New Dance Moves

Movementpants Dance has been very fortunate to receive a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts Dance Division Services (R FADDS). We received this monetary grant to conduct research in our stated field of "Dance". We spent this sum last weekend while researching current trends in social dancing in New York City bars. As you may know, an old law called the "cabaret law" actually makes it illegal for people to dance in bars in New York unless they give the bar extra money presumably to pay "dj's" (young men and women armed with with musical tastes and music). It seems that these bars, in spite of taking extra hard-earned cash from Manhatennites, seem to offer their patrons very little in the way of a supportive environment for new dance moves. While conducting our research, we noticed that even though people payed money to dance, generally very little dancing happened, and when it did, the variety was...well, there was no variety. Dancers moved from side to side sometimes with a slight bounce, but usually with just a rhythmic nodding of the head. Different musical genres elicited different levels of bounce and/or head nodding, but the basic form remained the same. Our grant money ran out early Saturday morning so we didn't get to sample as wide a variety of nights and nightspots as we would have liked, but I think we all saw enough. So, this week at rehearsal, we decided to come up with a few variations on standard "bar dancing" techniques.