‘Scuse Me While I Do The Boogaloo
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
‘Scuse me while I do the boogaloo
Boogaloo: To dance wildly, as though outside of oneself.
When James Brown demands of his audience, “”Scuse me while I do the boogaloo,” he is asking permission to step outside the bounds of normal discourse. “I know you’re here to hear me sing, but I’m goin’ to step outside of our normal relationship for a minute or two,” he seems to be saying. He then promptly does so, frenetic feet lost in dance steps that could only come from some outside inspiration. Dancing, he has stepped outside the world that we live in day to day and has entered one where the boogaloo’s rhythm and jerk make sense. While not all Americans dance as well as the Godfather of Soul, what happens when he does the boogaloo is essentially what happens when we do the same. “Dance your troubles away,” the old advice goes, and in many ways it works. Dance provides a unique opportunity for escape, and so it is that just as one might excuse himself from the table, he may also, through dance, excuse himself from present situation and circumstance.
In this light, then, we can see how valuable is an examination of what dances Americans actually do and in what situations they do them. In those cases when the entire nation is engaged in a dance craze, it can be indicative of a national attitude. With the body as the most basic tool for expression, dance is a medium in which everyone, regardless of social standing or education, can participate. This site examines dance and its democratic nature and the ways that it can then offer people the opportunity to step outside of their own social situation, however temporarily. It follows the national dance crazes of the Cakewalk in the 1890’s, the Lindy Hop or Jitterbug in the late 20’s, Rock’n’Roll dances as seen on American Bandstand in the late 50’s and early 60’s, and the urban breakdancing of the 80’s. In every case, these dances that captured the nations’ attentions and hips are inexorably tied to issues of social class and race. In terms of dance, they are consistent in their rebellion against accepted forms of dance, but more importantly they are in rebellion against the social structures which are represented by those forms.
Through dance, music and feting, the social ladder is actually even reversed from time to time. We see this in such phenomenon as Mardi Gras in New Orleans or the Carnevale in Brazil. Mobs in the streets don lavish masks and costumes, becoming the royalty of the festival, in essence becoming other people. This notion is known as carnival, and is on a larger scale exactly what we see in the dance habits of many Americans. Mr. Brown’s request, “’Scuse me while I do the boogaloo,” then, is one which should perhaps be raplaced with, “’Scuse me while I reestablish the social order.”
That a South Philly teenager doing the swim in 1962 or a 1920’s Harlemite in mid air-step was making any profound sociopolitical statement is not likely, but the environment that got him dancing in the first place is one from which much can be learned. Americans can be an uptight crowd, but when we do cut loose and cut a rug, we exercise a form of expression that is in tune with some of the most important issues of our country’s consciousness.
Do the Cakewalk
Its origins in slavery and the plantation south, the Cakewalk was the sole organized and even condoned forum for servants to mock their masters. A send-up of the rich folks in the “Big House,” the cakewalk mocked the aristocratic and grandiose mannerisms of southern high-society. Much bowing and bending were characteristic of the dance, which was more a performance than anything else. Couples lined up to form an aisle, down which each pair would take a turn at a high-stepping promenade through the others. In many instances the Cakewalk was performance, and even competition. The dance would be held at the master’s house on the plantation and he would serve as judge. The dance’s name comes from the cake that would be awarded to the winning couple.
Carnival in full effect, the cakewalk festivities turned convention on its head. The time of the dance was one in which typical order was set aside. Lowly slaves and servants were encouraged to mock the masters to whom obedience was mandated at all other times. The dancers donned fine clothes and adopted high-toned manners, and for the length of the performance they were not slaves but the stars of the show, their racial and social standing transcended.
As much as the cakewalk managed to overcome these barriers temporarily, however, it reinforced them the rest of the time. Because the dance was generally sponsored and judged by the plantation owner, he became master of ceremonies, and became master of the joke as well. If the master is in on the jokes that mock him, then the jokes no longer harm his standing with the slaves. So it was with the cakewalk, which further reinforced the master’s authority in allowing him to name a winner and thus make even his symbolic overthrow an attempt to appease him and an act of his decree.
