On November 8, 2014, members of the Flex and Lite Feet dance communities joined Ali Rosa-Salas ’13 for a lecture demonstration and discussion. NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRAL highlights movement-based artists who engage notions of subjectivity and materiality of the body in their work while utilizing the technical formalities of Abstraction. The project celebrates Flex and Lite Feet, looking at their evolution and the indelible impact they have had in the contemporary dance world. At the event, Rosa-Salas engaged Flex and Lite Feet dancers in a spirited discussion about their artistry, their techniques, and their personal experiences dancing a style considered “street” in a dance world that values formal training and classical technique.
NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRAL is the culmination of Rosa-Salas’s year-long work as a 2014 Barnard Alumni Fellow with BCRW. Much of Rosa-Salas’s research is interested in examining what she calls the false and problematic binary between “formal” dances and “street” or “vernacular” dances. The “formal” side of this binary houses ballet and modern techniques; “street” or “vernacular” styles like tap, jazz, hip-hop, voguing, Flex and Lite Feet make up the other half of the dance binary. While “formal” dance is privileged with forming the “bedrock of all contemporary dance,” with the highest levels of training necessary to perform these styles, “street” styles are thought to be “natural,” with very little formal training or technique necessary. Rosa-Salas also examines the ways in which “street” styles are appropriated by mainstream pop-culture and how race and class factor into the construction of hierarchies in dance. Her intersectional critique framed the lecture demonstration and discussion. “These false categories bare a hierarchy that trouble me,” Rosa-Salas said in her opening comments. “Because they relegate certain dance forms into this ‘otherizing’ realm.” NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRAL strives to make these categories visible and ultimately attempts to upend them.
Rosa-Salas kicked off the event by giving a brief narrative history of the Harlem Shake. Many of us are familiar with the 2013 Internet meme version of the Harlem Shake—you know, the 30 second videos that were absolutely everywhere, where people in weird costumes convulsively “dance” to American DJ and producer Bauuer’s song, “Harlem Shake.” The original Harlem Shake, however, is a dance that is part of Lite Feet movement vocabulary, and it’s been around for at least 30 years. And, if it must be said, the original looks nothing like its meme version. Rappers P. Diddy and G-Dep helped the dance go mainstream in 2001 with the music video for their song “Let’s Get It.” When the meme first emerged in early 2013, Harlemites expressed their concern and anger over the misrepresentation of the Harlem Shake. In March of 2013, Melissa Harris-Perry dedicated a segment of her MSNBC show to discuss how the Harlem Shake craze “needs historical and cultural context.” Now in 2015, the online presence of the authentic Harlem Shake is buried under pages and pages of the meme version, the dance’s online history obscured and, for those of us who never look past the first few results of an online search, effectively erased. Rosa-Salas points out that the saga of the Harlem Shake’s transformation from community art to Internet meme “comedy” represents a racialized pattern of gross appropriation and exploitation in America’s capitalist culture. Furthermore, it diminishes the cultural importance of the dance, and degrades the communities, neighborhoods, and dance collectives who originated it. As Rosa-Salas puts it, “[The Harlem Shake’s] rich history and technical complexity have been turned into a world-wide inside joke that I just don’t get.”
Rosa-Sala’s questions for the panelists highlighted the intersections of performance, class and race. She talks about the ways in which NYC’s “broken windows” policy polices street and subway performances, in many ways criminalizing street dance.
But her lecture demonstration also offered many moments of creative self-expression, moments that are refreshing and sometimes difficult to come by in Barnard’s academic environment. She asked each panelist to respond to the question “Who are you?” with a brief free style (go to the 13 minute mark to watch on the video above). The audience enjoyed their impressive displays of skill and technique, but we were also introduced to the immanent importance of free style, improvisation, and individual expression to the styles of Flex and Lite Feet.