Video • Video Digest: December 21, 2007

[ note: technical difficulties with some of these videos. all, however, run fine if push the play button.—ed. ]

If there’s one thing that I identify with the holiday season, it’s that sense of malaise of long car rides to visit family, only to sit down in cozy sweaters and watch TV. That much inactivity is not healthy for anybody, and thus the need for the holiday dance party. So instead of driving up to Wisconsin and talking about road conditions, just get out of the car and start dancing in the street when you get there.




Like the lyrics to a billion songs, it really doesn’t matter if you can’t dance, just as long as you get up on the dance floor and move. Only the daring take the chance to writhe in a fit of spastic convulsions. One note about this clip; I bet when Crispin Glover started dancing like this for Friday the Thirteenth Part IV, the director probably stopped the take multiple times to get him to dance in a bland, ignorable way. Now a few years later, it is the Dance of the Glover that is memorable, and the actual events of the movie are relegated to the dustbins. You too could be like this man and make your place in the pantheon of history with dance.




And there’s plenty of new moves available for those in the know. Some think that the days of songs that introduced dance moves, like the Mashed Potato or the Hucka Buck, to the uninitiated are long gone, but instead, I’d like to bring a bit of that back. Here then are the new dances for the holiday season, starting off with, what I call, The Consumption; a two-person dance, where one holds the other who is going through exorcist-like convulsions as the holy spirit moves through them.




The Candiru, like it’s Amazonian fish counterpart, is a Brazillian move that either replicates the feeling of something swimming the wrong way as you watch awkward avant-techno dances from the eighties, or it is that dance itself. Very dangerous. Only for the advanced.




The Dance of the Cossack has felled many an uncle at a Bar Mitzvah, but there are modern equivalents that may prove less trying on the sciatica. There’s the Ian Svenonious Double-Foot Kick, which is tricky in a small basement show, but much easier in a living room. Watch out for the bass player.




With enough room available, a good high-step can show yourself off as cock of the walk or lord of the dance, just as if you were breakdance fighting. This one is called The Drunken Nazi, wherein you wear binoculars and try to kick whatever might be near your feet. Imagine if you could, a marching band full of people in lockstep with this.




DJs want you out on that dance floor, as they’re paid by the satisfaction of the audience, so it’s in their best interest to choose songs that get people on that floor to “do the train”. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes you shouldn’t dance. Really, now is about when you should stop.




—Llewellyn Hinkes

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