you do to me
I'm like an ocean wave that's bumped on the shore
I feel so absolutely stumped on the floor

When you dance, you're charming and you're gentle
'specially when you do the Continental
But this feeling isn't purely mental
For, heaven rest us, I am not asbestos

And that's why
I won't dance, why should I?
I won't dance, how could I?
I won't dance, merci beaucoup
I know that music leads the way to romance,
So if I hold you in arms I won't dance

I won't dance, don't ask me,
I won't dance, don't ask me
I won't dance, Madame, with you
My heart won't let me feet do things that they want to do

You know what?, you're lovely,
Ring-a-ding-ding, you're lovely
And, oh, what you do to me
I'm like an ocean wave that's bumped on the shore
I feel so absolutely stumped on the floor

When you dance, you're charming and you're gentle
'specially when you do the Continental
But this feeling isn't purely mental
For, heaven rest us, I am not asbestos

and that's why
I won't dance, I won't dance
I won't dance, merci beaucoup
I know that music leads the way to romance
So if I hold you in arms I won't dance!!

[cookie]

I hadn't remembered the Red Shoes story until you mentioned it Steve. I also re-discovered by searching "dance herself to death" that Le Sacre du Printemps is about a girl sacrificially dancing herself to death.

Next time, I think I'll make sure I drink some Gatorade or eat some watermelon or something!

Clint, that's one of my all-time favorite Cole Porter tunes. The bridge is tricky harmonically and I love the word play. To me "If I hold you in my arms, I won't dance" implies that perhaps, something more intimate than dancing might occur in those arms--I won't dance, but maybe I'll start kissin' ya! I don't sing the tune because I haven't mastered the bridge to my liking yet, but boy, do I love to hear it. My favorite version is Louis and Ella.

I used to avoid dancing and I'm still not totally confident about it (unless it's a Dead situation where it doesn't matter). Like Gary, I really enjoy playing for dancers. It's always a pleasant shock when somebody gets up to dance to my tunes in a non-dance situation like a restaurant or concert. It's as though the music literally moves people and that's very gratifying.

[Gary Sisco]

I love it, Cookie. Out west they seem to dance more, still. Really dance, I mean. Two people dancing together, touching, even. Real dances like the two step, the lindy, and so on. When I was making my living in the bars, the thing was, if you wanted return gigs, your job was to make people dance and drink alcohol. Have fun, in short. That's what rang up the bar owners tape at the end of the night. I was a bit taken aback a couple years ago when I started playing out again, as I'm not at all accustomed to playing for a roomful of people who are sitting and just watching us play. If people weren't dancing in the days, we just started rocking harder until they did.

One gig couple of years ago, had it not been for my knowing nearly everyone in the room, and the length of their hair (if not the color), I could have taken the audience for an elderly bus trip bunch. :-0 But there were still some dancing in the back of the room, everywhere we went. And out on the floor out west.

One great thing on the old folks' night (which was actually a CD release party for my record), I was singing an old anthem from the 70s and in the back of the room I saw an old friend and her daughter dancing for real, and I realized as I was playing the song that she was pregnant with that daughter the year that record came out ('76), so her daughter's known those songs literally all of her life, and I was watching a grown woman dance and sing to a song she first heard whle still in the womb. It was a fun realization and to me shows the power of music across all kinds of different boundaries.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

There's a kind of reverse Red Shoes story in square dancing. When Lloyd Shaw was collecting square dance movements, he found over 80 different moves called Do Sa Do. The kind they did in El Paso he called the Do Paso, and modified it to be partner by the left arm, corner by the right, partner by left. But the original call continued lefts and rights until the caller told you to stop. The legend is that a caller in El Paso called the move and immediately died of a heart attack, and the dancers continued doing their left/ right/ lefts until their tracks wore the floor thin and the dance floor collapsed under them.

[Tom Storer]

Originally Posted by Jazzzoline

You French ? Puritan ???

I'm not French, I'm an American in Paris. My ancestors on the paternal side were Brits who moved to the Massachusetts Bay colony, hence lots of Puritan blood circulates in my veins.

[cookie]

Oooooh! "An American In Paris" is a GREAT dance movie!

I love watching classic dancers! And many of them were decent singers, too.

Singing *and* dancing is another whole aerobic ballgame. That's why I bow before the great Tina Turner. Wow!

[Gary Sisco]

Dancers can give you rhythmic ideas, sometimes, by their movements. The really cool thing is when that happens and the dancer picks up on it.

[groover]

Originally Posted by Squaredancecalling Steve

There's a kind of reverse Red Shoes story in square dancing. When Lloyd Shaw was collecting square dance movements, he found over 80 different moves called Do Sa Do. The kind they did in El Paso he called the Do Paso, and modified it to be partner by the left arm, corner by the right, partner by left. But the original call continued lefts and rights until the caller told you to stop. The legend is that a caller in El Paso called the move and immediately died of a heart attack, and the dancers continued doing their left/ right/ lefts until their tracks wore the floor thin and the dance floor collapsed under them.

I'll bet Robert Hunter was aware of that legend when he wrote the lyrics to "Row Jimmy".

Here's a half dollar if you dare
Double twist when you hit the air,
Look at Julie down below,
The levee doin' the do-pas-o.

I say row Jimmy row, gonna get there, I don't know
Seems a common way to go, get out and
row, row, row, row, row.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Interesting, Groover! With their bluegrass roots, somebody in the band must have played some square dances along the way.

http://www.tamtwirlers.org/tamination/ms/do_paso.html

It's less frequently called these days, most often as a nicely-flowing prelude for a T-Cup Chain:

http://www.tamtwirlers.org/taminatio...cup_chain.html

[Captain Hate]

Originally Posted by cookie

who else on the board really enjoys dancing?

When my eldest Hatette was married in New Delhi, there were lots of parties with bhangra music, a Punjabi type of pop music that's an interesting stew of rhythms and instruments and very good for dancing. It took me a while of watching to see how the people were moving to it (mercifully it doesn't have a particularly extensive number of songs; you start hearing songs repeated after a while) and, as father of the bride, I thought I had a responsibility to not be a cultural tight-ass. So I was on the dance-floor a lot, to the point where at the wedding reception itself that was held outside, there was steam coming off my head. I may have looked like a geek except for two things indicating otherwise: A particularly talented young teen told me I was "very graceful" and I was invited to other parties.

Fortunately at the US wedding, we were able to find a DJ with a bhangra mix so I think a lot of US people were exposed to it for the first time. Ollie was there and wrote about it on his blog; he can weigh in on whether I looked like a dweeb or not. Even if I did it was great fun.

When that Hatette, who is an excellent dancer, was younger she went to see Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys with me at a club one night, at which we danced for most of the evening. Keeping count of the 3/4 rhythms was a challenge but it was still fun.

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

Love bhangra! Wonderful dance music. Have a half-dozen albums of it, most 80s bhangra hip-hop fusion from Punjabi expats in UK and Europe. I even use one regularly for calling, Aaja Bilo by Balwinder Safri, speeded up a bit.