For something called dance music, dance itself doesn’t have much of a central role in the culture surrounding it. Dancing, as in what you do with your friends on the dance floor at the club, is of course one of its central pillars, but dance, as in a organized system of movement and gesture, is a rarity. In nearly any venue catering to electronic dance music you’ll see a lot of energetic motion, just not a lot of it that looks like it was considered ahead of time.
Pop music audiences across the board have for the most part abandoned coordinated movement. Rock has been shedding it since its acid rock days until only moshing (and hardcore punk’s idiosyncratic physical vocabulary) was the only option left. Hip-hop, which once considered breakdancing one of its primary elements, had largely jettisoned the concept by the time Terror Squad released their chart-topping 2004 single “Lean Back”, which perversely used the structure of the novelty dance song to promote the idea of dancing itself as terminally corny. Outside of TV shows, a few specific communities (footwork dancers in Chicago, line dancers in Oklahoma), and the New York City subway it’s hard to find pop-minded dance that’s worth discussing.
Last night’s Bounce Ballroom, the kick-off event of this year’s month-long Red Bull Music Academy NYC festival at the Brooklyn Night Bazaar in Greenpoint, paired four DJs who work in specific genres alongside troupes of dancers working in the particular styles associated with them. For once, it was a night of dance music with dance boldly underlined.
DJ Gip and DJ Sliink opened and closed the night with speedy, raucous Jersey club music, a high-speed collision of house and rap that’s grown its own distinctive club culture that’s only recently been getting attention from outside of New Jersey. Its dancers are similarly into creating hybrids, throwing together hip-hop moves both new and old, well-known and regionally obscure, along with bits and pieces of what seems like a hundred years’ worth of pop dance moves. The performances were mind-bogglingly frenetic, but the scheduling wasn’t kind to them, and by the time they took the stage in the early morning for their second set the crowd’s energy was flagging and the room had started to empty out.
By far the most popular part of the night was the detour into voguing, the style born in the gay ballroom scene that was popularized in the straight world first by Madonna’s “Vogue” as well as the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which has recently seen its status as an underground cultural touchstone expand far out from its original audience of club kids. Voguing takes the idea of identity as performance to a riotous extreme. A small group of dancers, most of them gay men, took turns strutting up and down a special-built runway in the center of the room in a surreal caricature of fashion models, performing rapid, intricate sequences of hand and arm gestures and frequently dipping down into a crouch or suddenly dropping flat on their back, a cartoon-quality pratfall with an acrobatic elegance that turns a parody of someone losing their balance into a weirdly powerful display of strength. With a fairly small repertoire of basic moves, voguing seems like it should be easy to learn, but stringing them together requires an immense amount of agility and coordination, not to mention hair-trigger improvisational abilities, which became clear when several women from the audience bum rushed the stage to show off clumsy moves that only emphasized how unreal the legitimate dancers were.
Hot 97 DJ Bobby Konders represented dancehall for the night, with a group of Brooklyn bruk-up and flex dancers accompanying him from a tiered stage. Bruk-up is the Jamaican style that you might be familiar with if you’ve ever watched any dancehall music videos; flexing is its Brooklyn-born descendent that pushes impressionistic breakdance moves like the robot into the fully abstract realm. (You may have seen this New Yorker profile on flex dancer Storyboard P.) The combination is a study in contrasts: sinuousness versus twitchiness, vogue-like fluidity versus something like a hyper-exaggerated version of the robot. At least two of the dancers were double-jointed. A husky member of the troupe took a solo shirtless, the better to show off his girth. One of them lifted up his t-shirt to demonstrate the compellingly odd and kind of gross way he can suck his gut in. It was a small demonstration of the possibilities of the human body, which is in many ways the basic job of dance.
The most fascinating part of the event was the house segment. DJ Todd Terry opened a portal back to the style’s early days with a set of vintage house and disco dialed well into the red, in the manner of the first generation of house DJs, blaring the music out of the banks of speakers that surrounded the DJ booth and throwing in screeching high-range filter sweeps as if to provoke the crowd into dancing using physical pain. A cadre of dancers who specialize in a form called housing spread themselves around the room, working on the floor, sans stage, just like they did back when the form was new.
Although it’s a rarity now, housing is almost as old as house music, and its free-flowing glides and lightning-fast footwork must have seemed just as radical to the disco scene as its musical counterpart did. Most of the people watching them did the usual shuffling and hip-wagging that you see in every dance club, but some of them, obviously on a higher skill level, took the talent’s presence on the floor as kind of a challenge and jumped into the circled-up crowd for pop-and-lock-offs of exceptionally high quality. For the length of Terry’s set the cavernous venue was a dance club where all of the attention was going to the dancers, and not to the DJ motivating them, and the joy that was crackling through the crowd was enough to make you forget how rare a thing that is.