Dance, Power, Obamamania

Having written these quick perspectives on dance practice and the figure of Obama, I realized that I should look at the man himself dancing. He did a lot of it. It reminds me of that quote, "if I can't dance in your revolution, then I don't want to be a part of it..." often attributed to Emma Goldman.



Obama the man seemd to be having a genuinely good time spreading his message wherever he went. His forays into ass shaking, rather than cause a good deal of laughing, were met with geniune delight and response in kind. We can think about his hips, and those cute little fists up by the shoulders, relaying information that he could not otherwise say without sounding cocky and/or crazy: "I am winning and I know it. I am joyful in this knowledge and I invite you to join me in this feeling."



Obama is that guy who starts dancing across the dance floor when his song comes on in search of a partner, moving his head and hips while professionally scanning the room until he finds YOU.



Obviously, a lot of people decided he would be a great dance partner, just enough awkardness to make his moves accesible and endearing; locked on the beat, though, so you can't get lost in the melissima or polyrhythm. It's in his dancing that all of his points of origins could be said to coalesce, revealing a man with many options, not one beholden to "blood memories."

In dance scholarship we frequently trace, or at least attempt to, the history of a dance move, discover who it "Really" belongs to, when it was first performed/staged/recorded/taught, etc. This act is usually futile, since most popular dances evolve mightily form their point of origin, other dances that seem to circulate mostly as religious implements tend to turn up at house parties with different music, poeple travel, artists, travel and then so do the dances. The provenance of a dance is quite an elusive thing.

Similarly, stamping a racial identity onto a series of floor patterns, torso isolations (or not), spine positions and arm swings can also be exhausting, and in the end, ten years down the line, really not the point of the dance anyway. These days, I prefer to think about dances, popular dances, as a series of networked corpo-realities that mark a specific location, pattern of practice and set of material conditions (that includes access to television and/or robust internet connections). To me, Obama's hips, facial expression, feet, arms, and hands reveal not so much ancestry as travel, accomodation, adoptation...code switching.



Given that we all now find ourselves immersed in codes, digital, indexical and corporeal--the ease with which Obama can allow in his body several codes to co-exist without resolving them is on the one hand, "funny," but on the other, "cool." This not to be confused or conflated with the "cool" that he exudes when getting out of a car, or putting on his jacket, lighting up a cigarette, kicking up his feet. No that cool is almost a picture perfect study in 1950s bebop elegance. The cool that I am referncing is the, "that's ok like that. I like it cause it is itself" type of cool that so many of us use instead of saying, "alright," "ok," or even "yes." Obama's dancing is cool cause, well yeah, I could do that. That's cool.

A little hip there, a lot of teeth here, and soon, Obama's dancing helped create a delirium, a mass need to move with him; effortlessly, in one's own contradictions.