Paradigm Shift

Millions of years ago, when the warm amniotic seas covered the earth, our ancestors crept from the primordial muck and, slithering to the beat of their labouring hearts, began to dance. Eventually, this became ballet. Ballet became codified, rigid, recognizable. With their hair skun in buns so tight that some suffered irreversible changes of facial expression, ballerinas leaped and spun to the delight of Romantic audiences everywhere. No one knew why they leaped and spun so much, and no one much cared. Generally everyone died at the end of the ballet, and that was good enough for the Romantics. Of course, technique at this level came at a high price. In order to spin faster, leap higher, and tie hair tighter, dancers subjected themselves to the savage ministrations of an ancient crone with a cattle prod, who was herself but a manifestation of a universal, bloody-handed teaching force. Under her rod, and set to an interminable barrage of dipshit toy piano music, these dancers learned their trade. And then, for reasons still not adequately understood, someone invented tap dancing. Now, dancers did not do so much leaping and spinning, but they did something new and different -- they made noise, and plenty of it. It was better than opera -- no one had to pretend to understand all those foreign words anymore. And no one was too sorry to see those buns go, either. Nevertheless, there was the deranged grinning to deal with. And the unfortunate association of tap with fishnet stockings stuffed like sausage-casings with too much white flesh. And so, on balance, when the show was over, the haunting, irreducible question remained: Why tap? More sinister still was the rise of what we now call jazz. Perhaps your brain is immediately clogged with visions of Ethel Merman belting out Everything’s Coming Up Roses, or Ben Vereen doing Mr Bojangles in toreador pants. But the truth is stranger and more disturbing than THAT. Rock videos ushered in an era of dance that resembled nothing so much as an epileptic with St Vitus’s Dance. A riot of crotch-fondling, a very festival of spastic twitching and lurid innuendo has led some scholars to ask the question: Is jazz art? Is it dance, or is it merely a kind of sweaty, aerobic annoyance? No one knows for sure. But questions like these were a kindergarten exercise compared to those posed by the advent of modern dance. On one side were those who held that modern dance meant a collective of grim, hairy creatures, presumed to be women, who did dance interpretations of grain tariffs or Soviet tractor factories. On the other side were those who held that it meant a troupe of flakes and weirdos flitting about pretending to be the wind, or a tree. To them, Isadora Duncan was the embodiment of this intellectually debauched form. The two camps were bitterly opposed, and at at least one conference, tempers flared and fisticuffs broke out. No mutually acceptable view has ever been proposed. And so, after the arid wasteland of ballet, the irredeemable cheesiness of tap, and slack-jawed idiocy of jazz, and the demented schizophrenia of modern, no one knew quite what to think anymore. A kind of bored resignation set in. All of this was familiar ground. Forget all of this. Now it’s our turn.

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Copyright © 1996 Akimbo Dance. All rights reserved.
Revised: January 04, 2002.