Skeleton Dance

   A bit of Halloween silliness and a reminder that dance reconstruction is a broader field than one might think:

 

This is actually quite a good reconstruction of part of the 1929 Walt Disney short "The Skeleton Dance", the first of the Silly Symphony series.  You can read more about its history here.  The dancers have adapted it for five instead of the original four, reversed the direction of the circles, and reinterpreted some things you can do with an animated skeleton that don't work with actual human bodies.  But it's entirely recognizable as the original dance. 

Compare:

Once I had finished enjoying the reconstruction, I wanted to know who these guys were.  With a little behind-the-scenes help I was able to track them down: it's the Hoodie fam, a group of five dancers from Japan who post short videos daily.  They have Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram channels, as well as individual Instagrams for each dancer: Masakimen, Marto, Shuto, Enoken, and Leon. 

They have hundreds of thousands of followers and hardly need the boost from me, but I do encourage everyone to give them some clicks and compliments at the original video on Youtube, here, and TikTok, here, or at the slightly different version (with the circles the correct direction!) on TikTok, here.

Happy Halloween week!

Thanks to Bess Iron Bess Miller for first posting this video to Facebook where it came to my attention!

Edited 4/1/2025 to add the image at left and the following three paragraphs:

The tune used for the actual dancing (rather than the rest of the short) in "The Skeleton Dance" and the Hoodie fam video is the 1912 tune "Dance of the Lunatics: An Idiotic Rave" by Thomas Stephen Allen, which is popular among modern ragtime dancers as a foxtrot, though it is also workable as a schottische.  The cover is shown at left; the full score may be downloaded at Digital Commons@UMaine.

The "Dance of the Skeletons" referred to at the top of the cover was not the Disney short of seventeen years later, the music for which was credited to then-Disney composer and musical director Carl W. Stalling, who later was responsible for hundreds of scores for Warner Bros. Cartoons' series Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.  It actually referred to Allen's 1901 composition "Dance of the Skeletons: A Descriptive", which may be heard here.  Perhaps this connection inspired Stalling, who proposed the concept for the short to Walt Disney?

For comparison with the Hoodie fam (and the skeletons), a video of dancers doing bits of assorted ragtime dances (one-step, two-step, foxtrot, Grizzly Bear...) to "Dance of the Lunatics" in 2022, with the music provided by Matt Tolentino and his New Liberty Dance Orchestra, may be viewed here.