white ppl cant dance?

Here's a Russian ballet superstar(Barishnikov) combining with a black man(Gregory Hines) for some excellent dancing



gregory hines white nights

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haBZCrBHMm4

ANd you will have to be an individual of extreme bad faith to not recognized that John Travolta did some fine dancing in Grease


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZeeELBWkJc&feature=PlayList&p=3BF2D0922EE06692&playnext=1&index=2

 

If you're an excellent dancer, all you have to do is learn the dances of various different cultures and pratice till you can master them. The proof is that this man Alain Lévy won many contest of African dances by beating Congolese dancers in very popular dance like Soukouss, ndombolo, kwassa kwassa, tchaku libondas, souléma, toukouniamatatapolo, caneton alaisement.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADh2qgYZ3k

Or the very popule Camille "Loketo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS1xUTNjbGo

 

This is the kind of dance I like to do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMS7gzst6Es&feature=related
Not very complicated, but a lot of fun! I'm so glad I had a chance to learn these moves.

African and Spanish dances have gained huge worldwide popularity because they are seen as erotic - a lot of hip movement, and some African dances are very sexually explicit (ex. Soukouss):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EoTYIvvzQM

Therefore such moves are popular in nightclubs. But, it's not the only kind of dancing that exists. Various cultures have preserved their own beautiful dances.

Here's the dance Lezginka of Dagestan, a Muslim province in Russia. Watch the two young girls, what one of them (in dark pants) is doing is mostly male dance moves, that's why she gets flamed in the comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI-ISRRO9xM&feature=related

Here's another Lezginka, this time danced by guys:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VLE6vzbVR8&feature=related

Now this looks like fun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h4YeG_hDUg&feature=related
Let them fight it out in the comments if these dances are Polish, Belorussian or Ukrainian! I don't care, I'm joining in!

 

Ok Francie lol. I thought it was Irish, but I see it's Scottish now. It's still Gaelic though, so you gotta give us some points there :smt045

 

eh. j/k?

Never liked hiphopdancing much.. jazz roots thank you please.

 

You know what's the irony in all this? It's the fact that it's not the black people who said that whities had no rhythm, it's the Europeans who said that black people had "rhythm in their blood". The so called inate sense of rhythm of the "Negro" first appeared in European litterature in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855) by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau is a voluminous work; while originally intended as a work of philosophical enquiry, it is today considered as one of the earliest examples of scientific racism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Inequality_of_the_Human_Races


I personally never read the essay, but I can quote Cheikh Anta Diop from the African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality . Diop takes a passage from Gobineau's essay where he writes that "the Negro sense of rhytm was due to his high emotional apptitude, which is in itself an inferior and primitive manifestation of human nature. And he even compare that tremendous sens of rhythm to the high senses of animals"

So originally, it wasn't meant as a compliment to say that black people had rhytm, but rather to denigrate them. It's the same with the stereotypes regarding penis sizes etc. The put black people in "Human zoos" or on display to prove their theoreis of them being a sub-species, not entirely human with women having exaggerated buttocks and men having disproportionate penises.

It just backfired when many White women found that "myth", the stud stereotype to be very interesting, and when black people's music became more and more popular accross the globe, the having an inate sense of rhytm became a quality.

You can trace all origins of black stereotypes in many essays, thesis and books written by European scholars in the 17th, 18th and even 19th century.

So yes, it's true that many blacks make fun white people because of the way they dance or talk about their so called congenital incapacity to follow rhytm because I've seen it or heard it, but I have been made fun of too and many Africans are laughed at for not being to dance and the European who can casually do African dance or hip hop are praised.

To me it's more a psychological and cultural factor than something having to do with genetics. How young were you when you first heard that white people had no rhytm? Because as soon as you hear this it will stay in your mind no matter what and if you go to a club and see black people dancing or having fun, you will feel insecure. I see all the time. Instead of trying, people are just become self-conscious and are conquered by defeatism

 

Okay I can't stop now... here's another BEAUTIFUL Polish dance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhjOn31oGng&feature=channel :smt061

It's a great group, and they're not professionals, just a few young people celebrating their culture and having fun.

 

Ive seen that about the rythm in a dictionnary from 1912 I think.

a bit of babbling:
I'm thinking that this is also about prevalence of strong/confident gender roles and movement patterns associated with those.. In quite a few northern european cultures, moving the pelvis in side to side manners are seen as gay. Or at all dancing... Interacting with females this way seems to somehow ruin their manly manly image, so they never learn (and those who do gets all the chicks.)... Ballroom dancing has for long been the only form off accepted dancing for guys to know, first because they lead and also because they can always blame something for learning it. Now when other dances are more often seen, salsa and alike, you can see that for the guys growing up here, it takes them ages to even learn how to isolate movements in the body.. because doing movements like that hasn't been socially accepted. I had a boyfriend who was a jazz musician, he couldn't at ALL move inside the music, he was too scared someone would see him dance. It's a social tabu for guys to dance.

