Wave Your Bent Arms in the Air

My girlfriend is into dancing. Really into dancing. By this I don't mean that she likes to go out clubbing or she did ballet as a kid, she regularly goes to dance school to train in all sorts of things. Streetfunk, African, Modern, all sorts of stuff most of which I have no idea what it actually is. In my experience dance styles are like the various styles of modern dance music, no-one apart from those who are into the scene have any idea how the styles differ. How does one differentiate between house, trance and techno? Similarly, streetfunk, streetdance and modernjazz? See my point?

What this all means is that even though I have no real interest in dance I have more knowledge about it than it should be legal for a thirty two year old computer programmer to have. I just pick it up from my girlfriend in the same way that she knows about different games consoles, why Halo 2 is terrible and that Metroid Prime is a work of unadulterated genius.

One aspect of being the partner of someone who attends dance school is that every so often you have the joys of attending a variety show, well a variety of dance show, at some theatre somewhere and spend an hour and a half watching amateur dance that you have no connection to just so you can watch the five minutes that involves the love of your life. Last weekend I did exactly that and whilst sitting in Theater Orion on Södermalm I came to realise something. I really hate Locking.

Wikipedia defines locking as "a style of funk dance invented in the early 1970s by Don Campbell" and let's face it, the person who wrote that probably knows a little bit more than I do so I really am in no place to doubt it. What I do know is that is piss boring to watch. Maybe it is the amateurs that I see performing it, but there really seems to be very little variety in the actual dancing. They point, they jump in the air and land with one leg bent underneath them, they look terribly gormless and finally, worst of all, they wave their bent arms in the air.

Words cannot explain how much I hate this arm waving. It seems to have moved beyond basic Locking and infected all forms of Streetdance. When I watched "Floorfiller" on TV3 I would shout at the TV every time someone did it, which really was about every five seconds. I can't really explain what my problem is with it. Maybe it is the self-assured face on the dancers as they do it, thinking that they are God's gift to dancing when in fact all they are doing, well, bending their arms. Maybe it is because, as a signature move for a dance style, it just isn't very interesting or difficult. Or maybe it is just because they do it all the sodding time. Seriously. Watch some amateur Swedish Locking (I can't speak for other countries as I am not exactly doing a world tour for this) and see how much of it involves bending the arms and waving them whilst looking somewhat gormless. I don't want to come across like my Dad but that is not dancing, it is looking like a mentalist in a quite uninteresting fashion.

So it has come to the point now that I just cannot watch people dancing in that way. I just feel the urge to scream out "DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT" and storm out whilst declaring it to be the death of streetdance. But what makes it worse is that other people, the cretins, seem to enjoy it. They clap and cheer. My only explanation for this is that the music is pretty damn funky, but that still doesn't make the dancing any good or in any way vaguely interesting.

Yet due to a number of high profile TV shows Locking is insanely popular right now, just going to show what muppets reality TV makes of the population. I'm sure that when done by someone who knows what he is doing, for example the Mr Campbell who apparently invented it, Locking can be quite artistic and entertaining. But in the hands of the amateurs it is just starting to embarrass itself. Just for giggles, try and watch a Locking amateur dance to any other musical style. The first thing they do is try and wave their bent arms about and when that doesn't work they just look lost and confused. That's the danger of a dance style having a signature move, like a beat-'em-up video game where a player can progress a reasonable distance by perfecting a single attack well, there is a possibility that a beginner concentrates too much on such signature moves to the point that they can no longer do anything or even see beyond it.

So who's fault is this? The dancers'? The teachers'? The choreographers'? Frankly I don't know, I'm not an expert in the field but rather someone who just seems to be subjected to it an awful lot. What I do know, however, is that in someone's amateur hands they have started the ball rolling and Locking has become a monotonous dance style that really needs to die a death now.

M Panda