i´ve never had a real affinity to dancing. as a kid my eurythmy teacher always said i looked like a robot when i dance and i was lacking grace. i didn´t like grace as a kid. when all my friends started going to dance classes, doing jazz dance and ballet, i was left alone, until i discovered tap: a complete robot machine-like dance. i tap danced for almost seven or eight years i think.
the ultimate lunacy though, isn´t a tap dancer, but many many tap dancers together like in lord of the dance or river dance. it is the most loco thing i have seen on tv. i think, if i saw it live, i´d probaby pass out. in a way it´s even kind of scary, like the tribal strange drums of outer space strangers you know almost nothing about who could be serious or dangerous. there´s something so extremely strange about this, that i´m lacking words to describe the phenomenon. just trippy and machine-like, mechanical. kind of reminds me of vaucanson´s automatic duck or la mettrie´s "l´homme machine". i don´t know when tap dance came up, but there must be some kind of connection to idustrialism. the idea of conform choreography and repetitive rhythm is so striking. and a lot of african slaves also did tap dance, so the idea of being a "slave to the rythm" (grace jones), an almost anonymous part of a bigger, machine-like movement might not be so false. river dance is like one big computer, and a computer is always an army, an entity of uniform elements.
there is no irrationality in river dance, not the slightest, and precisely that´s what makes it so crazy. like the madmen-scientists. rationality is always connected to madness. the irrational isn´t mad, -fluctuating inconsistencies is pretty "normal" considering the universe. wouldn´t that be cool if one of the river dancers just kind of broke himself free and went completely crazy on stage, like in altman´s classic "nashville" where one of the country singers is shot on stage, after hours and hours of country music madness. one dancer could just run out of line, in circles, on stage and scream "aaaaa".
