Capering & Kickery

Digging It

I keep coming across what I can only call weird little 1950s novelty dances that were supposedly enormously popular among teenagers of the time.  In the case of The Dig, I can't quite see it, myself, or even imagine it as a less-jaded teenager...but then I remember that the Bunny Hop was a genuine teenage fad during the same era, so anything is possible.  The Dig was at least briefly regionally popular, appearing on Oklahoma Bandstand, the local version of the televised dance program, American Bandstand.

As described in the November 1958 issue of Dance Magazine by columnist Dorothea Duryea Ohl (daughter of the famous Oscar Duryea), The Dig was not a spontanous dance-floor innovation like its contemporary, the hand jive.  It was choreographed by Oklahoma City dance instructor Jimmie Crowell:

The owner of a recording company wanted a dance for teen-agers to fit an as-yet-untitled number.  He liked Jimmie's brainchild so much that he gave the same title to the record: The Dig, now on Chess label, Ken Kash Kwintet, No. 1699 (Flip side: Vicious Vodka)

Crowell died only a few years ago, after a long career as a dance instructor.  Other than that Chess single, I can find no trace of the Ken Kash Kwintet.  I suspect that they were an in-house group of Chess musicians pulled together for this recording.

A Village Dance Ritual

For those reading this later: please note the original date of this post!

Dance history inevitably skews toward the dances of the upper classes, since only their dancing masters had the leisure, literacy, and financial incentive to record what they were teaching.  Dances of the lower classes are often lost to us.  But in the age of video, we are fortunate that anthropological expeditions have been able to record the native dances of specific cultures, preserving them in their pristine form before they are corrupted by contact with outside cultural influences.

I have recently had the privilege of viewing two videos made in the late 1970s in which male villagers wearing costumes symbolic of their culture's masculine archetypes sing to younger villagers and dance in a ritual mating display responded to even by those entirely unaware of its cultural context.  The first recording was made on location with the dancers in their native area.  For the second, the dancers were transported to a Los Angeles television studio with a live audience for a performance broadcast on television on January 6, 1979.

We are quite lucky to have a dated record of that performance, since it was there, in an act of aggressive cultural appropriation, that the young members of the audience, egged on by the show's host, displayed their own simplified version of the dance.  Unaware of its social significance or the symbolism of the costumes, their superficial interpretation (really only a set of arm movements) focused only on the alphabetic recitative that forms a part of the chorus of the ritual song.  In a moment of stupendous arrogance, the show's host even suggests to the startled dancers that they incorporate this new version into their own performance.

This cultural faux pas would be only a minor footnote in dance history were it not for the national reach of the broadcast and the catchy beat of the song, which caused the simplified version to became a nationwide craze which has survived in various forms to this very day on the social dance floor as well as in non-dance venues.  It is vanishingly rare to have both an unadulterated version of a village dance as well as a recording of the moment in which it was whitewashed into a popular dance fad.

More than three decades after these videos were made, after much careful study, I am pleased to be able to finally present a reconstruction of the original chorus of this ritual village dance.

Hollywood Line Hustle

It's been quite some time since I did any disco line dances, but here's one for the folks who love these session at the Dance Flurry.  Sadly, I'm not teaching there this year, but you can do this one on your own!

Unusually for one of these dances, I actually have it in two different sources: The Complete Book on Disco and Ballroom Dancing (1979) by Ann T. Kilbride and A. Algoso, and The Complete Guide to Disco Dancing (1978) by Karen Lustgarten.  The sequence is almost exactly the same in both books.  Kilbride and Algoso mention alternate names: the L.A. Line Dance or L.A. Line Hustle and note that it was popular in a particular area of the country, presumably southern Califoria.  Lustgarten calls it "one of the most popular line dances" and suggests disco hits to dance it to: Boz Skaggs' "Lowdown" for a slow version, and Vickie Sue Robinson's "Turn The Beat Around" for a faster one.

The Palais Glide

Between the two World Wars a fad for easy and often silly "romping" sequence dances swept Britain.  The Lambeth Walk is the best known of these, but many others survive.  Among them is the Palais Glide, which can be done by a couple or by an entire line of dancers side-by-side in a line, arms around each others' waists.  It is a living tradition in the British isles, having been danced continuously since the 1930s, and survives today as a ceilidh and party dance as well as being performed by World War II reenactors.

Most secondary sources consider the Lambeth Walk (1937) the first of the romping sequence dances and date the Palais Glide to 1938, but one of my sheet music sources for it is actually dated 1935.  This might be a misprint, or it might be that it took a few years to catch on or that it was not popularly accepted until after the Lambeth Walk.

The dance requires eight bars of 4/4 music and consists of a thrice-repeated short grapevine sequences in a slow-quick-quick-slow rhythm followed by a series of forward steps.  In 2001, Syd Bruce recalled dancing it during World War II:

I can remember as a teenager during the war, going to socials and dances in the school, attended by soldiers and land girls billeted in the village and sometimes sailors from Point Clear, which were very popular.  Seeing the Palais Glide, Waltz etc and even the Highland Fling performed in army boots was something to behold!

New York Bus Stop

I always end up reconstructing line dances when I have a relevant gig coming up.  This time it's the Dance Flurry, where I will be teaching an entire session of disco line dances a month or so from now.

This is another short line dance, only twenty-four beats long.  There are many, many dances called some version of "Bus Stop" -- it seems every city or perhaps every club had its own special one.  This is not the only dance I have found that's called the New York Bus Stop!

The source for this particular version is Let's Disco, no author given, published in 1978 by K-tel International, Inc.  It's slightly unusual in that the quarter-turns at the end of each iteration are to the right rather than to the left and occur in mid-dance rather than at the end.