 

I realize you were joking I was just trying to give credit. Oddly enough, I don't like hip-hop much either unless it's really good or off the norm. If you have ever seen America's Best Dance Crew, there was a group called "Jabbawokees" that would just set the stage aflame every time they danced. That's the kind of hip-hop that I can appreciate. I tend to like the classic dances like waltz, tango, foxtrot, all latin, swing and even hustle but I enjoy dancing in every genre. It is the ultimate form of self-expression!

 

Yes! I love the way it and many other things meant to make blacks seem "less than human" blew the f*** up in their faces!

 

Here's a lovely Irish dance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMHEjaHMRfE

 

Very true but that fear is starting to dissipate now especially in learning a skilled dance as opposed to just dancing in a club. I was the typical guy who HATED dancing in clubs mainly because it seemed awkward. Now, you can't stop me!

 

Yeah, thank god it's changing. Also ballroom dances and swingdances are becoming more popular, mostly because of So you think you can dance, and alike tv-shows. (My mom claims there is a correlation between the economy and amount of coupled up dancing. She has a point I think.. We sort of skip back to traditional patterns in times of stress.)
And also I think the rumour is out, that the guys who can dance gets all the girls.

 

Hehe, and that includes things like "They're only good in sports", "All they do is dance and sing" etc

The Franco-Ivorian journalist Serge Bile has written many books on the origins of stereotypes and myth regarding black people

This one in peticular, La légende du sexe surdimensionné des Noirs( The legend of the "oversized" penis of black men), talks about the essays, scientific experiments and various texts done and written by Europeans on the myth of black penis.

He argue with historical documents and other sources that Greeks were drawn and portrayed as men with smaller penis because it symbolized sheer intelligence( small penis, big brains)

Greek Statue



While the blacks were portrayed in litterature as men with huge penises because it symbolised bestiality, fornication etc and was used to frighten and further dehumanize.

In 1942, while the world is in conflict,a German docteur called Stigler, decided to study the penis size of the African and Antillais prisoners etc. Sexual prejudice is the twin sister of skin color's prejudice and there were many caricatures regarding black men penis siez used to scare people.




Black men resembled or had all the characteristics of a beast. It must have backed fired sometimes after someone wrote "Beauty and the Beast" and it became very popular (just kidding)

http://www.amazon.fr/l%C3%A9gende-sexe-surdimensionn%C3%A9-Noirs/dp/2268056716

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Bil%C3%A9

Anways, back on topic, orginally, saying that black people have an innate sense of rhytmn wasn't meant as a compliment and if you think about it carefully, it still isn't a "compliment", because if rhytmn is inate, what else is inborn? Isn't this a blatant disregard to the time and effort people make to practice and learn the moves? Note that if you're black, you will never amaze non-black for being an excellent dancer, but if you're "articulate", you will be complimented as if the people who compliment you were bewildered by your ability to speak so well

 

Yeah, I also think that's there's a correlation with the way people dance and their daily body language. The Africans and Europeans have very distinctive body languages, so some gestures and moves are totally alien to Europeans. But like I said, all this depend wherther you're a good dancer to begin with.

 

This is somewhat similar to the fact that many asians can't say R. They don't have it in their language and simply can't distinguish it from L. Im not even sure all people can hear the difference.

It's about training and isolation of muscle groups. It's not something that just happens, it has to be trained, be it speach, pelvic or triceps.

I like your brain/way of thinking by the way.

 

Oh, thank you for liking the way I think. I am flattered

Regarding Asian not being able to say R, I can give you an example of the Japanese and how Sociolinguistics could be very weird sometimes. Many Japanese who aren't born and raised in the US or in the Anglophone countries struggle with English and show the difficulty with the R and L like you said. But all my friends who lived in Japan, say that the Japanese can, if they want, casually learn and speak Lingala, which is an African language spoken in both Congo...all the way in Central Africa!

http://www.answers.com/Lingala

My friends say it's because of some similarities in phonetics between Lingala and Japanese I am looking of the link with video footage of Japanese speaking Lingala perfectly and they even have a better prononcation than the Europeans who have been living in COngo for decades. I will try to post the link later if I've found them again.

You can see the same with the Anglo-Saxons when they try to speak French and vice-versa. Both groups, at least most of the ones I've met couldn't casually articulate the language like native speaker. Let's be honest, most French sound like Pepé Le Pew when they speak English. It might be charming to the ladies, but it becomes difficult when they have to explain something or try to tell a story for instance.

However I have found out two years ago that for some reason, all the Romanians I've met could speak French with rather very little effort. Their prononciation was excellent compared to other non-native speaker of French. I was given an perfectly rationale explanation by a Romanian girl: Romanian is a Latin language and so is French. I had no idea, I've always thought Romanian was a slavic language