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!