We've Lost Dancing
We can't dance til it's light.
I saw Wicked on Friday, November 29th, 2024. I was, I believe, the last homosexual on earth to see the movie (I don’t care if that’s not factually true. It’s emotionally true).
I really loved it. And I could dedicate this newsletter to extolling its virtues (“No One Mourns the Wicked” was perfect) or nitpicking minor issues (Chloë pointed out that after she gets her makeover, Elphaba just… doesn’t need glasses anymore?) but I feel like David and Sarah have already written what there is to write about the film.
This is not a Wicked review. But I do want to talk about the Ozdust Ballroom.
In the musical, the Shiz U students all go to the Ozdust Ballroom, and despite Jon Chu cutting the line “What’s the most swankified place in town?” the movie did a great job creating, well, the most swankified place in town. It is stunning – I searched for a still of the set, but the best I could find was this shot of Ariana’s armpit:
The Ozdust Ballroom is positively glamorodious, exquisitely Ozmopolitan. But even though the building is underwater and there’s a sugar glider playing the drums…
… the biggest wish fulfillment of the Ozdust to me was that people were dancing.
Simply put: we have lost dancing. It’s surprising that it took me this long to write about it, because it’s one of my favorite rants - it even made my 2022 new year's journal entry (#8). It looks very twee in journal form, but when I express this sentiment in real life, it looks more like this:
Humans (and, based on what I’ve seen on tiktok, a smattering of pet birds) love to move our bodies to music in order to feel good. I refuse to do any research to back this up, but I believe it’s one of the commonalities found in every human society - when humans celebrate, we gather together, eat good food, and dance. And for good reason - there have been lots of studies showing that dancing regularly makes us happier (eating too, but I doubt the cast of Wicked would agree with me on that one).
Dancing is joy in motion. And yet we have managed to eradicate it, nearly completely, in America. (I know this is a generalization, and that my experience is of being white, on the west coast, and crowd-averse. But I used the word “nearly” there, so you can’t be mad.)
Physical gatherings in general are scarcifying (are you enjoying the Wickedisms? I can stop) at an alarming rate, thanks to COVID and smartphones. But even when there is a dance floor, people just aren’t using it.
I think that’s partially because we’re living in a shitty era of dance music. Charli XCX’s album brat was successful for a variety of reasons, but to me, the biggest draw was that it’s music that’s genuinely danceable. I do think the new era of pop girlies is doing their best to tug us away from chorus-less rap and melody-less techno, but it’s been so bad out here for so long. Bring back music that actually makes you want to move your body!!
(I think people have also forgotten how hot it is when a man nails a complicated dance. Whew.)
The music of today does not inspire swaying and sweeping. Given the option of nodding one’s head to cacophonous synth, or lurking on the periphery with a cell phone… I get why the teens are doing “kickbacks” instead of parties these days.
Speaking of teens, it’s insane that all the best formal dance opportunities occur at the most awkward point in our lives. Aside from weddings (which succeed in a lively dance floor only if the bride and groom are dancing throughout the night, write that down), school dances are basically the only existing opportunities to wear finery and dance.
Honestly, Oz bless the high school dance, one of the last vestiges of old timey etiquette. I think it’s a very important milestone - the rented suits (do kids still rent suits?), dancing near your crush while your math teacher watches, learning when to say no or yes to alcohol offered to you. But it’s crazy that these events occur when hormones are driving our bodies like drunk people driving ATVs.
I would JUMP at the opportunity to go to prom as a 30-year-old. And I feel betrayed, because rom-coms promised that as an adult, I’d be going to a plethora of fancy parties with slow dancing. But the corner of my mailbox reserved for gala invitations is gathering dust.
One light in the darkness is the growing trend of line dancing (particularly among the queers). This is partially because the cowboy aesthetic is in right now, but mostly because people love to follow instructions.
So many people feel socially awkward dancing, because there’s no guide to what you’re supposed to do. And that’s honestly so fair!! Up until very recently, we had guides for how to dance, and those dances were designed to facilitate social interaction. I always return to this scene in Pride and Prejudice, which everyone knows is historically perfectly accurate and exactly what balls at this time were like.
You heard it here: social interaction is too freeform now. We need structure. (Interesting… the need for structure was also the core of my newsletter on screenwriting. Maybe I should switch career paths and become a communist dictator?)
Nothing fills up a dance floor like the Cha Cha Slide. Every gay person knows the Apple dance. HOT TO GO is one of the biggest songs in America right now, just like the YMCA was. Are you seeing the common thread here?? The people crave culturally-known dances!!
Returning to Wicked, it does seem like Oz has a set-dance culture (learned at Cotilliodion, no doubt), though it’s a little hard to tell what’s happening in the world of the movie vs. what’s choreography because it’s a musical. But either way: the Ozdust Ballroom is jumpin’, jumpin’.
And that pissed me off! Because in real life, our clubs are not jumpin’, jumpin’. They’re hardly even vibratin’. And if structured dancing and big band waltzes are past us, I feel like the clubs should be picking up the slack.
When I think of the platonic ideal of “the club,” I think of the Bronze in Buffy.
It was always LIT at the Bronze. There was a vampire attack like, every week there, and yet the girlies were still back there every Saturday night. It was just that good.
The only bar I think I would continue to attend even if it were attacked regularly by vampires unfortunately closed in 2021. Oilcan Harry’s was a gay bar in Studio City, and I only managed to go thrice before it closed.
Truly nowhere I’ve been since holds a candle to this place. People of all ages. Free karaoke. DJs playing Abba. Located in the VALLEY. You really don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.
Oilcan Harry’s was a rarity because people actually danced there, which justified the loud music. You’d think that at other bars, where dancing was less popular, they’d then try to encourage conversation. Nope!! That would make too much sense. Instead:
As dancing has declined, music has gotten… louder? For some reason?? Most bars are the worst possible combination nowadays, which is dance: 0, music: 10. Even bars without dance floors play shitty remixes so loudly you can’t even think. To what end?
I’ve found that the bars my friends and I still enjoy going to have a uniting factor: a large outdoor space. It’s one of the few ways COVID made a positive impact on the city of Los Angeles - we remembered that we’re one of the few places you can be outside year-round, and we started to act like it. But beyond that, I love these places because you can actually have a conversation there without losing your voice. I swear that if a bar in LA simply advertised that they played their music at a reasonable volume, they’d make bank.
Anyway. I know “music is bad and too loud” is not exactly my youngest, freshest take. And this was definitely not one of my better-structured pieces of writing - it honestly would have been better as a Peter Griffin “What Grinds My Gears” segment.
But I do feel really passionately about this. As public spaces begin to recuperate from the repercussions of COVID, I want to see dancing re-prioritized. For my personal enjoyment, but also for the betterment of society!! Dancing makes us happy, and it costs nothing to do. So why aren’t we dancing?
In the meantime, at least we have this song, introduced to me by my friend Niccolo:
If only because dust is what we come to,
Johnny