That the nation’s attention came to the cakewalk is largely as a result of minstrel shows in the late nineteenth century. The dance’s exaggerated nature served perfectly for the physical, hammy humor of the stage shows, the participants generally played as goofy and bumbling as possible. The cakewalk’s original meaning was lost; where it had originally been black slaves attempt to mock their superiors and for a minute live in autonomy, it had come to be the bumbling attempts of poor blacks to mimic the manners of whites. The dancers were no longer joking, but were portrayed as genuinely wantingto be like the superiors. This interpretation held great appeal in a nation where race relations were whites’ concerns about blacks were building steadily, and it became a way to briefly escape that tension. Again dance had become a method of evasion and of escape, but now it was a tool for white the middle class to assure its social status and to ignore the spirit that gave rise to the cakewalk in its first incarnation.
Do the Lindy hop
The lindy hop is generally said to have been ‘invented’ in the Savoy ballroom in Harlem in the late twenties. It’s premier dancer, “Shorty” Snowden, threw off his partner in a competition before a large press contingency and performed a brief “breakaway” of fancy footwork that wowed the audience. Referring to the trans-atlantic hop Charles Lindbergh had recently completed, Shorty replied, “It’s the Lindy.” Later known as the Jitterbug and danced across the nation by millions for decades to follow, Shorty may not nave known it but his hop was just as formidable as that of the famous aviator.
Born into the atmosphere of the Harlem renaissance, the lindy had its roots in traditional African dance and that heritage was celebrated. Perhaps more than the lindy wasanything, however, it was more notable for what it was not. The lindy was no waltz, nor any foxtrot, and those who danced it knew that they were participating in a culture that no longer allowed itself to be defined by the entrenched values of white middle class. Though indirect, it was a rebellion against white’s appropriation of the cakewalk and the attempt to make their class the ideal toward which every poor man and black man strives. The lindy was a full-throttle break from that tradition and an effort to break free from the middle class order and structure that kept them on the bottom. Hoppers were excusing themselves from the social constraints that were pressed upon them elsewhere, and the dance, highlighted by its fantastic breakaways, did just that. As famed Detroit lindy dancer Ernie Smith was quoted in Jazz Dances (330) on the subject of his low class and often black dance partners, “I suppose you could call those mill-town girls lower class, but they could really dance. In fact, at the time it seemed that the lower class a girl was, the better dancer she was.”
As we learn from Marshall and Jean Stearns, “The environment from which the lindy developed had much to do with the nature of the dance.” The pair go on to describe a dance which grew in a violent and volatile environment, its major figures as skilled with their fists as with their feet. Late twenties Harlem was a hard neighborhood given little attention by police, and in their absence many ‘secret gangs’ arose, a kind of vigilante law and order presiding over the neighborhood that would eventually become the street gangs of the twentieth century. One of these gangs, the Jolly Fellows, was founded by famed lindy hop choreographer Herbert “Whitey” White. While “Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers” wowed audiences in ballrooms everywhere, they also belonged to a gang who required that potential members approach any shopkeeper, punch him squarely on the jaw, and then stick around to see what happened. Were a member injured unfairly, Whitey and the Jolly Fellows would not hesitate to turn a ballroom into a brawl (Marshall, 318).
The Savoy, located in the heart of the Jolly Fellows turf, became the refuge from the volatile community outside, and the Jolly Fellows became the club for dancers. The dancing within “syphoned off much of the nervous energy this constant pressure,” of life in Harlem generated This protocol within the world of the lindy seems to take the opportunity offered by the dance one step further. Not only were lindy hoppers able to step outside the boundaries of traditional social class, they established new rules themselves. With Whitey as head bouncer at the Savoy and the Jolly Fellows as enforcers of the lindy movement, the rules were clear. This was only the scene on which the dance developed, though. The dance did not become a national phenomenon until later, and particularly in 1936 with Benny Goodman and the birth of big band swing. With its spread across the nation, the original feelings that came with the lindy were lost, its name even changed to the jitterbug. White middle class Americans, once challenged by the feelings of social upheaval which gave rise to the dance, no longer even recognized those origins. Daughters happily danced the jitterbug right alongside the waltz and the foxtrot at high school cotillions, and the social message of the lindy was appropriated and made safe by mainstream, white America.