[Tango-L] NYT: Dance, Dance, Revolution? (1 of 2)

[Carol Shepherd]

FYI.  About dancing and antiquated cabaret laws.  We should all be
dancing tango in the streets! :)



THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 3, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Dance, Dance, Revolution
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

COMPARED with most of the issues that the venerable civil liberties
lawyer Norman Siegel takes up, this one may seem like the ultimate in
urban frivolity: Late last month, he joined hundreds of hip-hoppers,
salsa dancers, Lindy Hoppers and techno-heads boogying along Fifth
Avenue to protest New York City’s 80-year-old restrictions on dancing in
bars.

But disputes over who can dance, how and where, are at least as old as
civilization, and arise from the longstanding conflict between the
forces of order and hierarchy on the one hand, and the deep human
craving for free-spirited joy on the other.

New York’s cabaret laws limit dancing to licensed venues. They date back
to the Harlem Renaissance, which had created the unsettling prospect of
interracial dancing.

For decades, no one paid much attention to the laws until Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, bent on turning Manhattan into a giant mall/food court,
decided to get tough. Today, the city far more famous for its night life
than its Sunday services has only about 170 venues where it is legal to
get up and dance — hence last month’s danced protest, as well as an
earlier one in February.

Dust-ups over dancing have become a regular feature of urban life. Dance
clubs all over the country have faced the threat of shutdowns because
the dancing sometimes spills over into the streets. While neighbors
annoyed by sleepless nights or the suspicion of illegal drug use may be
justified in their concerns, conflict over public dancing has a long
history — one that goes all the way back to the ancient Mediterranean world.

The Greeks danced to worship their gods — especially Dionysus, the god
of ecstasy. But then the far more strait-laced Romans cracked down
viciously on Dionysian worship in 186 B.C., even going on to ban dancing
schools for Roman children a few decades later. The early Christians
incorporated dance into their liturgy, despite church leaders’ worries
about immodesty. But at the end of the fourth century, the archbishop of
Constantinople issued the stern pronouncement: “For where there is a
dance, there is also the Devil.”

The Catholic Church did not succeed in prohibiting dancing within
churches until the late Middle Ages, and in doing so perhaps
inadvertently set off the dance “manias” that swept Belgium, Germany and
Italy starting in the 14th century. Long attributed to some form of
toxin — ergot or spider venom — the manias drove thousands of people to
the streets day and night, mocking and menacing the priests who tried to
stop them.

In northern Europe, Calvinism brought a hasty death to the old public
forms of dancing, along with the costuming, masking and feasting that
had usually accompanied them. All that survived, outside of vestiges of
“folk dancing,” were the elites’ tame, indoor ballroom dances, fraught,
as in today’s “Dancing With the Stars,” with anxiety over a possible
misstep. When Europeans fanned out across the globe in the 18th and 19th
centuries, the colonizers made it a priority to crush the danced rituals
of indigenous people, which were seen as savagery, devil worship and
prelude to rebellion.

...

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Carol Ruth Shepherd
Arborlaw PLC
Ann Arbor MI USA
734 668 4646 v  734 786 1241 f
http://arborlaw.com

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