Rock 'n' Cha

Ever so often I come across the oddest little novelties.  The Rock'n'Cha is a conga-line type dance which was discussed in the January, 1958 issue of Dance Magazine.  The cha-cha was first introduced in the 1950s, and it seems to have spawned some weird group variants (Cha-Cha Choo-Choo Caboose, anyone?)  The notes for this dance were sent to the magazine by Chicago resident Louise Ege, who attributed them to Grace Hansen, Dance Coordinator and Professional Consultant for the Chicago YMCA and head of the ballroom committee of the Chicago National Associate of Dance Masters.  Mrs. Ege claimed that Chicago teens loved the dance, with it even having "replaced the Bunny Hop in their affections."  I'm not sure what this says about either the taste of Chicago teens in early 1958 or the accuracy of Mrs. Ege's observations of contemporary teen culture.

The formation is a single line, hand on shoulder of the person in front.  Everyone starts on the same foot and does the same moves.  There are three sections to the dance: the Rock, the Penguin (!), and the Break-Away Turn, danced in a sequence of Rock-Rock-Penguin-Turn.  The names of the Rock and Turn sequences are self-explanatory.  The Penguin refers to the movement of that section being "like a penguin, jiggling and teetering from side to side."  I usually find it best not to think too hard about this sort of simile in a dance choreography.

The Line Hustle

Line dances don't really get all that difficult, but there are a few longer ones with more complicated and less repetitive step sequences.  One of these is the Line Hustle.  These instructions are taken from Carter Lovisone's The Disco Hustle (1979) and claim to be "the original form used as the basis for all variations of the Line Hustle."  I would take this claim with a grain of salt, since Lovisone's book came out several years after the dance's first wave of popularity in the mid-1970s.

This version of the Line Hustle is a fifty-two beat dance.  My favorite music for it is Van McCoy's 1975 hit, "The Hustle," a snippet of which is included below.  The song is available on several different compilations, including The Hustle & The Best Of Van McCoy.  I like to wait out the intro and start at the "do the hustle!" verbal cue.  But as usual with line dances, the Line Hustle will also work to just about any disco tune.

Note that the so-called "Charleston" section below bears no relation to the Charleston in its 1920s form.

California Bus Stop/California Hustle

Still working my way through my collection of 1970s line dances, here's another one from The Complete Book on Disco and Ballroom Dancing (1979).  The California Bus Stop, a.k.a. the California Hustle, is an easy thirty-six-beat dance.  It's most notable characteristic is that it features claps and stamps on every fourth beat throughout the first two parts of the dance.

The Line Walk

Here's another very basic line dance; any Kickery readers planning a 1970s-theme party are going to be all set this week.  This one is also from The Complete Book on Disco and Ballroom Dancing (1979).  It's thirty-eight beats long, but very easy, though the odd length means it will cross the phrase of the music.  That's not unusual in disco-era line dances but drives some people crazy.

Unusually, the Line Walk starts on the left foot.

The Disco Duck

Yes, here I go again with another easy line dance from The Complete Book on Disco and Ballroom Dancing (1979).  I actually like these dances (which date back to my childhood), though I don't usually do them in batches.  The immediate excuse for this extended excursion into the 1970s is that I'm going to be teaching an entire session of disco line dances a week or so from now at the Dance Flurry.  This one is twice as long as Hot Chocolate/Bonaparte's Retreat (described here and here) and has slightly harder steps and "quick-quick-slow" rhythm sections which make it a more interesting dance.

The obvious music is the song "Disco Duck" by Rick Dees, which was a top Billboard hit for a couple of months in 1976, but it will work to any piece of lively disco music.  Happily, the dance does not include any arm-flapping or other duck-like miming.

Bonaparte's Retreat

No, this has nothing to do with the Regency era!  This is one of a trio of easy line dances I've drawn from The Complete Book on Disco and Ballroom Dancing (1979).  It's only sixteen beats long; line dances don't get any easier than that.  The name supposedly derives from the floor pattern of the dance:

...first the dancers mobilize, as they move in a line down the side, then they "retreat" backward and perform a "holding" action, before wheeling to the left and "defending" in another direction.

I find it's best not to think too deeply about this.  The book states that it's also known as the "Hot Chocolate Line Dance," and it is in fact the same step pattern as the dance "Hot Chocolate" I described in a previous post.  (So yes, this is kind of a cheat of a post; the only new material here is the stuff above.)

The New Yorker

Another guilty-pleasure disco-era line dance!  This is one I've actually used regularly as an easy cool-down dance at the end of my own practices for the last couple of years.  The source is The Official Guide to Disco Dance Steps by Jack Villari & Kathleen Sims Villari, 1978.  There's no special music for this or any other line dance, but I often use either Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" or Donna Summers' "Bad Girls".  The only thing even mildly unusual about the dance itself is that instead of quarter-turns after each repetition there are half-turns.

Hot Chocolate

I try to remember that history (dance or otherwise) didn't actually stop sometime before I was born, so today I'm flashing back to 1978 and the era of disco line dances and, happily, a flood of disco dance manuals.  I still find disco music very danceable, so ever so often I play around with reconstructing a few line dances to use as warmups or cool-downs at my own dance practices. 

Here's a simple one: Hot Chocolate.  It's only sixteen beats long, which is a very short repeat for a line dance.  This may not be the easiest line dance ever, but it's got to be high on the list!  The dance might have been inspired by the group of the same name, probably best known for the mid-'70s hit song "You Sexy Thing."  The source is Let's Disco, no author given, published in 1978 by K-tel International, Inc.