Just 'Do-Re-Mi' it

[timepiececlock]

wisteria_ pointed her flist to this video of street theater and this Salon article about it, which just brightened my heart. I can't wait to show my mom tomorrow.

from Salon.com, on why people love watching it:

"What they are presenting to the people in that station (and the rest of us, of course) is the ideal of human co-operation. They're showing us the possibility that a bunch of unrelated, unconnected people could spontaneously burst into a song and dance routine in a train station because that's what they all wanted to do and that's what we could do too, if we set our minds to it."

Plus, look how much fun they had preparing for it.


Outside of city parades--which are planned--I've only ever been part of one moment of spontaneous public dancing. It was nothing to this scale, but it was still pretty magical in its own way. The year was 2007, mid-June. I was living and working as an AmeriCorps service volunteer in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was a weekend night, maybe Friday but probably Saturday, and my group comprised of friends/coworkers/teammates were walking down Bourbon Street, the second most famous (and by far the grossest) avenue of the old French Quarter. Because it was the weekend and only about 1 or 1:30 am, there were still tons of people getting drunk down there. My group was about 8 or 10 people, a scattered and haphazard collection wandering past the crowded bars and closed shopfronts. I was solidly drunk but not enough to lose my wits (I rarely ever have been drunk enough for that, despite a lot of trying that year.) Music blasted from stereosystems that pointed to the street and uniformly covered each block or two with a different musical backdrop. In that part of the city, in the summer, every weekend is a street party.

Because we were in the South in 2007, the most popular pop song was "The Cupid Shuffle", for obvious addictive reasons. As we were walking in the upper fourth of Bourbon Street, meandering our way toward the empty FQ streets that would lead us to our van, one of the stereos blaring into the street crowd started on the Cupid Shuffle. The awesome young woman walking beside me--our designated driver--started to do the Cupid Shuffle dance (a kicky version of the Electric Slide), and so of course I had to do it too (being drunk didn't add or take away dancing inhibitions, it merely added new flavor to the sum experience.) And so did three other people in our group. It's a song that you can do in place or do to move in a general direction, and we moved in the same general direction, though it took nearly the whole song to walk the block because of the going backward parts.

It was spontaneous, it was undiscussed, and it was amazing. There was a fad at the time to just stop working and start doing the Cupid Shuffle any time it came on the radio. I loved this aspect of the community down there so much, because it would never happen in California, or at least the places where I've lived, outside of a college campus maybe. So when one is already on Bourbon Street, there's even more incentive to bust into group dancing! We did it for the whole song, and some other people in the street joined us, but not many, but even the ones who didn't were cool with it, and it didn't matter anyway. We were in our own little world, young outsiders but not young tourists, drunk and tired and working for toothpaste money and happy as clams to be there, dancing in the French Quarter at 1 a.m. It was a good night, and watching this youtube video brings a little memory of that back. New Orleans had a deep effect on me, the good and the bad, but the city's intense love of music and fun for the sake of fun was a vibe that permeated everything, hope creeping in like light under dark doorway cracks.

ETA: A similar ad from T-mobile, not nearly as beautiful in its simplicity or unifying in its scope.

Comments

[mswyrr]

Oh, my goodness! That is totally... I'm actually teary watching the Antwerp vid. Wow.

I don't know if you've seen the 1998 show Cupid, but there's a scene where this guy just starts dancing like Fred Astaire in public, and it always made me so happy, but to see people really doing something like that, all together like that is just amazing.

It was spontaneous, it was undiscussed, and it was amazing. There was a fad at the time to just stop working and start doing the Cupid Shuffle any time it came on the radio. I loved this aspect of the community down there so much, because it would never happen in California, or at least the places where I've lived, outside of a college campus maybe.

Must have been so cool!

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

It didn't happen all the time, because often the construction and reconstruction sites I worked at that day might not have a boombox or have it set to anything but oldies music, but there were moments, oh yes.